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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Yes, this is correct. They did use parts of StarTrek for Quicktime for Windows.
Also remember that OS X is based on NeXTSTEP, and NeXT had an x86 version of NeXTSTEP (OPENSTEP), AND Apple also had Rhapsody for x86 (Yellow Box), which is more or less the early version of Mac OSX Server.
There was talk a while back about meetings Jobs had with AMD... the plot thickens.
-- 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
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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