[sarcasm]
Yeah, it really really sucks to be an Apple user who is required to buy new hardware every few years because Apple has released new software that's so amazingly cool that the computer police will arrest you if you don't upgrade.
[/sarcasm]
Last time I checked, Macintoshes did not suddenly keel over dead just because Apple released new software. No one is forced at gunpoint to upgrade.
No one ever needs to buy all new hardware to run Linux, because Linux has never come out with anything substantially new from what was done 30 years ago.
People would be a lot happier with their computers if they just bought them to get something done today, instead of thinking they're buying some magic box that will solve all the world's problems tomorrow.
So, people don't write non-Sorenson codecs for QuickTime under Linux because they wouldn't be as good as Sorenson. Of course, they do write non-Sorenson codecs all the time, just not for QuickTime under Linux.
So QuickTime is bad because it can use the Sorenson codec which is better than the codecs you can use with or without QuickTime. Writing a codec without QuickTime is good, but writing a coded with QuickTime is bad, because QuickTime is bad. So if you write a codec, make sure to write it without QuickTime, because otherwise you'd be bad. Of course, you don't get any advantages from QuickTime, but that's a small price to pay for purity. Also, because you don't use QuickTime, then that means it doesn't exist for Linux.
Of course, the "you" in the preceding paragraph does not mean you personally. I'm also not questioning your description of the logic; it's just a kind of logic I don't see often outside the White House and old Beavis and Butthead reruns.
It's too bad someone modded that as flamebait, because you are correct.
That's why I'm sad. Linux developers shun QuickTime, because Sorenson is not available on Linux. They shun the very mechanism that could free them.
Attention Linux codec authors:
QuickTime is not the codecs! QuickTime is a standard way for software to USE codecs. Write your codec for QuickTime, and all the software out there that understands QuickTime can use your codec.
Or, to invert the question, why aren't the few open-source codecs that _are_ being developed being developed as QuickTime codecs? Why can't I get OggVorbis as a QuickTime codec?
You seem to be mistaken about the way codecs are developed. Generally, you develop a codec and create an implementation, and if you want it to be widely adopted you make source available for that implementation (if not completely open source, then you make it available to the standards bodies and their members). The individual developers (Apple in the instance of QuickTime) then implement the codec in their software, in most cases. If Ogg isn't available for QuickTime, that's the result of QuickTime not being popular in Ogg's target audience, as well as Apple not taking the time to implement Ogg (probably because Ogg isn't popular in Apple's target audience, either).
That's a great explanation from the technical implementation point of view, but completely ignores the reality of the end users who actually use software instead of write software.
When you say "The individual developers (Apple in the instance of QuickTime) then implement the codec in their software...", you miss the point of QuickTime.
If the OV developers released their codec as a QuickTime plugin, it would work on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, in any authoring or playback application that understands QuickTime.
Sure, Apple could do the integration for the OV developers. But why should they?
Apple has given the world an open, extensible architecture for multimedia. And no one is using it, because they either believe they need to own the whole widget (Real), or can't be bothered with anything as mundane as users (OV).
For example, Real could implement their entire business on top of QuickTime, and the user experience wouldn't be any different at all, but Real would suddenly only need to do 1/2 the engineering.
The really sad thing is that Apple would rather keep people using their player, so they can display their nag screens, than make plugins readily available for other players, or make a deal with Sorenson to make the format open to others to make those plugins for them.
The plugins (codecs) that Apple ships work in any QuickTime player. The QuickTime Player that Apple ships/sells is just ONE implementation of a QuickTime player. QuickTime itself is free, and widely available! Apple's QuickTime Player is NagWare for buying Apple's Pro Player, but you can get all of the same functionality from any of dozens of other freeware and shareware player applications.
In fact, you can play QuickTime movies from SimpleText on the Mac! That's about as minimal a player as you can find!
In my perfect world, the Open Source community would realize that QuickTime is a vehicle they could "embrace and extend", ensuring that their platforms are first class multimedia citizens.
After all, QuickTime is just an API. There's no reason why the QuickTime API couldn't be the native multimedia API for Linux, even if they shared none of the codecs!
QuickTime is an API framework for passing data through converters. These converters are called codecs (from encode, decode.)
Sorensen is probably the highest quality video codec with good compression for QuickTime. But there are a dozen other free codecs, including the widely available H.263 codec.
