Very synchronious, this showing up right now, because just yesterday the VTech people got in touch with me about porting their Windows "syncing software something like Palm Desktop" to the Mac. Not only am I really too busy to take it on, this sounds like they're having Linux problems too:
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your quick response. Seems any techie guy, not just Macintosh is really busy. We're looking for Linux people and it's been just as diffficult it seems...
Anyways, can you give the PDA manager "Wendy Siu" a call to discuss more about possible sub-contract work? The phone number is XXX-XXXX, ext. XXX.
If you're a good Linux and/or Mac programmer who wants to help them out, email me and I'll pass the number along if you sound competent.
it's for certain the complete truth. Just like the message I am responding to.
What, other people here would lie? I am shocked -- shocked! -- that you wouldn't believe me unquestioningly;)
If you have any Macintosh programmer acquaintances that have been in the business for at least ten years, there's a reasonable chance (100% if they live in BC) they've heard of me and can verify this, note that I am not an Anonymous Coward like yourself!
If not, here's the invite to Redmond, if you know any of the named people you can check with them if I'm making this up or not.
And if you don't have a wide enough network to verify my claims given all those leads... well, guess your opinion is pretty worthless then, isn't it now?
Hi Alex -
We would like to invite you to Redmond, WA to interview for a Software Design Engineer position on the Cross Platforms Team in the Digital Media Division - this is Pat Sweeney's team. Adam Hondiuk will be contacting you to arrange your travel and interview schedule. Also please pull the following documents together -- should we want to extend an offer at the outset of the interviews and you are interested then we'll need to have our legal department review and determine visa eligibility.
Thank you and I look forward to meeting you - if you have any questions I can be reached at 425-703-XXXX. [No, I will not post Brooke's phone number on/. I might need to ask her for a job someday.]
Brooke For candidates outside of the United States: * Copy of all educational transcripts/diplomas with translations * Copy of passport (only pages with biographic information, visa stamps and writing) * Copy of NDA's or non-compete agreements with other employers
several Bay Area Microsoft employees sitting round an... Apple Macintosh Powerbook!
Um, the only reason there IS a Mountain View campus is that the hires now known as the Macintosh Business Unit wouldn't move to Redmond. Note that MSFT employs more Mac developers than anybody but Apple, who do better work than you'd expect being hobbled with Windows compatibility requirements...
I am certain much of slashdot would kill to work at Microsoft
Speak for yourself, loser. Few months ago I agreed to submit my resume for a "Macintosh streaming media job in Seattle" I figured obviously must be with Real... when I found out it was with Microsoft I let them phone interview me twice just to see what it was like and told them "naaah, changed my mind, later maybe" when they offered to fly me there for the final interview/official offer.
Stock price was $107 at the time... called that one right, I must say;)
One other question for the crowd: Why is it that people obessed with making money are never called zealots?
Um, maybe because they're not?
Zeal is devotion to a cause or ideal. Making money for its own sake is neither. I suppose you could stretch the definition of "ideal" to include pure greed, but it would be stretching past generally accepted usage.
since submachineguns were designed specifically to kill
Erm... actually, you've got that precisely backwards. Submachineguns were designed specifically NOT to kill, but to wound.
The function of a submachinegun is suppressive fire, aka "bullet hose" -- the barrel is too short and the cyclic rate of fire too high to have any real pretensions to accuracy. And suppressive fire is far more effective when it leaves casualties behind its line of fire thrashing, screaming for mommy, bleeding, voiding bowels, etc. than when it simply leaves them dead. This is why submachineguns use comparatively underpowered rounds -- to produce disabling wounds while leaving the victim alive.
a weapon the NRA claims to be "recreational" it's clear that the weapon has a singular purpose of putting people in the ground
Wrong again! We'll shoot off three or four thousand rounds in a fun day out with my SMGs, and we've never put a person in the ground yet. Sent some old refrigerators, microwaves, TVs etc. to the next world, yes -- but last time I checked "people" did not include "household appliances", and man, blowing them to bits is INCREDIBLY recreational. Oh YEAH baby!
