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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 suspect Apple would require a different BIOS than what is used, per se, but right now Apple uses Open Firmware, which is an open standard for booting. You can wipe MacOS off of the so called "New World" Macs (most Macs since the original iMac) and install Linux if you like.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
People often attributed Kurt Cobain's famous quote to him: "It is better to burn out than to fade away."
Ole Kurt was not the source of the quote though, that would be Neil Young from around '76-'77 time frame. He just, uh, borrowed it since it, uh, fit the moment, I guess.
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.
See:
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>It's *nix only
That isn't fully correct. LizardTech provides encoders for Windows, although at a price. You're right that it doesn't have much support (notably a free Windows encoder), but JPEG2000 isn't widely supported either; no new format ever is. DjVu could go somewhere, although just where cannot be known yet.
true && more || less
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.
Even if Apple switches to x86 procs, their hardware will still be proprietary. Why? Because they would go broke in a heartbeat if they tried.
1) Apple is largely a hardware company, and one with fat margins to boot. If they tried selling PC clones with similar margins Dell would take them to the cleaners. Hell, Dell would probably take them to the cleaners even if they charged slim margins.
2) That stable as a rock feature your brother enjoys? The almost seamless integration of most hardware into the OS? Those are features of the tight control that Apple can exercise over their hardware. If you think you would get these same features running on generic PC hardware you are sorely mistaken. Most vendors don't bother writing OSX drivers now, despite the fact that all PCI, AGP, and USB devices will plug right into a Mac. What makes you think they'll bother writing OSX-x86 drivers? Or were you just going to use the high quality BSD 3d acceleration video drivers? The world of PC hardware is a tar pit of cheap hardware, poorly documented interfaces, and Windows-only drivers. Hardware detection and configuration has never really been one of Unix's strong points. Why do you think OSX would be much better?
And don't let the fact that PIV's have almost 3x the clock of a Mac fool you into thinking it has 3x the performance. The PIV is first and foremost a high speed oscillator circuit. It is designed to have a high clock speed because most people are stupid and think it means fast. Meanwhile, Intel's highest performing chip at FP (the new Itanium's) is clocked slower than a Mac. So is it slower than a Mac? (Not that I'm arguing a PM is faster than a PIV, I just don't think it's a factor of three slower.)
*opens IE* .png, please explain what you mean by "IE does not support .png"
*loads his forum, which uses only PNG images*
wtf are you talking about?
IE seems to support
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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.
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
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
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.
It is possible to render images using intricate table coding in which each cell represents a pixel (use colspans and rowspans as necessary to optimize the table).
See my example here. It does use one tiny, two-color gif for the page background, but most of what appears to be images are actually table cells with bgcolors. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite properly in Mozilla, which absolutely refuses to render 1x1 table cells.
In reality, this isn't a total solution, but if image format lawsuits succeed this is what we'll end up doing to render graphics on the Web.
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.
-- thinkyhead software and media
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.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
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.
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.
c-hack.com |
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.
Don't presume that moving to Intel hardware will create a Mac with the highly-modifiable box you take for granted on PCs.
Apple survives today because their boxes are designed to make a user's life easier. That means, despite a change to the processor, it is very likely that Apple would still have a custom motherboard available ONLY from Apple, still use Open Firmware rather than a PC BIOS, (this is done on Sun as well) and still not be subject to the resource-hungry design of the aging PC design.
Intel may assist Apple in a mobo design, but Apple will not release it for general consumption. If they want to continue to survive as a business, it would be suicide to do so. Apple is a hardware company. They have to keep some things closed to keep a competitive edge. The hardware would be generally closed-source, along with the upper layers of Mac OS X (Darwin, the core of OS X, is open source and works right now on x86 as well as PPC.).
A more serious matter would be the Pentium's lack of Altivec--the vector processing unit and the true power in the PowerPC chip that lets it keep up with Pentiums doing the same calculations in most instances, despite PPC chips having half the clock speed.
Not insurmountable things, however. I tire of the PowerPC production issues at Motorola. I would rather get IBM to make the chips--they should know how, since the PowerPC chip uses the same tech as in the POWER mainframe chips.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
"It's better to burn out than to fade away." -- Kurt Cobain
That's kind of a no-brainer, isn't it?
Apple's hardware strategy made sense back in the days when the extra money you paid for a Mac was really worth it just for all the extra hardware stuff that would Just Work(tm) -- until recently, 24-bit color, built-in sound input and output, etc. etc. were not common in the PC world, and were not cheap either. But within the last year or so, it's gotten so you can get comparable features in a $300 Walmart or Fry's PC.