QuickTime is available on Linux, it's only the Sorenson codec that is not.
Given these simple facts, why does the Linux community continue to bitch about the absense of QuickTime for linux? Where are the open-source codecs to replace Sorenson? Why isn't the community insisting that web authors use a more widely available codec than Sorenson?
Or, to invert the question, why aren't the few open-source codecs that _are_ being developed being developed as QuickTime codecs? Why can't I get OggVorbis as a QuickTime codec? If the open source world built codecs for QuickTime, they would be usable with a minimum of fuss on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, which would have a huge impact on adoption. Plus, so much of the boilerplate work, like authoring and playback software, would already be done for them!
I have more than 450 CDs that I purchased over the years. I've ripped all of them to MP3 so that I can listen to them at home and at work without transporting them. I havn't given copies of this library to my friends, because it's nearly 40GB. I recently bought an iPod, and I'll be using that to listen to some of this music in my car.
How do honest customers like myself make the music industry aware that not everyone ripping CDs is trading them on the Internet?
Or is the industry just happy to have a scapegoat to distract from their fear of losing the "media upgrade" market?
With US law written by corporations defending their income, how can us ordinary citizens protect our Fair Use copyrights?
Re:iPod and Digital Camcorder
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
How about using it as a storage device for your firewire camcorder or digital camera (if there are firewiere still cameras).
5GB is about 22 minutes of DV video. It's easier just to pop in another 15GB DV tape.
Since firewire devices are peerless, it shouldn't be much of a problem to connect the devices.
They're peerless when they provide a unique service on the bus. FireWire video cams are DV publishers/consumers. The HD claims to be a mass storage device. The camera would need UI for selecting a mass storage device other than the one built in (the DV tape).
For example, hook 3 DV cammeras together with FireWire. Hit play on one, record on the other two, and you should get two perfect digital copies. Hit play on two of them, record on the other, and unless the recording camera provides a UI for selecting from multiple DV streams, it's probably random which one you'll get.
Raise your hand if you have iTunes...
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port...
Raise your hand if you have both...
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device...
What, is there a large market for mp3 players with people who don't own computers?
Apple knows that their biggest market is existing Apple customers. If Apple sells one of these for every 5 iBooks they sell, they'll be sitting pretty.
Why should Apple fund a software team to port iTunes to Windows, just so they get a few $400 slim margin sales of an mp3 player?
Better to let the Windows users wish they had an iPod, and go out and buy an iBook to get it.
Apple's finally learning to bring the market to them, instead of chasing it all over the map.
Keep in mind it's $400 right now becuase the Apple Fanatics will have to have one. They'll pay anything for the latest cool toy from Apple.
In 6 months, hopefully the rest of us will be buying the 20GB version for $200.
Yes, because the HD is rarely spinning
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The iPod has 32MB of RAM, which it uses to buffer data from the HD. So it only has to turn on the HD every 20 minutes or so for just a few seconds to refill the RAM cache. The drive spends most of the time off and heads parked.
Saves tons of power, and should make it tough as nails.
Because Apple already has an internal bug tracking database called Radar, with a full app UI instead of a web UI.
The darwin pages that interface to it are rather primative. But slowly, they're becomming better integrated with Radar.
Opening up Radar to the public is not an option. With millions of bugs related to every aspect of Apple's business, darwin represents only a tiny sliver of the active Radar bugs.
Can anyone find a copy of the little informative graphic they have with the story? A version that hasn't been shrunk to 50% size, so we can actually read the comments in it?
Doing a world build of anything using gcc is a benchmark of your hard drive, NOT your CPU.
You mentioned in the article that the test isn't disk intensive, but every stage of GCC feeds the next via a file. Tons of RAM or not, you're still benchmarking your disks.
And BTW- your hunch that gcc produces shitty PPC code is correct. Run the bytemark tests if you want a more interesting benchmark of CPU performance. Make sure to test using different compilers on the same CPUs to show how much a compiler can affect efficient CPU utilization in the software it's building.
And you don't think Apple would use a free alternative to Sorenson if it was as good?
Get real. Apple is paying Sorenson for a competitive advantage. Open Source whiners are jumping up and down saying "gimme." If Open Source coders wrote a sorenson killer, you can bet that Apple would be all over it. Of course, then the whiners would just ignore the decades of work that is QuickTime, and whine that Apple gives them nothing in return...