You mean Darwin? Because that plus Darwin Streaming Server equals a dedicated media server, which would be made platform independent without a large direct investment. As you noted yourself, that is indeed coming along nicely on both ends. The regular Open Source quality/contribution benefits also make a pretty good tradeoff for CoreOS code, given that the source is pretty much open already and the parts that weren't (the driver model, mainly) it is to Apple's benefit to have other people adopt in any case. Which they would do, if they were smart, since the Darwin driver model beats everybody else's all to hell.
Apple feels free to profit on open-source. They should be giving something back.
Uh-huh. And if you think the board or the shareholders would tolerate the presence in the company of anyone who thought that was a justification for open sourcing QuickTime, you have some serious dealing with reality issues, my friend.
If they were looking at straight revenue, they would have skipped making Quicktime for the Mac and just released it for Windows.
You seriously misunderstand QuickTime's value to Apple, which is as a technology used for media *creation* and as such is a significant driver of hardware sales. Client distribution is of comparative unimportance, as that contributes to hardware sales in fairly indirect fashion. Client distribution on a vanishingly tiny consumer installed base fringe OS like Linux is of an importance indistinguishable from zero.
If you manage to get large swathes of the video creation industry to demand Linux versions of After Effects et al. and/or large swathes of the grandma consumer market to demand QuickTime Player on their Linux desktops... then that will change. I shall not hold my breath.
I don't feel that it's inappropriate to point out work that should be done when I can't actually do it myself.
No... but it is inappropriate to whine "I wish Apple would do something about it" without apparently making the slightest effort to grasp why Apple does not perceive a net corporate benefit from allocating resources in such a fashion. If your sole argument is "they should be giving something back" then we don't really need to hear any more from you. If you have something to say that would be justifiable to the shareholders, please share.
For a company that used to officially support MkLinux, you'd think they'd get off of their collective ass and at least release binaries
Um, Apple's position on this is very clear and simple: "Where's the revenue model?"
If you want to watch QT on Linux, you have three options:
1. Come up with a revenue model that is defensible to Apple shareholders. I can guarantee direct delivery to Frank Casanova if you DO... but you won't, because I can't, and neither can a whole lot of other people much smarter than you.
2. Have Red Hat or somebody license QuickTime. You may have noticed in the news that Kodak did last week. Apple will license QT to anyone who ponies up a reasonable amount of cash, and "reasonable" is probably "not too bloody much" in the context of a new player platform I'd be pretty confident.
3. The QuickTime file format is publicly documented. Download it at
Compatibility in the Classic environment is at least as good as any System upgrade of the last four years, i.e. if the program doesn't break any rules it's virtually guaranteed to work.
As for porting, user applications will be written to the Carbon or Cocoa APIs in virtually all instances. Neither is or is likely to be available on any other architecture in the foreseeable future.
In developer versions of Mac OS X, the kernel environment exports BSD services
and commands to the upper layers of the system through the System framework. User versions of Mac OS X do not. Because the BSD command environment is a special optional environment, it is not described further in this document.
In DP4 it's all standard BSD, matter of fact when you telnet in it says right up front it's BSD 4.4. Shell is tcsh but I'm sure you could install whatever gets you hard. Emacs is there too:)
"Aqua" is the translucent swirly interface that you write programs for in the UI of your choice. It's more a skin than an actual technology of its own.
Darwin: Mach kernel + *BSD + Apple's driver model. Aqua: PDF-based graphic engine relying on Darwin services, basis for the two main OS X APIs- Carbon: Macintosh Toolbox APIs that suck less. Cocoa: {NeXT|NEXT|Next|Open|OPEN}{Step|STEP} 6.0 (5.0 was Rhapsody, aka "Mac OS X Server 1.0")
Mac OS X Consumer 1.0: Distro of all of the above plus a basic application/utility suite, all prettified up to pass the grandma test (note how S. Jobs was crowing yesterday about the 28% of Apple sales that are to people buying their first computer). It is currently unknown what access to the BSD command line will be available -- in DP3 Terminal.app was only installed for the administrator by default, haven't installed DP4 just quite yet.
