That's not a result of the mechanism (unless you have a motorized pump toilet); that's probably a result of the fact that you're very close the equator. Directly on the equator, there is no swirl. The swirl gets more pronounced the further away you go. You're probably just close enough that there is no visible swirl.
The QuickTime file format is extremely well documented, and numerous players (and evern some editors, such as (I believe) Broadcast 2000) already exist for Linux/BSD/etc. That's not the issue. The issue is almost exclusively the availability of the Sorenson codecs. Sorenson actually would be perfectly OK releasing them on Linux if someone licensed them, but Apple will not allow them. (I apologize that I cannot remember the name of the application, as I do not use Linux anymore myself, but I think this came up with Xanim or something along those lines. The author was willing to license the Sorenson codec, but they informed him there weren't allowed.) Hence, getting QuickTime ported isn't the issue at all. Getting most QuickTime movies to use a more standard or open-source codec (such as DivX or the MPEG4 video codec, once that is released) and/or getting Sorenson on Linux should really be your focus.
I've always doubted the people who say that Gassée began with the goal of making a replacement for Mac OS. Keep in mind that BeOS started out being for an AT&T processor whose name skips my mind at the moment. It moved to PowerPC only when AT&T pulled the plug on their CPU. From there, Be went on to make some absolutely kick-ass PowerPC systems. Quad 133 MHz PowerPC 604s with 64 MB RAM were simply incredible back in the day when running BeOS. The thing would remained highly responsive under the heaviest of loads. Don't get me wrong; Be was absolutely doing the same things Apple was doing, and targeting Apple's market. It's just that, at least in my eyes, it seems that they intended to replace Apple, not be purchased by them. And back in 1995, when Apple was losing up to $700 million in a single quarter, it looked to Be like they'd have a very serious shot. Who'd have known back then that Apple would be able to turn around so much in so short a time? Certainly I didn't, and I doubt Be did, either.
Granted, when Apple began shopping for a new OS, Be did try to show why BeOS would be a great replacement. Their mistakes (which you can read about in a number of books on Apple; Apple Confidential is probably the easiest read and covers the most material) were that they wanted far too much money; that Gassée wanted to be given more power than Apple was willing to give (since he did not want to be purchased by a company that then went under shortly thereafter); that their OS was still only half-baked; and that they were far too over-confident. Jobs, on the other hand, had matured; had much more to offer for a significantly lower price; and had proven, complete technology. Be bet and lost the farm. This was not its original strategy; merely a result of poor planning.
The result, of course, is now well-known. Be's hardware died, while Apple did the impossible and became profitable and turned out much better hardware and software and significantly lower prices. Be was at that point screwed: with Apple alive, Be had no market. And you know the rest. So I doubt that Gassée's original intention was to be bought by Apple as much as to replace it.
As for why Sony doesn't buy them: good question. Seems like making Be run on PS3 would make a lot of sense, given that they've expressed an interest in making it be a full-fledged media desktop. Of course, you've got to wonder whether they don't already have an OS of their own which is very near completion...
AtheOS (http://www.atheos.cx for the paranoid) is an open-source OS which seems to fit your requirements. While it is still under heavy development, it already supports preemptive multithreading, symetric multiprocessing, protected memory, and, most importantly for you, a band-new, fully integrated GUI with a companion BeOS-like C++ toolkit. It's hardly ready for prime time, but if you've got the skills, check it out and see what you can do to help.
Now you got me confused. The SunPCi card can be added to the Blade 100, yes, just as it can be added to any Sun machine with at least one free PCI slot. But the article is not about the PCi card, which has been around since maybe 1994 or so in various incarnations. It is about a new SPARC system. So, the Slashdot article is (amazingly) completely correct as it reads now. I hope that clarifies things for you.
Back in it's hey day it was a multitasking OS that fit in (i think) 256MB ROM. That's no mean feat.
Despite the fact that that's a typo, as others have pointed out, do you realize that Windows and Mac OS both require about that much hard disk space anyway? You really would need a 200+ MB ROM...
For those of you who don't know much about American politics, the Republicans are the party that is for States Rights (this States Rights philosophy goes back a hundred years, even to the Civil War).