Help yourself for once. That's one of the points of Open Source, right?
Apple should release the boot details for all the classic Macintoshes. It's really pitiful that one has to keep a runty little MacOS partiton
Apple has done this, and those boot details are why you must have a "runty little MacOS partition". That's what the ROM in those older Macs expects to find in order to boot.
Do some research for once.
BTW- a handful of Apple's OS engineers on the darwin-developer mailing list will be happy to tell you in painful detail how the machine boots. Recent discussions have included booting on Mac clones too...
I know, because I'm one of the people working there. Apple is doing all of the Core OS work out in the open. Check out the darwin-development mailing list, where dozens of Mac OS X engineers contribute on a daily basis. This is unprecidented at Apple, allowing engineering types to communicate directly with developers.
And it's so very sad that someone like the author of that article has chosen to spin their own license dogma into a "Apple does nothing for me" story. It's sad becase myself and others are working 80hr weeks to share as much information as possible with our developers.
Dvorak is an Old-School Troll. He's been trolling the likes of us since we were in diapers.
He Trolls because then his readers write his editor and bitch. His publishers know he's popular because he gets 10x the email of any of their other writers.
stand back and watch the patents fly (although in this case they are much more deserved).
Why are they "much more deserved"? Is it because those researchers work in a field that you don't understand? Why does working on computers mean that our experts don't deserve patents? It seems that computer geeks have a fundamental misunderstanding of their place in the world of science...
At MacHack last year, two friends and myself wrote a hack called "EtherPEG", which sniffs the non-password protected AirPort network there, and draws all of the gifs and jpegs that traverse it in a window.
Slashdot Mirror
[sarcasm]
Yeah, it really really sucks to be an Apple user who is required to buy new hardware every few years because Apple has released new software that's so amazingly cool that the computer police will arrest you if you don't upgrade.
[/sarcasm]
Last time I checked, Macintoshes did not suddenly keel over dead just because Apple released new software. No one is forced at gunpoint to upgrade.
No one ever needs to buy all new hardware to run Linux, because Linux has never come out with anything substantially new from what was done 30 years ago.
People would be a lot happier with their computers if they just bought them to get something done today, instead of thinking they're buying some magic box that will solve all the world's problems tomorrow.
-pmb
So, people don't write non-Sorenson codecs for QuickTime under Linux because they wouldn't be as good as Sorenson. Of course, they do write non-Sorenson codecs all the time, just not for QuickTime under Linux.
So QuickTime is bad because it can use the Sorenson codec which is better than the codecs you can use with or without QuickTime. Writing a codec without QuickTime is good, but writing a coded with QuickTime is bad, because QuickTime is bad. So if you write a codec, make sure to write it without QuickTime, because otherwise you'd be bad. Of course, you don't get any advantages from QuickTime, but that's a small price to pay for purity. Also, because you don't use QuickTime, then that means it doesn't exist for Linux.
Of course, the "you" in the preceding paragraph does not mean you personally. I'm also not questioning your description of the logic; it's just a kind of logic I don't see often outside the White House and old Beavis and Butthead reruns.
It's too bad someone modded that as flamebait, because you are correct.
That's why I'm sad. Linux developers shun QuickTime, because Sorenson is not available on Linux. They shun the very mechanism that could free them.
Attention Linux codec authors:
QuickTime is not the codecs! QuickTime is a standard way for software to USE codecs. Write your codec for QuickTime, and all the software out there that understands QuickTime can use your codec.
-pmb
Or, to invert the question, why aren't the few open-source codecs that _are_ being developed being developed as QuickTime codecs? Why can't I get OggVorbis as a QuickTime codec?
You seem to be mistaken about the way codecs are developed. Generally, you develop a codec and create an implementation, and if you want it to be widely adopted you make source available for that implementation (if not completely open source, then you make it available to the standards bodies and their members). The individual developers (Apple in the instance of QuickTime) then implement the codec in their software, in most cases. If Ogg isn't available for QuickTime, that's the result of QuickTime not being popular in Ogg's target audience, as well as Apple not taking the time to implement Ogg (probably because Ogg isn't popular in Apple's target audience, either).
That's a great explanation from the technical implementation point of view, but completely ignores the reality of the end users who actually use software instead of write software.