Mac OS X Server 2.0: Presumably will be Consumer 1 plus BSD applications and services, many probably with Cocoa GUIs on top. This is the one for geeks, not Consumer, which those who whine about no CLI in Consumer are stupid for forgetting.
This whole online music piracy fracas really is the exact same argument that went on in the late '70s about application software object code. Only the scale is different:)
Since it appears that Metallica et al. don't dig the shareware try-before-you-buy model at all, what would they think of a crippleware/demoware model for music distribution, like the one at http://www.destinympe.com/ perhaps?
We all have some element of hypocrisy in our characters, but the Slashdot community takes it to a level of cognitive dissonance that can only be characterized as literal insanity.
How on earth is it possible to simultaneously hold the expressed opinions about the unquestionable inviolacy of copyright when applied to code expressed in the "GPL Violation - NVIDIA" posting on Sunday, and the equally unquestionable irrelevancy of copyright when applied to music expressed in this posting?
Granted, the posters are merely following the lead of their cult leader RMS... and I agree, the GPL, being based on copyright, should be awarded by all thinking people exactly the level of courtesy and compliance that RMS extends to the holders of copyright on music. (You may wish to review his interview, in case you somehow missed that; it can be paraphrased as "none whatsoever".)
But if anyone *does* have any substantive argument why anyone should respect the GPL in any way shape or form when its author and advocates freely and publicly repudiate its sole legal basis as soon as it inconveniences them in the slightest, I would truly love to hear it.
When will Apple release Quicktime in a format that allows cross-platform viewing of QuickTime 4 movies?
It does now (well, OS X is a little sketchy yet:) on all platforms for which Apple can justify the investment.
If you have some sound business justification for porting to a not currently supported platform that has escaped the QuickTime team, QuickTime application developers, and the world in general up to this moment, you can send it to me and I can assure you that the appropriate people at Apple will receive it.
If not, well, then it appears to have escaped you that the QuickTime team needs to justify their salaries. "Wouldn't it be neat to watch movies on Linux" is not an acceptable justification.
Note that the file format of a QuickTime movie is publicly and completely documented. To write an API to handle that should be the work of no more than a couple weeks. It is the codecs that are the trick, and most of those are not Apple's intellectual property anyway, you would have to deal with their implementors.
A specific example of said codec would be the QDesign 2 Music codec, which really is the best low-bandwidth music technology out there. I did the first version of QDesign's MVP, so I'm not talking through my hat when I assure you that if QDesign saw a business opportunity in QT for another architecture they would be pushing Apple for it. Another would be the Sorenson Video codec. One of my former subordinates has just been hired there to work on the OS X stuff. Ditto.
So there you go. If you have any good reasons for Apple and codec makers to do this work, I can absolutely guarantee their delivery to the decision makers on the QuickTime team, at QDesign, and at Sorenson.
It's as if Aqua is designed to default to handhold the most relentlessly AOLish l^Huser. I'm not at all sure this _is_ a mistake.
Not "as if"... it IS.
Everybody goes on about how Aqua sucks as a GUI. Well, yeah, because Aqua is not a GUI. Aqua is to a GUI what a GUI is to the CLI; a whole whack less power, for an order of magnitude reduction in learning curve. It's different enough from a dumbed down GUI ("Bob", anyone?) that it deserves a completely new name, and I suggest AUI, Appliance User Interface.
Think of it this way: What are the top ten things your mother and grandmother (if yours have a clue, substitute your boss, or whatever:) just do not get about their computer, no matter how many times you explain the same thing? Now, how many of those would completely disappear as issues in Aqua Single Window Mode? Pretty much all of them, right? Sure, the Dock sucks for me. For THEM it is UTTERLY PERFECT.
The truly nifty thing about OS X is that a CLI, a GUI, and what I call the AUI will all coexist nicely on a single machine. That's really cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Very synchronious, this showing up right now, because just yesterday the VTech people got in touch with me about porting their Windows "syncing software something like Palm Desktop" to the Mac. Not only am I really too busy to take it on, this sounds like they're having Linux problems too:
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your quick response. Seems any techie guy, not just Macintosh is really busy. We're looking for Linux people and it's been just as diffficult it seems...
