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Apple Sues Sorenson Over QuickTime Codec
ScooterComputer writes "According to Bloomberg and a bunch of others, Apple is suing Sorenson over their licensing a codec to Macromedia for Flash MX, for 'developing, marketing, or licensing any version of the compression software used in QuickTime to competitors.' For years we have seen finger pointing going on between Apple and Sorenson as to WHY the Sorenson codec can't make it to the Linux platform... and things usually end with Apple saying it is Sorenson's fault. Well, I'd say Apple lied. So, can we all just start putting big pressure on Apple again to release QuickTime for Linux?"
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No computer platform has ever been shrouded in so much mystery and voodoo as MacOS. This is because the users never have a clue, the pundits need to protect their emotional investment, and Apple never tells you anything. MacOS X just continues this well established tradition.
The search for "the thing makes MacOS X slow" is a chimera. First of all it's not that slow, considering what it does. If anything is hard, it is to make something look easy. Apple customers are more than happy to pay that price.
Second, forget about the first point. MacOS is slow, and it doesn't make sense to look for a single spot that makes it slow -- the slowness pervades throughout the system. Font rendering is slow, Mach is slow, the CPU is slow, memory is slow, file I/O is slow, Carbon is slow, Classic is slow, applications are slow. It is really no surprise that the system as a whole is slow.
And it won't get better. Mac people like to think that future OS revisions will make OS X run faster on their iMac/iBook. But that's just because Mac people like this idea of the computer becoming gradually, magically, faster; the underdog slowly growing stronger, that kind of thing. It's not true. While future revisions of OS X will undoubtedly incorporate faster code, that does not keep Apple from adding things that make it run slower again. Meanwhile your iMac/iBook hardware keeps aging, until in a couple of years time, the introduction of the G5 or G6 or Gwhatever, Apple finds an excuse to basically drop support for your outdated hardware altogether. And then the cycle starts anew. The promise of an "all-native" system will never actually have been realized for your hardware, but Mac people won't mind, since they are ideologically compelled to look to the future, not whine about the past.
It is rumored that chairman Stalin once said: "The communist ideal is already on the horizon!". When questioned by somebody in the audience as to when the ideal would be reached, he just smiled and said: "Comrade, don't you know you can never reach the horizon?".