This is a real problem for Microsoft. Think about it. They're telling corporate America, their primary customer, that they can't have the product they want. Instead, they have to buy something else that costs more, does the same thing, has tailfins, and imposes more restrictions on what you can do with it.
This does not work when your customer buys heavy trucks, milling machines, or office furniture, a few million dollars worth at a time. Now that computing is a commodity, it's no longer working for operating systems.
I'll bet we see a life extension on Windows 2000. Microsoft sales reps are going to call on corporate information officers and see a Red Hat box on the desk during negotiations.
Note that Dell gets this. See their Windows 2000 page.
"Dell offers the entire Windows 2000 Server family factory-installed across our enterprise server/storage product lines. Not only does Dell offer Windows 2000 support on new hardware, we also provide tools to help you assess and upgrade your current infrastructure."
The first round of camera drivers for Linux had a truly awful interface. The second round is better, but at the price of putting too much in the kernel.
And five years in, it hasn't fully replaced the old one yet.
For comparison, here is our camera interface on QNX. It's possible to have a much more straightforward API. Much of the problem is that the Linux video API predates the more responsive 2.6 kernel, so the driver can't assume real-time performance from the user client. This forces the queueing too far down and complicates the interface.
None of this the fault of the camera manufacturers or the camera spec. The DVCAM spec is available, published, and corresponds to what real cameras do.
We will be sorting through and organizing all our material into themed blocks and programs, and you will be able to watch them continuously in a high-quality stream.
And that's the problem. It's taking the Internet back to 1950s technology, where you watch when they want you to watch.
Push technology died years ago. The Internet is a "pull" medium.
Ever hear of Magnaband? They're an "internet TV station". Up for years. Nobody watches. Even though they have a "celebrity trials news" channel.
Of course a message board without moderation wouldn't work. We all knew that. Why is anybody surprised?
A secondary problem, one which afflicts Slashdot, are posts which link to blogs, rather than a primary source. (Roland the Plogger comes to mind). I suggest that the Slashdot editors act to discourage this.
This is the voice of Moderation. We wouldn't go so far as to say we've seized the radio station...
Unlike these new guys, who are all player, no content, visit the Internet Archive Moving Images collection. They have actual content. 5344 open source movies and counting, plus a big collection of historical films.
And you don't need some wierd player, either. The Internet Archive offers video in about five different formats, including editable quality versions for use in other works.
The hippies of the '60s assumed that if they "dropped out", they'd be able to get back in again some day. Most of them did get back in.
That's no longer true. Housing is far more expensive (San Francisco has 13,000 homeless people), well-paying jobs are no longer easy to get, welfare is almost nonexistent, and the organizations that supported hippiedom in the 1960s are long gone.
Take a look at Disney's current in-house output. "Bambi, Special Edition". All the "princess" movies (Snow White, Cinderella, etc.) in a boxed set, with associated toys. A "Herbie" remake, about a Volkswagen with a personality. The "Pocahontas" ten year re-release. Another "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie. "Chicken Little". Not much new there.
Their better output is outsourced. "Disney" doesn't just distribute Pixar and Ghibli; they also distribute Vanguard Animation from the UK, ("Valiant"), and Walden Media from New Zealand ("Narnia"). Disney is really more of a distributor than a studio now.
Once the Pixar deal runs out, Disney's distribution pipeline may run dry. Then what?
If the tying product is protected by patent or copyright the existence of market power should be presumed. See Data General vs. Digidyne.
Data General vs. Digidyne is very similar to the Apple/MacOS situation. Data General manufactured both Nova minicomputers and the RDOS operating system to run on them. Digidyne manufactured a Nova clone. Data General was not the dominant minicomputer manufacturer at the time.
The appelate court held that Data General's requirement that RDOS could only be run on Data General hardware was an illegal tie-in sale. The Supreme Court declined to review, so that's the law in the US.
This is an area where combined software/hardware manufacturers have consistently lost.
This punches a hole in Apple's strategy. The question is, can Apple compel users to run Apple's operating system only on Apple's hardware. In general, that's a "tie-in sale", where you have to buy B to buy A.
There are four elements to a per se tying violation:
the tying
and tied goods must be two separate products;
the defendant must
have market power in the tying product market;
the defendant
must afford consumers no choice but to purchase the tied product
from it; and
the tying arrangement must forclose a not insubstantial
volume of commerce in the tied product.