When you say "The individual developers (Apple in the instance of QuickTime) then implement the codec in their software...", you miss the point of QuickTime.
If the OV developers released their codec as a QuickTime plugin, it would work on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, in any authoring or playback application that understands QuickTime.
Sure, Apple could do the integration for the OV developers. But why should they?
Apple has given the world an open, extensible architecture for multimedia. And no one is using it, because they either believe they need to own the whole widget (Real), or can't be bothered with anything as mundane as users (OV).
For example, Real could implement their entire business on top of QuickTime, and the user experience wouldn't be any different at all, but Real would suddenly only need to do 1/2 the engineering.
The really sad thing is that Apple would rather keep people using their player, so they can display their nag screens, than make plugins readily available for other players, or make a deal with Sorenson to make the format open to others to make those plugins for them.
The plugins (codecs) that Apple ships work in any QuickTime player. The QuickTime Player that Apple ships/sells is just ONE implementation of a QuickTime player. QuickTime itself is free, and widely available! Apple's QuickTime Player is NagWare for buying Apple's Pro Player, but you can get all of the same functionality from any of dozens of other freeware and shareware player applications.
In fact, you can play QuickTime movies from SimpleText on the Mac! That's about as minimal a player as you can find!
In my perfect world, the Open Source community would realize that QuickTime is a vehicle they could "embrace and extend", ensuring that their platforms are first class multimedia citizens.
After all, QuickTime is just an API. There's no reason why the QuickTime API couldn't be the native multimedia API for Linux, even if they shared none of the codecs!
-pmb
QuickTime is an API framework for passing data through converters. These converters are called codecs (from encode, decode.)
Sorensen is probably the highest quality video codec with good compression for QuickTime. But there are a dozen other free codecs, including the widely available H.263 codec.
QuickTime is available on Linux, it's only the Sorenson codec that is not.
Given these simple facts, why does the Linux community continue to bitch about the absense of QuickTime for linux? Where are the open-source codecs to replace Sorenson? Why isn't the community insisting that web authors use a more widely available codec than Sorenson?
Or, to invert the question, why aren't the few open-source codecs that _are_ being developed being developed as QuickTime codecs? Why can't I get OggVorbis as a QuickTime codec? If the open source world built codecs for QuickTime, they would be usable with a minimum of fuss on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, which would have a huge impact on adoption. Plus, so much of the boilerplate work, like authoring and playback software, would already be done for them!
It's sad, the opportunity being wasted like this.
-pmb
I have more than 450 CDs that I purchased over the years. I've ripped all of them to MP3 so that I can listen to them at home and at work without transporting them. I havn't given copies of this library to my friends, because it's nearly 40GB. I recently bought an iPod, and I'll be using that to listen to some of this music in my car.
How do honest customers like myself make the music industry aware that not everyone ripping CDs is trading them on the Internet?
Or is the industry just happy to have a scapegoat to distract from their fear of losing the "media upgrade" market?
With US law written by corporations defending their income, how can us ordinary citizens protect our Fair Use copyrights?
How about using it as a storage device for your firewire camcorder or digital camera (if there are firewiere still cameras).
5GB is about 22 minutes of DV video. It's easier just to pop in another 15GB DV tape.
Since firewire devices are peerless, it shouldn't be much of a problem to connect the devices.
They're peerless when they provide a unique service on the bus. FireWire video cams are DV publishers/consumers. The HD claims to be a mass storage device. The camera would need UI for selecting a mass storage device other than the one built in (the DV tape).
For example, hook 3 DV cammeras together with FireWire. Hit play on one, record on the other two, and you should get two perfect digital copies. Hit play on two of them, record on the other, and unless the recording camera provides a UI for selecting from multiple DV streams, it's probably random which one you'll get.
Raise your hand if you have iTunes
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port
Raise your hand if you have both
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device
What, is there a large market for mp3 players with people who don't own computers?
Apple knows that their biggest market is existing Apple customers. If Apple sells one of these for every 5 iBooks they sell, they'll be sitting pretty.
Why should Apple fund a software team to port iTunes to Windows, just so they get a few $400 slim margin sales of an mp3 player?
Better to let the Windows users wish they had an iPod, and go out and buy an iBook to get it.
Apple's finally learning to bring the market to them, instead of chasing it all over the map.
Keep in mind it's $400 right now becuase the Apple Fanatics will have to have one. They'll pay anything for the latest cool toy from Apple.
