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Slashback: Alternatives, Ads, Apple
Prepare the JPEG bonfire. Moderator writes: "Here is an open alternative to the JPEG file format. I tried posting it in the JPEG patent article but it got buried under all the comments about "THEY CAN'T DO THIS!" and stuff."
This project is called DjVuLibre and encompasses "a set of compression technologies, a file format, and a software platform for the delivery over the Web of digital documents, scanned documents, and high resolution images."
I hope the judge has a big "WITHOUT MERIT" stamp. theodp writes "A U.S. District Court has issued a summary judgement in the patent infringement lawsuit filed against Palm and Handspring by NCR, dismissing NCR's suit as having no merit. Praising the decision, Handspring's CEO said 'Settlement of this case was never an option,' while Palm's CEO remarked 'We refuse to succumb to intimidation by companies that use charges of patent infringement to bully others.' One of the NCR patents in question was for 'a portable terminal small enough to fit in the user's hand,' and the complaint went on to claim that NCR's researchers, 'recognized an unsatisfied need for a portable, handheld device which would allow the user to information such as appointments, to-do lists, and addresses, and execute financial and shopping transactions by connecting to networks using an interface module.'"
This is sure to bring out the AdCritic critics. thebus writes: "The good news. AdCritic is Alive! The bad news. You gotta pay!"
An annual subscription for $69.95 looks like something worth paying for if you're in the advertising industry, but it would be nice to get a less expensive "interested viewer" option as well. Oh well.
Oh Steve, ya big tease! Maïdjeurtam writes: "In this Yahoo finance article, Reuters asked Apple's CEO Steve Jobs about the possible abandonment by Apple of Motorola and IBM's processors (PowerPC G3's & G4's), and the possibility of Intel processor-equipped Macs. Steve Jobs didn't exclude the possibility. He noticed that, during the year 2002, Apple had to finish the OS X transition and, this done, there would be a lot of amazing possibilities, which he finds exciting."
Most of the content of this article was covered in yesterday's coverage of Jobs' keynote, and the bit at the end about other processors may be only a throwaway line, but it certainly is intriguing.
How many of you are using the GIF replacement PNG? Anyone... anyone? Yeah, exactly. Unless IE (for Windows) supports it right, no one will ever use it for the web. THAT is why we don't want anyone company to develop a monopoly.
PNG in Mozilla (and Opera) is pretty darn great. And 24-bit transparency rocks. Too bad I can't use it too often.
I like the idea of a significant number of processors in the PC market that are not made by the two chip giants AMD and Intel. This stems partially from concerns about things like the pentium's processor serial number now - and future possibilities like palladium. I also appreciate that, thanks to the G4, Intel can no longer claim clock speeds are the only meaningful chip performance measurement.
Of course, _nothing_ says that any apple x86 computers would in any way be compatible with standard PC offerings. They would likely still have their own, special BIOS and architecture, and would likely include some 'special', cool, apple-specific hardware OSX would depend on. You would not be able to get OSX to run on anything but genuine Apple hardware, x86 or not.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Am I the only one who thinks that this should be an *entirely* obvious step that should be taken immediately?
I'm sure there are many users who share your wish. Sadly it is hard to see how this makes sense for Apple. They make their money from selling hardware. It is conceiveable they could transition to making their money from selling operating systems - though only Microsoft has ever really built a significant revenue stream in this business. But managing the transition would be almost impossibly hard.
It is almost unimaginable that a public company could turn to its shareholders and say: we have a sustainable business that makes about $1 billion a year and isn't under threat. We're going to throw that away and go into this other business, with Microsoft as our main competitor, and we might be profitable again in a decade.
It just isn't going to happen.
What Apple will do, IMHO, is start selling Macs with Intel-compatible CPUs in them. Mac OS X would only run on those Apple machines, not on an off-the-shelf PC box.
This makes perfect sense, given that Intel's economies of scale and the competition from AMD means their CPUs are faster and cheaper than PowerPC. Apple can still make its money off hardware and the value of its industrial design.
Sailing over the event horizon
.. is a sucker. Sorry, had to say it.
I know, some are really really really funny, but sometimes one has to make a stand for one's pricipals.
