Slashback: Alternatives, Ads, Apple

Slashback tonight with word on what you can use instead of JPEG, the return of AdCritic.com as payware, NCR vs. Handspring, and more. Read on for the details.

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.

Comments

OSX on x86

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, baby! OSX on Intel/AMD. :D
Personally, I would prefer to port it immediately to the 64-bit Itanium2 and Opteron. Not bother at all with the simple 32-bit x86. It would be slow for OSX anyway... :D

Re:OSX on x86

[doorbot.com]

right now Apple uses Open Firmware, which is an open standard for booting

Ask a Sun engineer if you want a more accurate response, but as I recall, Macs (including my own) using Open Firmware, which is a stripped down version of the true "open firmware" known as OpenBoot. This is, of course, used by recent Sun machines and is very nice. I wish my Mac had the same OBP as my Sun.

For example, I managed to damage my video card on my Ultra 30. Yes, it was stupid and I regret it. However, I didn't know exactly what was wrong with it at the time. I connected a serial cable to the Sun, fired it up without the keyboard and was able to get into the OpenBoot prompt. From there, I ran the built in diagnostics which basically told me what an idiot I was and how much damage I'd done to the card (doh!).

Now, granted, I have yet to try this with my Mac but I'm 95% sure it won't work.

OS X on Intel Processors

[MBCook]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I would love to see OS X on Intel processors for a variety of reasons. First of all, it's not Microsoft, so that means it's competition. My brother runs it on his Mac and it's great. It looks great, runs great, stable as a rock, and a unix core. I'd put it on my PCs in a heartbeat. Even if it failed, it would make MS push some features taht I think are smart like using 3D hardware to render the desktop to let you do all those cool window transitions and stuff. Also, OS X runs great on Macs, but Intel and AMD are up to nearly 3x times the speed of Macs, so think of what they could do. They could fund Wine for windows compatablility which would be a HUGE boost to open source. Plus software from the Mac could be easily ported, probably just a recompile like most unix software. And all the PC apps that might (and hopefully WOULD) get ported to OS X would easily go back over to the Mac, giving the existing userbase a major reason to want this. Plus the ease of a Mac on a PC would give Apple a reason to lower prices. At this point I'm close to rambeling so I guess I'll end this. I would LOVE to see OS X on PCs. I'd definatly dual boot it, no question. I'd pay $150, $200. And I'd love to be able to access the stuff on my Macs on my PCs without having to pay for some 3rd party program (my Macs are older and can't run OS X, so having an OS that could connect to them would be great). Plus it would probably FINALLY push MS to put in Mac compatibility stuff like Apple's had for years.

Re:OS X on Intel Processors

[Osty]

Even if it failed, it would make MS push some features taht I think are smart like using 3D hardware to render the desktop to let you do all those cool window transitions and stuff.

Microsoft doesn't necessarily need Apple to push them in that direction, since they're already going there. Maybe not with Longhorn, but soon (say, within 5 years, which I guess isn't "soon" in computer time, but it's still relatively soon) you can expect DirectX to be the de facto standard for displaying anything on Windows. No more GDI, nor more GDI+ (which is better than GDI, but is not hardware accelerated by many drivers yet), OpenGL probably just as a wrapper for DX (or at least by default. I'm sure hardware vednors will still write OpenGL ICDs if the demand is there), etc.

Of course, once that happens, expect to hear even more bitching and complaining about having such a heavy GUI on a server-class OS (I guess they could stick with the current GUI for their server-level versions and the DX-based GUI for consumer-grade and workstation versions, but I doubt that would happen for consistency purposes). Anyway, by that time, a DirectX-based interface won't be any heavier (relatively) on future hardware than the current GUI is on current hardware.

Re:A jpeg replacement

[bedessen]

I'm thinking about using png exclusively. If the content is good enough, I'm sure many IE users would make the effort to swtich.

Why would they need to switch? IE has supported png since version 4.