In 6 months, hopefully the rest of us will be buying the 20GB version for $200.
The iPod has 32MB of RAM, which it uses to buffer data from the HD. So it only has to turn on the HD every 20 minutes or so for just a few seconds to refill the RAM cache. The drive spends most of the time off and heads parked.
Saves tons of power, and should make it tough as nails.
They're doing exactly what you want, and it's much cooler than PalmOS.
FireWire (400Mbps) data syncing _and_ recharging at the same time. That's cool.
I wonder if it's hackable for a bigger drive...
Plus, you can use it as a portable disk. No "content protection". Yay!
Because Apple already has an internal bug tracking database called Radar, with a full app UI instead of a web UI.
The darwin pages that interface to it are rather primative. But slowly, they're becomming better integrated with Radar.
Opening up Radar to the public is not an option. With millions of bugs related to every aspect of Apple's business, darwin represents only a tiny sliver of the active Radar bugs.
-pmb
I can't believe I got modded down as a troll for asking that... and the answer is (rightly) modded up to +4...
Oh wait, this is slashdot. Of course.
Moderators on crack... bizzare.
-pmb
Can anyone find a copy of the little informative graphic they have with the story? A version that hasn't been shrunk to 50% size, so we can actually read the comments in it?
Doing a world build of anything using gcc is a benchmark of your hard drive, NOT your CPU.
You mentioned in the article that the test isn't disk intensive, but every stage of GCC feeds the next via a file. Tons of RAM or not, you're still benchmarking your disks.
And BTW- your hunch that gcc produces shitty PPC code is correct. Run the bytemark tests if you want a more interesting benchmark of CPU performance. Make sure to test using different compilers on the same CPUs to show how much a compiler can affect efficient CPU utilization in the software it's building.
You are wrong, and dozens of people here have provided examples.
I've PERSONALLY contributed code back to BSD licensed projects, so it doubly pisses me off to see people spewing these lies.
-pmb
And you don't think Apple would use a free alternative to Sorenson if it was as good?
Get real. Apple is paying Sorenson for a competitive advantage. Open Source whiners are jumping up and down saying "gimme." If Open Source coders wrote a sorenson killer, you can bet that Apple would be all over it. Of course, then the whiners would just ignore the decades of work that is QuickTime, and whine that Apple gives them nothing in return...
Help yourself for once. That's one of the points of Open Source, right?
-pmb
Apple has done this, and those boot details are why you must have a "runty little MacOS partition". That's what the ROM in those older Macs expects to find in order to boot.
Do some research for once.
BTW- a handful of Apple's OS engineers on the darwin-developer mailing list will be happy to tell you in painful detail how the machine boots. Recent discussions have included booting on Mac clones too...
-pmb
I know, because I'm one of the people working there. Apple is doing all of the Core OS work out in the open. Check out the darwin-development mailing list, where dozens of Mac OS X engineers contribute on a daily basis. This is unprecidented at Apple, allowing engineering types to communicate directly with developers.
And it's so very sad that someone like the author of that article has chosen to spin their own license dogma into a "Apple does nothing for me" story. It's sad becase myself and others are working 80hr weeks to share as much information as possible with our developers.
-pmb
QuickTime is a file format! The only closed part of it is the sorenson codec.
THERE IS NOTHING STOPPING LINUX CODERS FROM WRITING A QUICKTIME CLIENT THAT CAN PLAY EVERYTHING EXCEPT SORENSON MOVIES.
And once you do that, write a open source codec that doesn't suck to replace Sorenson.
-pmb
Mod That Up! :-)
Dvorak is an Old-School Troll. He's been trolling the likes of us since we were in diapers.
He Trolls because then his readers write his editor and bitch. His publishers know he's popular because he gets 10x the email of any of their other writers.
He Trolls for a Living!
-pmb
Why are they "much more deserved"? Is it because those researchers work in a field that you don't understand? Why does working on computers mean that our experts don't deserve patents? It seems that computer geeks have a fundamental misunderstanding of their place in the world of science...
www.etherpeg.org
-pmb
A visual packet sniffer. Source included.
www.etherpeg.org
-pmb
Warning: I'm human #3872. Sometimes stuff I post here is wrong. Use your head. Question authority.
It only changes the meaning a little bit. ;-)