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Apple Snags Former Xbox Exec
nandemoari sends along word that Apple has picked up Richard Teversham, a senior Executive from Microsoft's European Xbox operations, ending his 15 years of service to Redmond. Some press accounts assume that Teversham's role may lie in beefing up the games scene on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Forbes goes farther, opining that Apple "appears to be preparing an all-out assault on the handheld gaming market." Other reporting associates the hire with Apple's recent buildout of chip-design expertise.
The future is parallelism. Unless Apple can come out with a hardware and software solution to the parallel programming crisis within the next few years, this is an investment that will come back to bite them in the ass. Hard.
Anybody who thinks that the conmputer industry should retain last century's multithreading CPU technology should lay off the dope, in my opinion. Heterogeneous processors, too, will lead to failure. What is needed is a new parallel processor, a homogeneous one designed to support a universal, deterministic and easy to program parallel computing model.
Can Apple deliver? Does it have the correct vision? Does it have the courage? I am not so sure. All those hardware experts come from the old conservative school of computer science. That's too bad because what is needed is a radical paradigm shift. Apple needs a true maverick, a rebel with humongous huevos. I wish them the best.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis
The way you write betrays you:
He's too much of a control freak to let Tim Cook or anyone else sabotage the juggernaut he helped to create
Why would Cook be 'sabotaging'? We're talking incompetence here, not malice.
If you think Sculley's Apple will make a comeback then you're mistaken and don't know history.
Sorry - the downfall has already begun. RIM is again the biggest smartphone maker.
Expect things to get worse when this xbox exec 'sexes up' the iPhone. Probably with some lime green styling. And make it bigger. Yeah, chunkier. And the appstore will be renamed to iPhone live - where you can only rent apps.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Apple would be dumb to take on Nintendo in the handheld market.
A. It's been tried.
Everyone up to and including Sony has tried and failed. No one has ever taken the crown from N in portable gaming. And Sony gave it everything they had.
B. It's not possible without dedicated hardware.
So the Iphone can play games. Gee great. It has a nice screen. So did the PSP. But it doesn't have dedicated gaming inputs like the PSP had, and the PSP still failed. I remember people saying the PSP would be the one to finally take the crown, how wrong they were. The DS blew everything out of the water once again.
C. Only one screen.
When Apple starts shipping Iphones with two screens it might have a chance of competing with the DS, until then I think not.
Are developers going to create games for Iphone with the same scope of the best and richest of DS games? No. Because the market for Iphone apps is muddled. People may be buying games for the Iphone, but they sure as hell aren't paying DS-game prices for those games. They're paying a few bucks. And those games reflect it, they are curiosities-- the portable equivalent of time wasters, generally. Will Square ever release an RPG for the Iphone, I seriously doubt it. Will parent buy an Ipohone for their kid to game with? Hell no. Lacking a clam-shell alone is a massive strike on that possibility.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
LOL! What a fucking moron.
The PSP is over 50 million sold worldwide dipshit. Hell, in Japan the PSP is outselling/neck and neck with the DS every week in the hardware charts.
Sounds like you need to keep your fucking fanboy mouth shut, k?