I know hollywood movies can and have been one huge ad before (Wizard comes to mind for Mario 3, Pokemon, Big Trouble was a massive dorito ad), but doesn't anybody take issue with the fact that music and movies for pay hasn't come about yet, but that advertising for pay might? Isn't that kind of twisted?
"Old man yells at systemd"
IA-64 seems more likely than IA-32 to me, but some people have suggested Apple could move to IBM's Power4 line, which is closely related to PPC. How about ARM Processors? MIPS? Sparc? Alpha? Transmeta? Anybody have any other ideas?
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
I concur, but keep in mind that Apple has always (afaik) made the majority of their income from hardware sales. Were they to move to an easily-cloneable PC platform (i.e. the platform that's evolved from the original IBM PC), they'd have to really move a lot of software to make up!
HOWEVER: a lot of people seem to think that that fact alone will prevent them from considering Intel/AMD. I'm not so sure. Granted, all of us would love to be able to run OSX on our existing Athlons, and I doubt that will happen -- but what's to stop Apple from rolling out their own version of the PC architecture? There's a lot of cruft in the ex-IBM PC that could be dropped; with a little work, an x86 machine could be had with all the hardware integrity of a Mac, and just as hard to clone.
You may be asking, Why would we want THAT? Two reasons, imho: 1) it would allow them to lower the price (though I doubt they would), and 2) x86 binaries could be run through something closer to Wine than a full-out emulator! Mmmm, compatibility.
Lets be clear about this too:
x86 CPUs != IBM PC compatible (necessarily)
Opteron* x86-64 != IBM PC compatible (necessarily)
(or whatever they are calling this chip)
Just because the CPU is an x86 and therefor cheap, does not mean that the system is an IBM PC. Apple could still be a 'hardware' company and move away from the PowerPC, which, while a fine processor with excellent performance can't meet intel or amd in a price/performance showdown.
Apple should make the smart market decision and pick up some of the 'low price' users.
Is it just me?
The advertisers should be the ones paying. Let them post their add and bill them for the bandwidth (plus markup to cover overhead, obviously). It's got to be cheaper than getting TV ad spots, and the advertiser gets direct feedback on how many people actually watched it, as opposed to a guess based on "ratings systems".
Adcritic was one of my favorite sites back in the day, but there's no way I'm going to pay to watch ads.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Jobs is needling Motorola. Unless Apple's business model is changing from that of a hardware to a software company, they'll stay with PPC.
:-)
When folks see my iBook, they think of it as a "Mac." A Mac is different from a PC (in marketing terms). This difference is why Apple can turn a profit these days when Gateway is posting losses.
If you put OS X on Intel, every beige box will be a "Mac." The name will lose all meaning, and Apple will have surrendered its hardware's marketing position.
It might be that Apple has, indeed, decided the hardware market is too saturated to assure the company's long-term profitability. This is the only reason it would make sense to port OS X to Intel.
I do not agree that the market is tapped out for Apple. If I were Jobs, I would constantly press hardware requirements through technological innovation on the OS and clever new add-on devices. This will keep their existing customer base on an upgrade track. A hot OS and new features, properly marketed, will also serve to attract new users. Their entry point is a hardware purchase.
Given Apple's commitment to their new retail stores, I'd think they still believe they're a hardware company. No Intel for now. Just options.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Plus the names awful, DjVu (deja vu) is almost as awkward as Ogg Vorbis. Why must so many open source alternatives have awful names?
Besides, what would they do for their portable line? Itanium is meant for high-end servers, not lower powered laptops.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
Well, there was the GIF patent and it took what, around 5 years to get decent PNG support in most apps? (but it finally works well in web browsers, office progs, photoshoppish progs, etc)
If JPEG goes the way of gif, perhaps people will realize its in their benefit to stay w/ and open format, and the next major release of everything will have whatever the "open" alternative is... but realistically its probably gonna take another 5 years
_
SUV's support terrorism !
x86 is not an option, it's number is up. Itanium, is the only real choice (unless AMD takes Intel with x86-64). I think Apple would take the road HP has taken with Itanium and there PA-RISC systems. You can run PA-RISC code without recompile on HP's new Itanium systems. If apple takes this route then the codebase would still be PowerPC. I don't think Apple can ask their developers (Adobe, etc) to support two chip architectures with 5% of the market. Apple is not going to give up the hardware business that easy.