I am an ardent Republican, and I don't know whether you meant this to be confusing or not, but in the Civil War, the Democrats were for State's Rights (remember Calhoun's Exposition and Protest and Douglas' work to get the Missouri Compromise revoked?) and the Republicans were the ones for increased Federal control. (Otherwise, that whole little Civil War thing wouldn't have happened, because we would have let South Carolina and the Southern states just do their own thing and nullify the laws they didn't like.) During the Progressive Era, that changed, with the Republicans and Democrats both pushing for increased Federal interference. Finally, we arrived at the current situation where Republicans are pro States' Rights and Democrats are for Federal control. That emerged mostly during FDR's administration. Just wanted to clarify, since it sounded like you were saying Republicans were for States' Rights way back in the Civil War.
First of all, this is old news, but ignoring that, I actually think Apple's perfectly justified to do this. It's not exactly like they're suing any random GUI. On the contrary, they're going after designs that are clearly Aqua rip-offs to the point where at first glance they appear to be the same thing, and I don't find that unreasonable in the least. Would you expect Chevrolet to sit by idly while Ford created a line that looked almost exactly like a particular Chevy, or for a major fashion designer to watch quietly while a competitor starting making the exact same design himself? Whether or not you like Aqua, Apple put a lot of effort into its design, making it very different (even if it's not exactly evolutionary as Jobs claimed). When people see Aqua, they think Apple; just as Coke would get very irritated if a bottle manufacturer started making bottles that proudly had Coka-Cola written on it, Apple is justifyably irriated at GUIs that do the roughly the same thing. I don't think Apple's wrong to say that you cannot blatantly steal what they've put tremendous time and effort into. And, if you don't think the GUI is worthy of the unique status that Apple's giving it, then ask yourself something: why didn't anyone else think of it first? Did you ever see an Aqua-like GUI before Aqua came out? Just some food for thought.
When the Russians wanted to do this on Mir, I was fine with it. Mir is their thing; if they want to let people video tape on Mir, that's fine. But ISS was funded almost entirely by the US, as Russia has been notoriously bad on holding up their end of the bargain, as you undoubtedly know if you've been following this whole charade. I wish that NASA could somehow stop the Russians from doing this. I know that they've got to be extremely angry at the entire situation. There's nothing they can do at this point, of course, but still, it makes me both mad and sad. What a waste of a wonderful research laboratory.
Actually, someone has written a very good book entitled The Physics of Christmas which describes, among other things, how Santa could use warp technology to have all of the time he needs and move at whatever speed is required without vaporizing himself in the process. You can read a quick summary of some of the ideas here.
I think that Ecco was purchased by Novell and turned into InfoCentral for PerfectOffice 3.0. Certainly InfoCentral had the same idea: it had an incredibly powerful relational database that allowed you to tie any entry in the database to anything else, essentially allowing you to add new functionality merely by tying things together. (One of the demos that came with InfoCentral, in fact, was a family tree--not exactly something which your average PIM can handle.) I liked InfoCentral so much that for quite awhile I kept a copy of Windows 3.1 running emulated on my Mac just to use InfoCentral, until finally I gave up and switched to Claris Organizer. But for those of you with PerfectOffice 3.0 (and possibly with Corel Office, although I have no idea if they still use that PIM), I strongly recommend you check it out. If you wrote your PIM in the style of Ecco and InfoCentral, I think you'd be able to make a name for yourself not only in free software circles, but if done correctly, then in the business world at large as well.
The only thing I know which is even remotely close to this is the Mozilla ActiveX control, which allows you to have a Mozilla component embedded with an IE window. As the component doesn't share IE's API, they aren't interchangable; however, they are similar enough that, if a vendor wanted, they would be able to support both very easily. This is how NeoWeb (if I got the name right) added Mozilla support so quickly.
This is not flamebait, this is a serious question:
Why is Indrema using Linux as a console OS? On a console, you want the OS to be out of the way, providing as little interferance as possible. You don't need memory protection (landing at the command prompt instead of simply freezing is hardly an improvement, and it gets in the way of extremely high-speed code), daemons, a complex driver module, or anything like that. All you want is a tightly-coded microkernel written in assembly which provides the most rudimentary hardware abstraction and multitasking, and then hand off everything to the loaded game--something a lot closer to V2 OS than Linux. Linux just isn't suited for a console for the same reasons that it is very well suited for workstations and servers.
So the question comes down to: why are they using Linux?
Still easier yet. If it really worked like an HP calculator, the result of each op would be pushed to the stack, so you woldn't need the piping at all.
At Ease doesn't even exist anymore; Macs are supposed to use Mac Manager on an OS X or ASIP box and the integrated security with OS 9. While not a huge improvement, the two security bugs you listed don't work anymore. (On the flip side, all you need to do is boot from an OS 8/9 CD and you can read the entire contents of the hard disk at will. I don't remember whether or not you could do this with At Ease.)
