"on OSX you just target quicktime for audio and video playback."
I hate to nitpick, but on OS X using QuickTime for audio got depreciated long ago. In fact, it's entirely gone in 64 bit. You're supposed to use CoreAudio or OpenAL now.
Sorry, I just didn't want people thinking that on the Mac we were still basing our audio code on a creaky ancient proprietary API.:)
(QuickTime X, on the other hand, is brand new, rebuilt from the ground up, and great at doing hardware accelerated video. But it doesn't include an audio API like the old QuickTime sound manager.)
"It's not stated, but I assume by "Mac" he means "Intel Mac" and not "Intel and PPC Macs". Anyone know any different? (I have a PPC mac and never intend to buy another.)"...why? That's the stupidest stand on principle I've ever heard.
However you want to crumble the cookie (RISC vs. CISC, Hypertransport, etc), any Intel Mac these days is going to be far faster on any benchmark than a PPC. And Intel deserves kudos, they did a great job with the original Core Duo, and blew away the PPC in performance. Not to mention they designed a chip that was far more power efficient than the PPC.
If the PPC was still great technology I'd sympathize, but by none of todays standards is it still a good chip.
(And I say this as a developer who was in the room when Steve announced the Intel transition at WWDC 2005, and I was involved with the Mac PPC->Intel transition.)
I hate to say this on Slashdot... but have you tried.. : gulp : Microsoft Word? At least on the Mac version, it has this great feature... It records audio while you're taking notes, and next to every line of notes is a little speaker icon. If you click the speaker icon, it starts playing starting at the point you added that line of notes. It's great for just writing down the basic concepts, and then jumping through the audio to get the detailed lecture.
AAC is also DRM free, if you follow the formats specs. And it has better compression with better quality. Yes, Apple had their own DRM'd version of AAC at one point, but they've since gone to using the pure DRM free spec.
I'm really surprised they didn't go with AAC. Most players support DRM free AAC already, and it's the far superior format.
$30,000 in potential sales was lost, yes. Even if the potential was slim.
More importantly, though, if the app uses bandwidth from a server, or if you get support, you have caused real monitary damage by using things you haven't paid for. I have an app on the app store, and people who pirate cause significant amounts of damage by steal our bandwidth from our partners that we paid a lot of money for, and we pay per access.
If there was a way we could lock out those services to paying customers only, we would, but we can't. App store doesn't give us that data.
The iPhone will never succeed if they only allow developers to use web technologies instead of native code. Real apps require features that only native code can provide....oh what? You said Palm Pre? In that case web code roxxors!
Even though Microsoft abandon PowerPC long ago (XBox excluded), they still support IA64 to this day.
The biggest problem hasn't really been vendor support, but compatibility. PowerPC held Apple back for the longest time because users had no good solutions for running x86 Windows apps when needed, whereas now they have WINE and native booting. IA64, while having some x86 compatibility, does not have clear enough benefits for consumers, and generally runs existing apps slower.
Ironically enough, AMD pretty much killed IA64 and gave x86 a longer life when they came out with x86-64, thus cutting off Intel's attempts to replace x86. Smart business decision for AMD, but it hampered attempts to replace x86.
"and that's the problem. The board itself does not carry an OEM license, so upgrade copies still do not apply."
And why not? Plenty of companies sell Apple products in different cases, and they're blessed by Apple.
Hell, I'm pretty sure I remember Steve Jobs playing with a 3rd party Apple tablet that was on display at MacWorld a few years ago. Pretty sure it was the ModBook, which not only was on display at MacWorld, but is commercially available, and considered by Apple to be licensed for OS X.
"Apple doesn't want COMPANIES making systems, or facilitating hacks, but they have made it know they actualyl appreciate the general hacking community and have no intention of persuing people who use LEGAL copies of the software paid for in a store on home-built components."
As noted above, the ModBook is a 3rd party system built with Apple parts sold commercially, and condoned by Apple.
While true, Apple is in the same situation. They allow you to run any OS on their hardware you want, but restrict their own OS to their own hardware, much as TRS-DOS would be restricted to Radio Shack hardware.
The problem is a lot of mainstream news sites have reported all the cool apps you can get by jailbreaking, and a lot of people have found jailbreaking as one way to pirate apps. Thus the clueless public was introduced to jailbreaking, and of course they install whatever random crap they find like kids in a candy store, such as an SSH server.
I really don't get the boot up time argument. My Macbook Pro takes 30-40 seconds. I'd gladly sacrifice an almost immeasurable amount of startup time for a computer I never restart anyway to have many times more functionality. It's great for the marketing droids who want another bullet point on paper, but for the real world? I don't think it matters.