Okay, so some features aren't implemented right and there are still a few gotchas, most notably alpha channel support. Surprisingly, IE for the Mac has perfect alpha channel rendering, yet it remains broken on the Windows version.

Send in the Clones

[mumkin]

Apple had its flirtation with allowing its OS to run on other people's hardware. They killed it off. I'm still using an old PowerComputing clone that I bought back in '95, running OS X on it just fine thank you. Sure, it's been through a lot of upgrades, but until I bought an iBook last month Apple hadn't seen a dime from me for hardware since I bought my old Centris 610 a decade ago.

They killed off their licensing arrangement with the clone makers because Apple makes its money from hardware. It's very hard to imagine that they could sell Wintel users enough copies of OS X to make up for the lost hardware sales they'd get from "switchers" who no longer had to buy an entire new machine. Would it rock if I could run OS X on a tricked out custom-built PC at half the price of an apple box? Sure! Would Apple profit from my doing so? I don't think so.

I suspect that The Steve was just suggesting Apple might switch to IBM's Power 4 as the next gen architecture, not that they'll start dropping Athlons into iMacs.

Re:OS X

[bigfatlamer]

It's already been covered many a time, but DAMN would I love to see OS X on Intel hardware.

Alright, I've been hearing this refrain since OS X Beta first came out and I finally have to ask. What exactly would be so cool about having OS X on x86 hardware? Is there something about the x86 architecture that would make the BSD core run much better than it does on PPC hardware? Or is it just the idea of finally having a usable, decent, attractive OS to load on all that cheap, commodity hardware?

Does anyone actually think that an x86 port of OS X would run faster on a 2.5GHz P4 than it does on a 1GHz PPC? No fucking way. They'd cripple it even if they could get it to run as fast as on PPC hardware, just to give you a taste of the good life...the first one's always free.

E

OS X on Intel? Maybe!

[Slur]

IT is not out of the question for Apple to make their own computers utilizing Intel processors. They would only support the OEM hardware, avoiding the pitfalls of Windows, which must support zillions of configurations.

The most challenging hurdle I can see is dealing with big versus little-endian issues.

Apple should consider buying the Alpha technology

[Tjp($)pjT]

It is scheduled to be retired by HP/Compaq/Digital glom after the next two generations are out. The architecture has lots of headroom and Apple could own it outright. It has been 64 bit from the start and is very flexible. And the Apple^H^H^H^H^HAlpha architecture equivalent of AltiVec (MVI) is quite suave.

best commercial ever

[jcsehak]

VW's "Milky Way" (last one on the page). Like the best silent films, they manage to tell a wonderful story with no words, except this is all in the space of a minute. The music chosen gives further meaning to the video, and vice versa. The fact that it's an advertisement is almost an afterthought. Which, ironically, makes you want to buy one even more. I consider it to be one of the finest short films ever made. If more commercials were like this, I'd pay for that adcritic subscription. Especially if they offered a way to get broadcast-quality copies of these commercials.

Re:best commercial ever

[Artifex]

I don't think most of us in the United States will ever see the best commercials there are - in every compilation of international commercials I have seen, the Europeans trump us easily, especially when it comes to "public service announcement" type ads. Since these compilations get shown every year at film festivals, it would make perfect sense for AdCritic to offer them as a pay feature.

I wouldn't say it's the best one, but one of the ones I remember best from these annual shows was one that only ever played at one theater in England, for a reason that will be obvious: it was a PSA, and showed a homeless (drug addicted? alcoholic?) person, the quiet kind most ignore unless they are causing trouble, only in this ad you hear not only about the man, but from the man himself. The PSA turned out to be for a local charity that assisted people like him, and at the end of the part where he talks about how they helped him, he says they even gave him a job. The commercial ends with the charity saying that besides just helping him, they hired him to collect donations... and he's the guy everyone outside that theater in England just all passed by and probably ignored on their way inside, as he sat on the ground outside the theater. If I remember correctly, it closes with a shot of him there, waiting.