If you read the article, it appears that the reason their JIT is so much faster than, say Java, is that they've really designed their environment so that programmers will want to code in assembly and use high-performance features, unlike Java where it's not even possible to write directly in bytecode (at least not so far as I know, anyway). If programmers write in assembly, they get cool features, such as extremely modular code which is only loaded in pieces (making for much lower memory consumption and faster execution). This is detailed further in the article.
While he doesn't say so in the article, I would suspect that another way they've greatly sped up their JIT is that their design is closer to Crusoe's dynamic translation than Sun's HotJava: the first time code is called, it is merely translated, like a classic JIT. The next time the code is called, the compiler optimizes that code a little more, and so on, until frequently used code is extremely optimized. The result is that the more you use a specific feature of a program, the faster it becomes. Combine this with modular code as discussed above, and you get a program which is extremely quick to load, and in which the most commonly called sections are optimized on-the-fly not only in general, but for the specific processor on which it's running (e.g., AltiVec on a G4, MMX on a Pentium, etc). No Java JIT that I know of can do this.
Granted, I did not see him detailing this as the way their JIT works in the article, but it might explain why he believes their JIT is so much superior to what's currently out there.
The SO components for StarPortal will be JavaBeans, and, therefore, pure Java. However, IIRC, StarPortal only shares the file format with the monolithic SO. No code is the same, and unlike the current SO, you can easily load only the components you need. (Essential, given StarPortal's ASP-like deployment strategy.)
In fact, it's likely StarPortal that's caused Sun to GPL the old StarOffice. StarOffice isn't something which still interests them, as they would prefer to use the ASP model permitted by StarPortal. True, that's a rather cynical notion, but then again, aren't all open-source people cynical?
I wrote this on AppleInsider's forums, and I'll write it again here: Apple's lawyers did not do this if they are even remotely intelligent, and here's why:
MOSR is, to say the least, not highly regarded in the Mac community. Its stories generally turn out to be wrong, and it frequently retracts and modifies stories. As a result, very few people likely believed the MOSR articles. (Visit AppleInsider's Future Hardware forum to get a good feel for the average Mac user's feelings towards MOSR.)
Now, with MOSR's reputation in mind, put yourself in Apple's lawyers' shoes. MOSR has just posted an article about a cube-shaped Macintosh computer. If the article is false, then of course you don't do a thing. But if it's true, you also wouldn't do a thing. By threatening legal action, you would be confirming the product's existence, at least at the R&D level. Apple's lawyers would have to be brighter than that.
Then there's the whole issue of the fact that the lawyers have absolutely no legal ground whatsoever to stand on. MOSR is a rumors site. It is extremely unlikely that it obtained physical documentation of the computer's shape and specifications, especially when you take into account that MOSR was unsure whether the computer was an iMac or a PowerMac and that it changed its specifications at least twice, reducing the box from about 14" or 16" down to 12" at the last time I checked before the article was pulled. As such, I think I can say with confidence that they were not in copyright violation, and also that the information wasn't obtained by breaking an NDA. So Apple's lawyers would essentially be making an idle thread--something that could result in a countersuit yielding MOSR hundreds upon thousands of dollars.
It just doesn't add up. Perhaps MOSR did, in fact, receive an email, and perhaps the email really did ask them to be quiet, but that email could not have come from Apple Legal.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a result of the mechanism (unless you have a motorized pump toilet); that's probably a result of the fact that you're very close the equator. Directly on the equator, there is no swirl. The swirl gets more pronounced the further away you go. You're probably just close enough that there is no visible swirl.
The QuickTime file format is extremely well documented, and numerous players (and evern some editors, such as (I believe) Broadcast 2000) already exist for Linux/BSD/etc. That's not the issue. The issue is almost exclusively the availability of the Sorenson codecs. Sorenson actually would be perfectly OK releasing them on Linux if someone licensed them, but Apple will not allow them. (I apologize that I cannot remember the name of the application, as I do not use Linux anymore myself, but I think this came up with Xanim or something along those lines. The author was willing to license the Sorenson codec, but they informed him there weren't allowed.) Hence, getting QuickTime ported isn't the issue at all. Getting most QuickTime movies to use a more standard or open-source codec (such as DivX or the MPEG4 video codec, once that is released) and/or getting Sorenson on Linux should really be your focus.