With the proposed tying of MacOS x86 to Apple hardware, we clearly have 2, 3, and 4. Apple's only defense is that the OS is an "integral part" of the hardware/software offering.
That defense just blew up. If you can run the thing on a stock PC, clearly the tying and tied goods are separate products.
This is an area where software/hardware companies consistently have lost. IBM lost decades ago, which created the IBM compatible mainframe market. Sony lost in the Connectix case. There will be cheap Mac clones from China, and Apple won't be able to stop them.
One of the best reliability technologies around was Tandem's NonStop systems, carefully architected clusters that can survive crashes. HP bought Tandem and made them switch to PA-RISC. Now they're making them switch to Inanium, just before Intel kills it.
The high-reliability customers are not going to like this. Those machines run important stuff - 911, NASDAQ, power grids, VISA.
Almost all the cosponsors are Democrats, and the bill went to the House Committee on Administration, where there has been no action.
Read
Preserving Democracy - What Went Wrong in Ohio.
" "We have found numerous, serious election irregularities . . . which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. . . .
"In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."
Think about that for a moment. The person in charge of vote counting in Ohio was also running the Bush campaign.
Apple hasn't had to worry about antitrust issues in the computer area because their market share is so tiny. (Apple is having antitrust problems over the iPod/iTunes link, but that's a different market.) Intel has enough market power that if they try a technical lockout of competitors, they're likely to have antitrust problems.
If someone builds a machine with an AMD processor and some custom support chips to run Apple software, neither Intel nor Apple will be in a strong position to stop them legally. Especially since the Lexmark vs. SCC decision that "lock out codes" are not copyrightable.
This issue has already been decided in the game console area, in the Connectix case. Connectix sold a VM that ran Playstation I games on a PC, and won against Sony on that issue. Nobody builds game console clones because they're sold at a loss, not because it can't be done.
We'll probably see low-end machines from China that boot Windows, Linux, or MacOS as requested.
In the end, this will boost Apple's market share.
If your Mac Tiger app is 64 bits, you're screwed. Won't even run in the emulator.
Say goodbye to "Mac OS X Tiger delivers the power of 64-bit computing to your Mac. Build and run a new generation of 64-bit applications that address massive amounts of memory, without compromising the performance of your existing 32-bit applications."
It seems wierd that at this late date, Apple is trying to switch to the 32-bit Intel architecture. Switching to the 64-bit AMD/Intel architecture would seem to make more sense. It's very late in the IA-32 life cycle to switch to it.
Windows and Linux have already shipped as 64 bit
systems, and it's clear that IA-32 is becoming low end.
Slashdot Mirror
This does not work when your customer buys heavy trucks, milling machines, or office furniture, a few million dollars worth at a time. Now that computing is a commodity, it's no longer working for operating systems.
I'll bet we see a life extension on Windows 2000. Microsoft sales reps are going to call on corporate information officers and see a Red Hat box on the desk during negotiations.
Note that Dell gets this. See their Windows 2000 page. "Dell offers the entire Windows 2000 Server family factory-installed across our enterprise server/storage product lines. Not only does Dell offer Windows 2000 support on new hardware, we also provide tools to help you assess and upgrade your current infrastructure."
Go to ViaArena. Click on "Open Source", and go from there. Source for drivers for their Ethernet and graphics chips is provided.
For comparison, here is our camera interface on QNX. It's possible to have a much more straightforward API. Much of the problem is that the Linux video API predates the more responsive 2.6 kernel, so the driver can't assume real-time performance from the user client. This forces the queueing too far down and complicates the interface.
None of this the fault of the camera manufacturers or the camera spec. The DVCAM spec is available, published, and corresponds to what real cameras do.
And that's the problem. It's taking the Internet back to 1950s technology, where you watch when they want you to watch. Push technology died years ago. The Internet is a "pull" medium.
Ever hear of Magnaband? They're an "internet TV station". Up for years. Nobody watches. Even though they have a "celebrity trials news" channel.
There's a standard for FireWire cameras, and, having written a generic FireWire camera driver for QNX, I can report that it works.
Texting to an autoresponder - yeah, cool. Would you like spam with that?