"Even if the programming environments are compatible, doesn't the developer agreement require exclusivity of code?" No, it doesn't. I, and lots of other developers have code that runs over multiple platforms. There are lots of projects out there that use cross platform open source libraries in their projects. Usually, you have to end up reimplementing the Objective C portions for your app because other platforms don't do Obj-C (except for OS X), but that's it.
And now we know the real reason Apple fears, hates and will continue to block Java on the iPhone.
Except Android doesn't even use the Java standards, just the syntax. Even if Apple allowed the Java VM on the iPhone, you'd still have to port apps. (Note: I am not an Android developer, so I don't know how bad the disparity is between Android Java and real Java, but I know it exists.)
Sure, if porting over was free...
But the reality is that porting an iPhone app to Android requires moving all your iPhone C code to Java, targeting non multitouch devices, targeting devices with different screen sizes and resolutions, and another round of testing... You'd have to hire a second engineering team.
What Gameloft seems to be saying is they can hire a dozen engineers to make X number of dollars on Android, or they can take those same engineers and make 400 times X on the iPhone. Economically, it makes no sense for them to keep engineers on Android when those same engineers could be put to work to make 400 times as much money on the iPhone.
Couldn't the difference be due to Vista and 7 no longer supporting hardware audio processing?
I seem to remember a lot of fuss when Vista came out that a lot of people didn't get hardware decoding on their sound cards. Pretty sure it only affected DirectSound and that OpenAL still worked, but still...
"This is news to me! I do not believe that there are any keys embedded in any shipping Intel Macs. In fact, I am pretty sure that OSX will install cleanly on any PC similarly equipped to a Mac and has EFI firmware"
This is not true. Apple's version of EFI is not vanilla, and has special hooks for loading OS X.
You can't load OS X from a vanilla EFI implementation.
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"on OSX you just target quicktime for audio and video playback."
I hate to nitpick, but on OS X using QuickTime for audio got depreciated long ago. In fact, it's entirely gone in 64 bit. You're supposed to use CoreAudio or OpenAL now.
Sorry, I just didn't want people thinking that on the Mac we were still basing our audio code on a creaky ancient proprietary API. :)
(QuickTime X, on the other hand, is brand new, rebuilt from the ground up, and great at doing hardware accelerated video. But it doesn't include an audio API like the old QuickTime sound manager.)
"It's not stated, but I assume by "Mac" he means "Intel Mac" and not "Intel and PPC Macs". Anyone know any different? (I have a PPC mac and never intend to buy another.)" ...why? That's the stupidest stand on principle I've ever heard.
However you want to crumble the cookie (RISC vs. CISC, Hypertransport, etc), any Intel Mac these days is going to be far faster on any benchmark than a PPC. And Intel deserves kudos, they did a great job with the original Core Duo, and blew away the PPC in performance. Not to mention they designed a chip that was far more power efficient than the PPC.
If the PPC was still great technology I'd sympathize, but by none of todays standards is it still a good chip.
(And I say this as a developer who was in the room when Steve announced the Intel transition at WWDC 2005, and I was involved with the Mac PPC->Intel transition.)
I'm a Mac user, and they don't make OneNote for Mac, but in this case they likely just integrated the OneNote features into Word on the Mac.
I hate to say this on Slashdot... but have you tried.. : gulp : Microsoft Word? At least on the Mac version, it has this great feature... It records audio while you're taking notes, and next to every line of notes is a little speaker icon. If you click the speaker icon, it starts playing starting at the point you added that line of notes. It's great for just writing down the basic concepts, and then jumping through the audio to get the detailed lecture.
AAC is also DRM free, if you follow the formats specs. And it has better compression with better quality. Yes, Apple had their own DRM'd version of AAC at one point, but they've since gone to using the pure DRM free spec.
I'm really surprised they didn't go with AAC. Most players support DRM free AAC already, and it's the far superior format.
"To avoid Microsoft Apple could buy whatever is left of AltaVista...."
Two bags of potato chips and an old 386 in a closet?
$30,000 in potential sales was lost, yes. Even if the potential was slim.
More importantly, though, if the app uses bandwidth from a server, or if you get support, you have caused real monitary damage by using things you haven't paid for. I have an app on the app store, and people who pirate cause significant amounts of damage by steal our bandwidth from our partners that we paid a lot of money for, and we pay per access.
If there was a way we could lock out those services to paying customers only, we would, but we can't. App store doesn't give us that data.
The iPhone will never succeed if they only allow developers to use web technologies instead of native code. Real apps require features that only native code can provide. ...oh what? You said Palm Pre? In that case web code roxxors!