Granted, when Apple began shopping for a new OS, Be did try to show why BeOS would be a great replacement. Their mistakes (which you can read about in a number of books on Apple; Apple Confidential is probably the easiest read and covers the most material) were that they wanted far too much money; that Gassée wanted to be given more power than Apple was willing to give (since he did not want to be purchased by a company that then went under shortly thereafter); that their OS was still only half-baked; and that they were far too over-confident. Jobs, on the other hand, had matured; had much more to offer for a significantly lower price; and had proven, complete technology. Be bet and lost the farm. This was not its original strategy; merely a result of poor planning.
The result, of course, is now well-known. Be's hardware died, while Apple did the impossible and became profitable and turned out much better hardware and software and significantly lower prices. Be was at that point screwed: with Apple alive, Be had no market. And you know the rest. So I doubt that Gassée's original intention was to be bought by Apple as much as to replace it.
As for why Sony doesn't buy them: good question. Seems like making Be run on PS3 would make a lot of sense, given that they've expressed an interest in making it be a full-fledged media desktop. Of course, you've got to wonder whether they don't already have an OS of their own which is very near completion...
Please, don't destroy the box. That'd just give us bad rap. If, on the other hand, hidden links to DeCSS showed up on their homepage...
AtheOS (http://www.atheos.cx for the paranoid) is an open-source OS which seems to fit your requirements. While it is still under heavy development, it already supports preemptive multithreading, symetric multiprocessing, protected memory, and, most importantly for you, a band-new, fully integrated GUI with a companion BeOS-like C++ toolkit. It's hardly ready for prime time, but if you've got the skills, check it out and see what you can do to help.
Now you got me confused. The SunPCi card can be added to the Blade 100, yes, just as it can be added to any Sun machine with at least one free PCI slot. But the article is not about the PCi card, which has been around since maybe 1994 or so in various incarnations. It is about a new SPARC system. So, the Slashdot article is (amazingly) completely correct as it reads now. I hope that clarifies things for you.
First of all, this is old news, but ignoring that, I actually think Apple's perfectly justified to do this. It's not exactly like they're suing any random GUI. On the contrary, they're going after designs that are clearly Aqua rip-offs to the point where at first glance they appear to be the same thing, and I don't find that unreasonable in the least. Would you expect Chevrolet to sit by idly while Ford created a line that looked almost exactly like a particular Chevy, or for a major fashion designer to watch quietly while a competitor starting making the exact same design himself? Whether or not you like Aqua, Apple put a lot of effort into its design, making it very different (even if it's not exactly evolutionary as Jobs claimed). When people see Aqua, they think Apple; just as Coke would get very irritated if a bottle manufacturer started making bottles that proudly had Coka-Cola written on it, Apple is justifyably irriated at GUIs that do the roughly the same thing. I don't think Apple's wrong to say that you cannot blatantly steal what they've put tremendous time and effort into. And, if you don't think the GUI is worthy of the unique status that Apple's giving it, then ask yourself something: why didn't anyone else think of it first? Did you ever see an Aqua-like GUI before Aqua came out? Just some food for thought.
When the Russians wanted to do this on Mir, I was fine with it. Mir is their thing; if they want to let people video tape on Mir, that's fine. But ISS was funded almost entirely by the US, as Russia has been notoriously bad on holding up their end of the bargain, as you undoubtedly know if you've been following this whole charade. I wish that NASA could somehow stop the Russians from doing this. I know that they've got to be extremely angry at the entire situation. There's nothing they can do at this point, of course, but still, it makes me both mad and sad. What a waste of a wonderful research laboratory.
Actually, someone has written a very good book entitled The Physics of Christmas which describes, among other things, how Santa could use warp technology to have all of the time he needs and move at whatever speed is required without vaporizing himself in the process. You can read a quick summary of some of the ideas here.
Nothing personal, but if that's the funniest thing you've ever read, you might want to lay off the "eggnog" for a little bit.
I think that Ecco was purchased by Novell and turned into InfoCentral for PerfectOffice 3.0. Certainly InfoCentral had the same idea: it had an incredibly powerful relational database that allowed you to tie any entry in the database to anything else, essentially allowing you to add new functionality merely by tying things together. (One of the demos that came with InfoCentral, in fact, was a family tree--not exactly something which your average PIM can handle.) I liked InfoCentral so much that for quite awhile I kept a copy of Windows 3.1 running emulated on my Mac just to use InfoCentral, until finally I gave up and switched to Claris Organizer. But for those of you with PerfectOffice 3.0 (and possibly with Corel Office, although I have no idea if they still use that PIM), I strongly recommend you check it out. If you wrote your PIM in the style of Ecco and InfoCentral, I think you'd be able to make a name for yourself not only in free software circles, but if done correctly, then in the business world at large as well.