A secondary problem, one which afflicts Slashdot, are posts which link to blogs, rather than a primary source. (Roland the Plogger comes to mind). I suggest that the Slashdot editors act to discourage this.
This is the voice of Moderation. We wouldn't go so far as to say we've seized the radio station...
And you don't need some wierd player, either. The Internet Archive offers video in about five different formats, including editable quality versions for use in other works.
That's no longer true. Housing is far more expensive (San Francisco has 13,000 homeless people), well-paying jobs are no longer easy to get, welfare is almost nonexistent, and the organizations that supported hippiedom in the 1960s are long gone.
Drop out now, and your future is McDonalds.
This guy must have some source of free ice. If you have to pay market rates for ice, this is a terrible idea.
Their better output is outsourced. "Disney" doesn't just distribute Pixar and Ghibli; they also distribute Vanguard Animation from the UK, ("Valiant"), and Walden Media from New Zealand ("Narnia"). Disney is really more of a distributor than a studio now.
Once the Pixar deal runs out, Disney's distribution pipeline may run dry. Then what?
The remaining bugs are "related to tank debris, orbiter hardening and tile repair". Aren't those the problems that caused the last crash?
Data General vs. Digidyne is very similar to the Apple/MacOS situation. Data General manufactured both Nova minicomputers and the RDOS operating system to run on them. Digidyne manufactured a Nova clone. Data General was not the dominant minicomputer manufacturer at the time. The appelate court held that Data General's requirement that RDOS could only be run on Data General hardware was an illegal tie-in sale. The Supreme Court declined to review, so that's the law in the US.
This is an area where combined software/hardware manufacturers have consistently lost.
There are four elements to a per se tying violation:
With the proposed tying of MacOS x86 to Apple hardware, we clearly have 2, 3, and 4. Apple's only defense is that the OS is an "integral part" of the hardware/software offering.
That defense just blew up. If you can run the thing on a stock PC, clearly the tying and tied goods are separate products.
This is an area where software/hardware companies consistently have lost. IBM lost decades ago, which created the IBM compatible mainframe market. Sony lost in the Connectix case. There will be cheap Mac clones from China, and Apple won't be able to stop them.
However, the KFC in the Imperial Park didn't have their lease renewed. There is some hope.
The high-reliability customers are not going to like this. Those machines run important stuff - 911, NASDAQ, power grids, VISA.
Read Preserving Democracy - What Went Wrong in Ohio. " "We have found numerous, serious election irregularities . . . which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. . . . "In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."
Think about that for a moment. The person in charge of vote counting in Ohio was also running the Bush campaign.
Here are real market share figures, year by year. The Mac peaked at 11.20% in 1991. Every year since then, it's dropped. For 2004, the figure is 1.8%.
But the awful year was 1996, when Mac market share dropped from 9% to 5.1%. Just at the PowerPC transition. And in 1997, it was 3.45%.
That's reality.
Bleem spent about $10 million litigating against Sony, and they were winning when they ran out of money.
If someone builds a machine with an AMD processor and some custom support chips to run Apple software, neither Intel nor Apple will be in a strong position to stop them legally. Especially since the Lexmark vs. SCC decision that "lock out codes" are not copyrightable.
This issue has already been decided in the game console area, in the Connectix case. Connectix sold a VM that ran Playstation I games on a PC, and won against Sony on that issue. Nobody builds game console clones because they're sold at a loss, not because it can't be done.
We'll probably see low-end machines from China that boot Windows, Linux, or MacOS as requested. In the end, this will boost Apple's market share.
If your Mac Tiger app is 64 bits, you're screwed. Won't even run in the emulator. Say goodbye to "Mac OS X Tiger delivers the power of 64-bit computing to your Mac. Build and run a new generation of 64-bit applications that address massive amounts of memory, without compromising the performance of your existing 32-bit applications."
64 bits just got "Steved".
It seems wierd that at this late date, Apple is trying to switch to the 32-bit Intel architecture. Switching to the 64-bit AMD/Intel architecture would seem to make more sense. It's very late in the IA-32 life cycle to switch to it. Windows and Linux have already shipped as 64 bit systems, and it's clear that IA-32 is becoming low end.
Yes. When they only needed 10us latency, they didn't lose any. And that was on a 200MHz CPU.
Sorry, 10us.