Anyways, can you give the PDA manager "Wendy Siu" a call to discuss more about possible sub-contract work? The phone number is XXX-XXXX, ext. XXX.
If you're a good Linux and/or Mac programmer who wants to help them out, email me and I'll pass the number along if you sound competent.
it's for certain the complete truth. Just like the message I am responding to.
;)
... well, guess your opinion is pretty worthless then, isn't it now?
/. I might need to ask her for a job someday.]
What, other people here would lie? I am shocked -- shocked! -- that you wouldn't believe me unquestioningly
If you have any Macintosh programmer acquaintances that have been in the business for at least ten years, there's a reasonable chance (100% if they live in BC) they've heard of me and can verify this, note that I am not an Anonymous Coward like yourself!
If not, here's the invite to Redmond, if you know any of the named people you can check with them if I'm making this up or not.
And if you don't have a wide enough network to verify my claims given all those leads
Hi Alex -
We would like to invite you to Redmond, WA to interview for a Software Design Engineer position on the Cross Platforms Team in the Digital Media Division - this is Pat Sweeney's team. Adam Hondiuk will be contacting you to arrange your travel and interview schedule. Also please pull the following documents together -- should we want to extend an offer at the outset of the interviews and you are interested then we'll need to have our legal department review and determine visa eligibility.
Thank you and I look forward to meeting you - if you have any questions I can be reached at 425-703-XXXX.
[No, I will not post Brooke's phone number on
Brooke
For candidates outside of the United States:
* Copy of all educational transcripts/diplomas with translations
* Copy of passport (only pages with biographic information, visa stamps and writing)
* Copy of NDA's or non-compete agreements with other employers
several Bay Area Microsoft employees sitting round an ... Apple Macintosh Powerbook!
Um, the only reason there IS a Mountain View campus is that the hires now known as the Macintosh Business Unit wouldn't move to Redmond. Note that MSFT employs more Mac developers than anybody but Apple, who do better work than you'd expect being hobbled with Windows compatibility requirements...
I am certain much of slashdot would kill to work at Microsoft
... when I found out it was with Microsoft I let them phone interview me twice just to see what it was like and told them "naaah, changed my mind, later maybe" when they offered to fly me there for the final interview/official offer.
... called that one right, I must say ;)
Speak for yourself, loser. Few months ago I agreed to submit my resume for a "Macintosh streaming media job in Seattle" I figured obviously must be with Real
Stock price was $107 at the time
One other question for the crowd: Why is it that people obessed with making money are never called zealots?
Um, maybe because they're not?
Zeal is devotion to a cause or ideal. Making money for its own sake is neither. I suppose you could stretch the definition of "ideal" to include pure greed, but it would be stretching past generally accepted usage.
since submachineguns were designed specifically to kill
... actually, you've got that precisely backwards. Submachineguns were designed specifically NOT to kill, but to wound.
Erm
The function of a submachinegun is suppressive fire, aka "bullet hose" -- the barrel is too short and the cyclic rate of fire too high to have any real pretensions to accuracy. And suppressive fire is far more effective when it leaves casualties behind its line of fire thrashing, screaming for mommy, bleeding, voiding bowels, etc. than when it simply leaves them dead. This is why submachineguns use comparatively underpowered rounds -- to produce disabling wounds while leaving the victim alive.
a weapon the NRA claims to be "recreational" it's clear that the weapon has a singular purpose of putting people in the ground
Wrong again! We'll shoot off three or four thousand rounds in a fun day out with my SMGs, and we've never put a person in the ground yet. Sent some old refrigerators, microwaves, TVs etc. to the next world, yes -- but last time I checked "people" did not include "household appliances", and man, blowing them to bits is INCREDIBLY recreational. Oh YEAH baby!
Where was the revenue model when giving away BSD?
... then that will change. I shall not hold my breath.