You mean it won't include native COBOL support?!
Easy. Just email BackOrifice to everyone on campus. Any machines that don't show up must not be running Windows.
The only thing I know which is even remotely close to this is the Mozilla ActiveX control, which allows you to have a Mozilla component embedded with an IE window. As the component doesn't share IE's API, they aren't interchangable; however, they are similar enough that, if a vendor wanted, they would be able to support both very easily. This is how NeoWeb (if I got the name right) added Mozilla support so quickly.
Why is Indrema using Linux as a console OS? On a console, you want the OS to be out of the way, providing as little interferance as possible. You don't need memory protection (landing at the command prompt instead of simply freezing is hardly an improvement, and it gets in the way of extremely high-speed code), daemons, a complex driver module, or anything like that. All you want is a tightly-coded microkernel written in assembly which provides the most rudimentary hardware abstraction and multitasking, and then hand off everything to the loaded game--something a lot closer to V2 OS than Linux. Linux just isn't suited for a console for the same reasons that it is very well suited for workstations and servers.
So the question comes down to: why are they using Linux?
Mac OS is turning into BSD! The only way it's Linux-like is in the sense that Linux and BSD both happen to be Unix-like.
Still easier yet. If it really worked like an HP calculator, the result of each op would be pushed to the stack, so you woldn't need the piping at all.
At Ease doesn't even exist anymore; Macs are supposed to use Mac Manager on an OS X or ASIP box and the integrated security with OS 9. While not a huge improvement, the two security bugs you listed don't work anymore. (On the flip side, all you need to do is boot from an OS 8/9 CD and you can read the entire contents of the hard disk at will. I don't remember whether or not you could do this with At Ease.)
I know a little about a lot of things, and as it happens I don't follow Java closely. So sue me.
While he doesn't say so in the article, I would suspect that another way they've greatly sped up their JIT is that their design is closer to Crusoe's dynamic translation than Sun's HotJava: the first time code is called, it is merely translated, like a classic JIT. The next time the code is called, the compiler optimizes that code a little more, and so on, until frequently used code is extremely optimized. The result is that the more you use a specific feature of a program, the faster it becomes. Combine this with modular code as discussed above, and you get a program which is extremely quick to load, and in which the most commonly called sections are optimized on-the-fly not only in general, but for the specific processor on which it's running (e.g., AltiVec on a G4, MMX on a Pentium, etc). No Java JIT that I know of can do this.
Granted, I did not see him detailing this as the way their JIT works in the article, but it might explain why he believes their JIT is so much superior to what's currently out there.
In fact, it's likely StarPortal that's caused Sun to GPL the old StarOffice. StarOffice isn't something which still interests them, as they would prefer to use the ASP model permitted by StarPortal. True, that's a rather cynical notion, but then again, aren't all open-source people cynical?
MOSR is, to say the least, not highly regarded in the Mac community. Its stories generally turn out to be wrong, and it frequently retracts and modifies stories. As a result, very few people likely believed the MOSR articles. (Visit AppleInsider's Future Hardware forum to get a good feel for the average Mac user's feelings towards MOSR.)
Now, with MOSR's reputation in mind, put yourself in Apple's lawyers' shoes. MOSR has just posted an article about a cube-shaped Macintosh computer. If the article is false, then of course you don't do a thing. But if it's true, you also wouldn't do a thing. By threatening legal action, you would be confirming the product's existence, at least at the R&D level. Apple's lawyers would have to be brighter than that.
Then there's the whole issue of the fact that the lawyers have absolutely no legal ground whatsoever to stand on. MOSR is a rumors site. It is extremely unlikely that it obtained physical documentation of the computer's shape and specifications, especially when you take into account that MOSR was unsure whether the computer was an iMac or a PowerMac and that it changed its specifications at least twice, reducing the box from about 14" or 16" down to 12" at the last time I checked before the article was pulled. As such, I think I can say with confidence that they were not in copyright violation, and also that the information wasn't obtained by breaking an NDA. So Apple's lawyers would essentially be making an idle thread--something that could result in a countersuit yielding MOSR hundreds upon thousands of dollars.
It just doesn't add up. Perhaps MOSR did, in fact, receive an email, and perhaps the email really did ask them to be quiet, but that email could not have come from Apple Legal.