There have been quite a few different architectures, all supported by Microsoft and Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA64
Even though Microsoft abandon PowerPC long ago (XBox excluded), they still support IA64 to this day.
The biggest problem hasn't really been vendor support, but compatibility. PowerPC held Apple back for the longest time because users had no good solutions for running x86 Windows apps when needed, whereas now they have WINE and native booting. IA64, while having some x86 compatibility, does not have clear enough benefits for consumers, and generally runs existing apps slower.
Ironically enough, AMD pretty much killed IA64 and gave x86 a longer life when they came out with x86-64, thus cutting off Intel's attempts to replace x86. Smart business decision for AMD, but it hampered attempts to replace x86.
"This beast might be in the range of US$300-400."
Hah. For a contract free phone? You're looking at $600-$700.
"I don't think bloody revolution is the only path to democracy."
No, but it's a lot more exciting that way! Peaceful Democracy is boring... Nobody wants to see that.
"and that's the problem. The board itself does not carry an OEM license, so upgrade copies still do not apply."
And why not? Plenty of companies sell Apple products in different cases, and they're blessed by Apple.
Hell, I'm pretty sure I remember Steve Jobs playing with a 3rd party Apple tablet that was on display at MacWorld a few years ago. Pretty sure it was the ModBook, which not only was on display at MacWorld, but is commercially available, and considered by Apple to be licensed for OS X.
"Apple doesn't want COMPANIES making systems, or facilitating hacks, but they have made it know they actualyl appreciate the general hacking community and have no intention of persuing people who use LEGAL copies of the software paid for in a store on home-built components."
As noted above, the ModBook is a 3rd party system built with Apple parts sold commercially, and condoned by Apple.
It was Apple branded, that was the point. He used entirely genuine Apple parts, except for the case...
While true, Apple is in the same situation. They allow you to run any OS on their hardware you want, but restrict their own OS to their own hardware, much as TRS-DOS would be restricted to Radio Shack hardware.
The problem is a lot of mainstream news sites have reported all the cool apps you can get by jailbreaking, and a lot of people have found jailbreaking as one way to pirate apps. Thus the clueless public was introduced to jailbreaking, and of course they install whatever random crap they find like kids in a candy store, such as an SSH server.
Unless you are already infected and you don't know it, then changing the password does nothing.
I really don't get the boot up time argument. My Macbook Pro takes 30-40 seconds. I'd gladly sacrifice an almost immeasurable amount of startup time for a computer I never restart anyway to have many times more functionality. It's great for the marketing droids who want another bullet point on paper, but for the real world? I don't think it matters.
Of course if only 1/400th of your iPhone software is approved, you're still making as much money as you do on Android. :)
"Even if the programming environments are compatible, doesn't the developer agreement require exclusivity of code?" No, it doesn't. I, and lots of other developers have code that runs over multiple platforms. There are lots of projects out there that use cross platform open source libraries in their projects. Usually, you have to end up reimplementing the Objective C portions for your app because other platforms don't do Obj-C (except for OS X), but that's it.
And now we know the real reason Apple fears, hates and will continue to block Java on the iPhone.
Except Android doesn't even use the Java standards, just the syntax. Even if Apple allowed the Java VM on the iPhone, you'd still have to port apps. (Note: I am not an Android developer, so I don't know how bad the disparity is between Android Java and real Java, but I know it exists.)
Sure, if porting over was free... But the reality is that porting an iPhone app to Android requires moving all your iPhone C code to Java, targeting non multitouch devices, targeting devices with different screen sizes and resolutions, and another round of testing... You'd have to hire a second engineering team. What Gameloft seems to be saying is they can hire a dozen engineers to make X number of dollars on Android, or they can take those same engineers and make 400 times X on the iPhone. Economically, it makes no sense for them to keep engineers on Android when those same engineers could be put to work to make 400 times as much money on the iPhone.
...all those laid off Microsoft employees already found work.
Couldn't the difference be due to Vista and 7 no longer supporting hardware audio processing? I seem to remember a lot of fuss when Vista came out that a lot of people didn't get hardware decoding on their sound cards. Pretty sure it only affected DirectSound and that OpenAL still worked, but still...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration_(United_States) Anything with less than 7% alcohol content are under the prevue of the FDA.
"This is news to me! I do not believe that there are any keys embedded in any shipping Intel Macs. In fact, I am pretty sure that OSX will install cleanly on any PC similarly equipped to a Mac and has EFI firmware" This is not true. Apple's version of EFI is not vanilla, and has special hooks for loading OS X. You can't load OS X from a vanilla EFI implementation.