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Inside View on Apple WWDC Rumors
AppleLurker writes "In a recent interview with DVD newsroom an Apple employee talks WWDC rumors including the iPhone, Blu-ray, MacPro and the Apple Tablet. More realistic about what not to expect next week when Steve Jobs hits the stage." Apple's next move is always a hotbed of debate leading up to a product release and with all the rumors flying this year all bets are off until we see the checkered flag, so take with the requisite grain of salt.
with obscure Simpsons references in them!
Monstar L
Awesome! I'm all greased up and ready to go.
The question before us is this: Does Al Gore exist? Let us address this question from a phenomenological perspective, taking as a starting point the following sentence from Martin Heidegger's Being and Time : "The nothing nothings" (or "Nothingness nihilates"). That sentence is an extremely apt description of Al Gore giving a political speech. He isn't there, and he's not saying anything or, to put it differently, he is nothing and he's saying nothing. Al Gore is a kind of hole or vacuum. Let us consider Al Gore provisionally as a section of unoccupied space and time (later we will have to refine this account).
A Gore supporter might reply that while "of course" Al Gore is something or perhaps even someone, the problem is his public persona. He tries to stay safe by sticking to pure cant and revealing as little as possible of himself.
Paradoxically, however, the fact that he will not or cannot reveal himself in public is precisely his most authentic revelation of himself. As he speaks from concealment he is nothinging or nihilating: his self is the self that creates or clears the absence that he presents, and the presentation from which he is absent. His self is nothingness, the source of the nullity he embodies in public space. The nothing nothings; but more, only the nothing nothings. Nothing cannot derive from something, as if by a slow decay. Rather, the abyss lurks at the heart of each thing as a possibility. In human beings the abyss lurks as a choice, but to choose nothing (what Sartre called "bad faith") is to choose the unreality at the heart of oneself, to annihilate oneself or tumble into perfect falsehood, or rather perfect negation of truth, as the essence of oneself.
Al Gore tumbled into this infinite pit long ago and now calls upon all of us to do likewise, to annihilate ourselves entirely, to take up and become sheer empty space and time. Nothingness now beckons us from our televisions to vote for it, to endorse it, to choose it to represent us; that is, it urges and cajoles us to become sheer void.
It would not be inaccurate to think of Al Gore as a nihilist in the Nietzschean sense, as someone who by withdrawing in fear from reality seeks an annihilation of all that is into the nothingness he himself has chosen. Augustine famously proposed that evil is the absence of good. In beckoning us toward nothingness, Al Gore calls us to evil. But he calls us not only to the absence of everything but also to the absence of nothing, and thus to the absence even of evil itself. Hence Al Gore is no more evil than he is good, which is perhaps what people sense when it occurs to them that Al Gore means no harm, or even that he is not a deeply evil person. One finds oneself wishing beyond hope that Al Gore were evil. Even that much nothing would be something.
But Al Gore, in being the very principle of emptiness itself, cannot be evil, for he is also what annihilates even nothingness, what annihilates good but also the absence of good. Al Gore is the infinite series of annihilations by which the universe devours itself, devours its own devouring of itself, and then devours even that. Al Gore is the devourer of dimensions, the devourer even of time and of the possibility of time.
One can see this most clearly when one listens to Al Gore, which is a complete waste of time. It's not just that in listening to Al Gore time is disposed of nonproductively, that time is lobbed into the universal garbage pail along with the cosmological coffee grounds and orange peels. As Al Gore speaks, time is wasted as a disease wastes the human body; time slowly collapses in on itself like the body of a consumptive: time withers, time decays, time atrophies as all things cease to be, even the very ceasing-to-be itself of things. So Al Gore makes not only everything impossible, he makes nothing itself impossible too, for nothingness must be the annihilation of itself as well as of everything. Al Gore is the universe feeding on itself and then feeding on its own excrement and then feeding on its own f
Why are you greased up? Do you wrestle?
Got MILF? It does a body good!
It's not that surprising. There's quite a large contingent of Microsoft support people who'll be at this WWDC, helping Mac developers migrate to the new NT kernel APIs. There's going to be a staggering amount of stuff Mac developers will need to learn as Apple transitions to Mac OS W, or Leopard as it's currently known.
That's not to say there's going to be an actual announcement of Mac OS W, even if it's an open secret. Instead, Apple will merely announce the existance of a transition API (called a "Cross Platform API") for Windows that includes Cocoa, Carbon, and a few useful extras that integrate well into the Vista POSIX layer. It'll be Steve's "nod and wink" to developers that the days of OS X as a freestanding platform are close to an end.
Inside source: this happened on the morning Microsoft announced delays to Vista.
The board meeting
So it's Tuesday morning at Apple. The boardroom is having another meeting about the future of the Macintosh. They're perusing the feedback over the unofficial port of Windows to the Mac, and considering the consequences. There's a whole bunch of things on the agenda. OS development is hard, and it's expensive. Their competitors, Sony and Lenevo, doesn't need to do it, and they're doing pretty well all in all. Plus, there's the whole break up plan. When Apple separates into Apple Macintosh Inc and iTunes Corp, how attractive will Apple Macintosh be as a take-over target? The whole move to Intel will be for naught if it hasn't made Dell and friends just a little more excited and comfortable they could fit the Macintosh into their lines.
Apple has some little development projects on the boil and has for some time. To begin with, it's pretty much completely reimplemented the Carbon APIs under Windows. Indeed, that's how iTunes and Quicktime are implemented. But, interestingly, so are the Cocoa APIs. They're all there, Apple never stopped developing them, even after it nixed WebObjects for that platform. It's also in need of certain features that would help it with the future. Apple has no "managed code" environment - it supported Java to a certain extent, but Cocoa never was a perfect fit for that. Apple's progress with .NET, unofficially, under Windows and OS X, is coming along surprisingly well.
As time has gone on, the notion of switching to Windows as the base platform really has gotten more and more plausable. There are still roadblocks, Apple needs Microsoft to provide them with a little more customizability of the UI. A switch to Windows without providing the essential Macintosh experience just wouldn't do. But, well, .NET, and Aero, are Microsoft's attempts to break with the past. Perhaps an OS built upon these APIs could, with Microsoft's help, look entirely like a Mac environment - with the right code, obviously. You don't want a Dell user flipping a registry switch and getting a Mac.
It's clear that whatever happens, OS X is doomed. Postings by MacRumors alumni arguing that the porting of Windows to the Mac spells disaster are read out, and largely agreed with. But the question then is - does Apple continue to pour money into OS X, or could Gates and Ballmer be ameanable to making the modifications needed to make Windows Vista the next Macintosh OS?
The phone call
Jobs picks up the phone and calls Gates. There's a brief discussion, and then the phone's put down. A few minutes later, the phone rings. It's Ballmer, Gates, and Allchin.
"We think we can do it, Steve" says Bill Gates. "I mean, this is a major thing for us. It's a coup, and I know you know we're thinking it. So we're going to help in any way we can."
Allchin interjects: "Funnily enough, from our end, the code's largely there. We need a bit more time. WinFS needs some work - we'd put it on hold, but if you're going to want Spotlight on this OS, we'll need to finish it. Sticking menus at the top of the screen and reorder
"I guess it's nice for those still taking mass transit." (emphasis mine)
As if stopping the use of mass transit to use a car was an evolution. Hello! Kyoto!
Fuckin' ape.
perception is reality