I think most people in the theater watching the compilation with me were crying at the end of that one, and we were a few thousand miles away. It was... very effective in getting people to care about someone, flipping it back around to point out that they may think they care, but they have ignored obvious opportunities to help, and then pretty much pushing them directly back towards that opportunity.

I'm sure I've really mangled the content, and you can't possibly really get the full effect from what I said - which is precisely why AdCritic should be showing foreign ads, as well. There's a lot of powerful stuff out there, and we should be able to access it online.

Motorola and PowerPC processors

[tristan-b]

The funny thing is, Apple hasn't been using PowerPC processors in most macs for some time now. That's right. If you open up your brand new G4 tower, that piece of silicon won't have the PowerPC label. In fact, no processor made by Motorola is made under the PowerPC name. Due to a bit of a hiccup with IBM over licensing the name, they're all merely "PowerPC Compliant" processors. Seems we won't see a PowerPC G5 coming from them after all.

Re:Time to ditch image files altogether

[Monkeyman334]

On my web design site we don't let designers upload designs with images because we want users to be able to use designs without an image editor. People that couldn't break from the images started some pretty interesting alternatives.

Face (IE Only)

Blueish (Ascii pron, all browsers)

Some Impressive CSS Design

2176lines (in emacs, crashes NS4)

C64 (all browsers)

And the list goes on, here's an ascii solution to flash while I'm at it. The web would be just fine without images and flash.

Re:Good god please!

[Maserati]

There are two basic problems with the otherwise brilliant idea of just slapping an x86 chip into what was a G4 case (modulo cooling). The first is the network effect. If OS X86 runs Windows apps just fine, then relatively few developers will be tempted to do use the (far superior) Cocoa/Quartz APIs. The other problem is that if Apple ever ships a machine capable of running Visio out of the box, then Microsoft will go into a hyper-adrenal fight-or-flight state and do their best imitation of a rabid badger on crystal meth.

The first problem marginalizes OS X and turns Apple into Dell or Gateway. They're much too good of a software house for that. The second problem will produce a reaction from MS that even a GOP DoJ can't ignore.

Given that, the concept of telling Motorolla to put up or shut up must be attractive to Steve Jobs. He might well float rumors to keep Motorolla on their toes, or to get them there in the first place.

I'm sure Apple's hardware engineers can handle the task of cooling a P4. The other components won't be affected much more than a whole new mobo would normally require. But you'd lose the vector unit and the the lower power requirements of the G4. I don't think they'll do it, since the 'books have good battery life thanks to the lower power consumption int he chips. And that's a strong selling point.

Re:A jpeg replacement

[billatq]

Actually, I know of a hack that someone came up with that allows internet explorer to properly use transparent pngs. Look and be amazed! Real browsers ignore the microsoft crap and render the png properly, and IE uses a directx filter to make the png transparent. See http://www.tidakada.com/ to see it in use.

Re:Don't hold your breath

[jamesoutlaw]

Can anyone give me some hard facts about whether or not its true that they rely on their hardware markups to drive the development of their kick-ass software?

I can't give you any hard facts, but II can give you a bit of empirical evidence.

Apple give away nearly all of it's software. They sell a few of their more "professional" titles: AppleWorks ($79), DVD Studio Pro (somewhere around $1,000), iMovie ($50), Final Cut Pro (~$1,000), WebObjects (~$700 plus some cllient fees maybe), OS X (~$130), OS X Server ($1,000) and a couple more. It seems tha that the price of these titiles are comparable to the prices of similar products and that the price would reflect the development costs of the software plus all of the overhead associated with it. Given the quantity of "free" software they put out and the quality (iTunes, QuickTime, iMovie, iCal, iSync, etc) it seems to me that they would subsidise the development of the free stuff from the sales of their hardware. I have no idea how many developers they actually have working on these titles, nor how many people would be required to put together some of these things.
Anyway, that's a long blurb about nothing and it may not make any sense, given the fact that i am pretty tired right now, lol...... any other ideas?