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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.
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.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
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
DJVU was designed for scanning paper documents, mainly. It doesn't include actual ASCII text like scanned PDFs can, but it is tuned for accurate visual representation of printed pages. The images have a couple of layers - the high-contrast material (such as text) and the background nuances (shading of the paper etc.) So it's possible to view the image with or without the background. And the background, being low res smooth shading, doesn't cost much space. I've been using it for a couple of years for this purpose, because neither JPEG nor PNG are ideally suited for it. Separating the foreground from the background strikes me as a really good idea.
It wasn't completely free at first so that was good news when it was announced a while back.
Of course to be truly useful as a JPEG replacement it needs to be included in browsers. People don't like having to mess with plugins.
Anyway I bet the JPEG patent stuff will blow over soon enough. This company obviously has brass balls and no brains to think they can pull that off. Maybe they will manage to sue a few big guys, bully some little ones, make some money and then get a little more complacent as their time runs out. But I imagine we will still be seeing lots of JPGs 10 years from now (just like GIFs didn't go away).
I think the Steve comment was taken a bit out of context. Here is the whole quote: "The roadmap on the PowerPC actually looks pretty good and there are some advantages to it. As an example, the PowerPC has something in it called AltiVec, we call the Velocity Engine -- it's a vector engine -- it dramatically accelerates media, much better than, as an example, the Intel processors or the AMD processors... so we actually eek out a fair amount of performance from these things when all is said and done. And the roadmap looks pretty good. Now, as you point out, once our transition to Mac OS 10 is complete, which I expect will be around the end of this year or sometime early next year and we get the top 20% of our installed base running 10, and I think the next 20 will come very rapidly after that. Then we'll have options, then we'll have options and we like to have options. But right now, between Motorola and IBM, the roadmap looks pretty decent. "
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I believe the poster meant that there are 2 different Itaniums:
One that is x86 backwards compatible (and only x86 backwards compatible)
One that is PA-RISC backwards compatible (and only PA-RISC backwards compatible)
And the poster thought it not much of a stretch to create a third version, that is PowerPC compatible.
Of course, there is only one Itanium core, and it handles all 3 (as you said). However, most RISC chips (such as the PA-RISC and PowerPC) at least have enough similarities that emulating PPC on PA-RISC (or using the PA-RISC decoder) is relatively simple; the opcodes may be different, but otherwise almost everything translates over directly.
eg. (example-- the actual binary is probably different)
Function to perform: A+B=C
"ADD A, B, C"='AF0F32BFh' in PPC machine language.
"ADD C, A, B"='CBBF0F32h' in PA-RISC machine language.
The difference is the opcode byte (AF v. CB), and ordering (A+B=C v. C=A+B)
The commands translate directly over, and only the formatting of the instruction matters. Easy emulation. x86 emulation is more of a bear: a single instruction can do different things, depending on the context (almost like operator overloading in assembly)
There have been similar rumors about using AMD chips; they go along these lines:
AMD Athlon & Opteron processors are really two processors: 1.) An x86 decoder, which translates the x86 instructions to 2.) AMD's completely original RISC core; each is roughly 1/2 of the total die size.
Take the upcoming Opteron, chop off the x86 decoder (which is about 1/2 of the chip), and use its RISC core natively (and emulate PPC)
Take the Opteron, and replace the x86 decoder with a PPC decoder (which would still be a smaller die than the x86 Opteron)
AMD is more likely to modify their design than Intel is.
Of course, the argument can be made 'why modify anything?'
As the poster said: x86 is on its last legs. The Opteron is likely the bed it will die in. There's really no reason to even have a CISC chip now that compiled languages are used instead of assembly.
There aren't many compelling things that show that VLIW is a better design paradigm than RISC. Few convincing reasons that VLIW (Itanium) is better than RISC (PowerPC)
Even Intel will have to debunk the MHz myth when trying to convince the public to buy the consumer version of Itanium, rather than the x86 Opteron.
Itanium and PowerPC have roughly equivalent SPEC scores at the same clock speeds.
There's not much to show that PowerPC is 'showing its age', as many of Itanium's touters claim. (It's more of a VLIW vs. RISC argument)
Apple has already done the processor emulation: When it moved from 680x0 to PowerPC. It's not as big a problem for them, having learned how to do it)
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
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.