At several times during past keynotes, Jobs has mentioned the possibilites of using new chips from both Moto and Intel.
I've personally heard him mention the possibility of transitioning quite a few times over the past few years -- usually mentioned as an afterthought.
Because of Jobs' pacing and delivery (and his famed RDF), the media hasn't picked up on it very much -- and whatever stir is caused dies down very quickly, and people forget again by the next time an expo rolls around.
I imagine during the last couple of years of OS 9, this was more of a veiled threat to Moto to try and keep up with clock speeds and the like, much like Apple's (non-veiled) threat against ATI.
Honestly -- with the exception of the CPU -- just about everything in modern Macs is a standard across the industry.
Now with Darwin for X86, it shouldn't be terribly difficult at all to transition to Intel -- and might be a welcome change of pace. I've had a 450mhz G4 tower for 4 years now, and machines have barely doubled in speed.
We've heard rumours of the G5 for, um like, 3 years now? Always 6-8 months out (just like today).
I'm as much of a Mac nazi as they get, but as long as the machine behaves the same and -- God forbid -- prices might drop a bit, I'm all for it.
The Mac is all about the user's experience. And, for the most part, the user could give a shit what's in his box as long as it behaves consistently and reliably.
What would be so cool about OS X on x86 hardware? The exact same things that make OS X as cool as it is on PPC hardware. OS X is just a wonderful operating system, regardless of the hardware behind it.
The fact is that x86 hardware has a huge installed base. Given the assumption that such a port of OS X didn't require any proprietary motherboards or whatnot, (an assumption that may or may not be reasonable,) having an x86 port would be a wonderful opportunity for more people to run this great OS.
On the subject of speed, my eMac is certainly not top of the Mac line and it performs very well on everything I do on it. I'm extremely pleased. The 10.2 Jaguar release will only improve this. Even if Apple was dastardly enough to artificially cripple an x86 OS X port to run at the same speed, I'm pretty darn happy as-is.
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
Actually, the processor isn't the problem. When Motorola released the Apalo G4, with the level 3 cach and the SOI technology they released an awsome chip. The porblem is actually with Apples current bus which runs at only 133Mhz in the fastest machines. Where as the P4 has 4 133Mhz busses quad pumped to the processor. If Apple increased the bus speed I think that the G4 would have a much longer life and make the transition tot he 64bit G5 (backwards compatable with the 32bit PPC chips) easier in the next year or so.
I have moderator access, and I am wondering if I should write a comment (and hence can not moderate), or moderate (and hence can't post). However, noticed something which has not been represented so far. Hopefully this will not go unread as there are already 200 comments posted.
People say mac users are fanatic (and that's why they don't switch). People say Mac is losing market share. People are unhappy with Apple charging $99 for DOT-MAC. And so on and on...
However, given a choice of 4 subjects (JPEG alternative, patent infrigement, ad critic, and Apple), I see most of the comments (more than 60% per my count) are about Apple. Either that reflects the zealotry on the Mac side, or, boy, is Mac the talk of the town !
Unbelievable...
New G4s should be out in August also.
The 17" iMacs look great. :)
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
x86 is dying. Apple isn't known for living in the past.
Just because it's Intel doesn't mean it's x86.
Releasing OSX for x86 is completely moronic. Apple is a computer company, not a software company. They sell computers first, software second. If OSX ran on 'open' PC hardware, nobody would buy Apple computers-- they'd buy cheap hardware and OSX.
This is exactly what happened circa 1995 when there were Mac clones. The clones bled Apple dry. Steve Jobs saved Apple by making it a closed system again. Openness only works in a world that believes in openness. The clones exploited Apple's generosity, and it nearly killed Apple.
Pit any software against Microsoft, and expect Microsoft to attempt to kill it. Apple is doing well because they cooperate with Microsoft. If OSX were released for commodity PC hardware, and Microsoft will dump Office/Mac, and basically shut OSX out of the market (as it did with Netscape).
Free software is surviving Microsoft because it can't out-compete with Free Software's price. There's no company to bankrupt, and the software is largely donated by generous coders. Apple has no such protection. They can go bankrupt, and they don't have the hordes of programmers donating code that Free Software enjoys.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.