... but it is inappropriate to whine "I wish Apple would do something about it" without apparently making the slightest effort to grasp why Apple does not perceive a net corporate benefit from allocating resources in such a fashion. If your sole argument is "they should be giving something back" then we don't really need to hear any more from you. If you have something to say that would be justifiable to the shareholders, please share.
You mean Darwin? Because that plus Darwin Streaming Server equals a dedicated media server, which would be made platform independent without a large direct investment. As you noted yourself, that is indeed coming along nicely on both ends. The regular Open Source quality/contribution benefits also make a pretty good tradeoff for CoreOS code, given that the source is pretty much open already and the parts that weren't (the driver model, mainly) it is to Apple's benefit to have other people adopt in any case. Which they would do, if they were smart, since the Darwin driver model beats everybody else's all to hell.
Apple feels free to profit on open-source. They should be giving something back.
Uh-huh. And if you think the board or the shareholders would tolerate the presence in the company of anyone who thought that was a justification for open sourcing QuickTime, you have some serious dealing with reality issues, my friend.
If they were looking at straight revenue, they would have skipped making Quicktime for the Mac and just released it for Windows.
You seriously misunderstand QuickTime's value to Apple, which is as a technology used for media *creation* and as such is a significant driver of hardware sales. Client distribution is of comparative unimportance, as that contributes to hardware sales in fairly indirect fashion. Client distribution on a vanishingly tiny consumer installed base fringe OS like Linux is of an importance indistinguishable from zero.
If you manage to get large swathes of the video creation industry to demand Linux versions of After Effects et al. and/or large swathes of the grandma consumer market to demand QuickTime Player on their Linux desktops
I don't feel that it's inappropriate to point out work that should be done when I can't actually do it myself.
No
For a company that used to officially support MkLinux, you'd think they'd get off of their collective ass and at least release binaries
... but you won't, because I can't, and neither can a whole lot of other people much smarter than you.
e vdocs/PDF/QTFileFormat.pdf
Um, Apple's position on this is very clear and simple: "Where's the revenue model?"
If you want to watch QT on Linux, you have three options:
1. Come up with a revenue model that is defensible to Apple shareholders. I can guarantee direct delivery to Frank Casanova if you DO
2. Have Red Hat or somebody license QuickTime. You may have noticed in the news that Kodak did last week. Apple will license QT to anyone who ponies up a reasonable amount of cash, and "reasonable" is probably "not too bloody much" in the context of a new player platform I'd be pretty confident.
3. The QuickTime file format is publicly documented. Download it at
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/quicktime/qtd
and put your sorry whining ass to work.
Think differently and use a fucking adverb you fucking morons.
... but it's not Apple marketing.
Ah yes. We must be consistent with other common phrases involving "Think" and an adjective, such as "Think LARGE", "Think HARDLY", and so forth.
There certainly is a moron here who has no grasp of the vernacular
Compatibility in the Classic environment is at least as good as any System upgrade of the last four years, i.e. if the program doesn't break any rules it's virtually guaranteed to work.
As for porting, user applications will be written to the Carbon or Cocoa APIs in virtually all instances. Neither is or is likely to be available on any other architecture in the foreseeable future.
Inside Mac OS X: System Overview
But specifically, from page 42:
In DP4 it's all standard BSD, matter of fact when you telnet in it says right up front it's BSD 4.4. Shell is tcsh but I'm sure you could install whatever gets you hard. Emacs is there too
Bah, I read Quartz for Aqua.
"Aqua" is the translucent swirly interface that you write programs for in the UI of your choice. It's more a skin than an actual technology of its own.
Darwin: Mach kernel + *BSD + Apple's driver model.
Aqua: PDF-based graphic engine relying on Darwin services, basis for the two main OS X APIs-
Carbon: Macintosh Toolbox APIs that suck less.
Cocoa: {NeXT|NEXT|Next|Open|OPEN}{Step|STEP} 6.0
(5.0 was Rhapsody, aka "Mac OS X Server 1.0")
Mac OS X Consumer 1.0: Distro of all of the above plus a basic application/utility suite, all prettified up to pass the grandma test (note how S. Jobs was crowing yesterday about the 28% of Apple sales that are to people buying their first computer). It is currently unknown what access to the BSD command line will be available -- in DP3 Terminal.app was only installed for the administrator by default, haven't installed DP4 just quite yet.
Mac OS X Server 2.0: Presumably will be Consumer 1 plus BSD applications and services, many probably with Cocoa GUIs on top. This is the one for geeks, not Consumer, which those who whine about no CLI in Consumer are stupid for forgetting.
Irony \I"ron*y\, n.[L. ironia, Gr. ? dissimulation, fr. ? a dissembler in speech, fr. ? to speak; perh. akin to E. word: cf. F. ironie.]
1. Dissimulation; ignorance feigned for the purpose of confounding or provoking an antagonist.
2. A sort of humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm, which adopts a mode of speech the meaning of which is contrary to the literal sense of the words.
Since it appears that Metallica et al. don't dig the shareware try-before-you-buy model at all, what would they think of a crippleware/demoware model for music distribution, like the one at http://www.destinympe.com/ perhaps?
We all have some element of hypocrisy in our characters, but the Slashdot community takes it to a level of cognitive dissonance that can only be characterized as literal insanity.
... and I agree, the GPL, being based on copyright, should be awarded by all thinking people exactly the level of courtesy and compliance that RMS extends to the holders of copyright on music. (You may wish to review his interview, in case you somehow missed that; it can be paraphrased as "none whatsoever".)
How on earth is it possible to simultaneously hold the expressed opinions about the unquestionable inviolacy of copyright when applied to code expressed in the "GPL Violation - NVIDIA" posting on Sunday, and the equally unquestionable irrelevancy of copyright when applied to music expressed in this posting?
Granted, the posters are merely following the lead of their cult leader RMS
But if anyone *does* have any substantive argument why anyone should respect the GPL in any way shape or form when its author and advocates freely and publicly repudiate its sole legal basis as soon as it inconveniences them in the slightest, I would truly love to hear it.
It does now (well, OS X is a little sketchy yet :) on all platforms for which Apple can justify the investment.
If you have some sound business justification for porting to a not currently supported platform that has escaped the QuickTime team, QuickTime application developers, and the world in general up to this moment, you can send it to me and I can assure you that the appropriate people at Apple will receive it.
If not, well, then it appears to have escaped you that the QuickTime team needs to justify their salaries. "Wouldn't it be neat to watch movies on Linux" is not an acceptable justification.
Note that the file format of a QuickTime movie is publicly and completely documented. To write an API to handle that should be the work of no more than a couple weeks. It is the codecs that are the trick, and most of those are not Apple's intellectual property anyway, you would have to deal with their implementors.
A specific example of said codec would be the QDesign 2 Music codec, which really is the best low-bandwidth music technology out there. I did the first version of QDesign's MVP, so I'm not talking through my hat when I assure you that if QDesign saw a business opportunity in QT for another architecture they would be pushing Apple for it. Another would be the Sorenson Video codec. One of my former subordinates has just been hired there to work on the OS X stuff. Ditto.
So there you go. If you have any good reasons for Apple and codec makers to do this work, I can absolutely guarantee their delivery to the decision makers on the QuickTime team, at QDesign, and at Sorenson.
If not ... quit'cher whining.
Not "as if" ... it IS.
Everybody goes on about how Aqua sucks as a GUI. Well, yeah, because Aqua is not a GUI. Aqua is to a GUI what a GUI is to the CLI; a whole whack less power, for an order of magnitude reduction in learning curve. It's different enough from a dumbed down GUI ("Bob", anyone?) that it deserves a completely new name, and I suggest AUI, Appliance User Interface.
Think of it this way: What are the top ten things your mother and grandmother (if yours have a clue, substitute your boss, or whatever :) just do not get about their computer, no matter how many times you explain the same thing? Now, how many of those would completely disappear as issues in Aqua Single Window Mode? Pretty much all of them, right? Sure, the Dock sucks for me. For THEM it is UTTERLY PERFECT.
The truly nifty thing about OS X is that a CLI, a GUI, and what I call the AUI will all coexist nicely on a single machine. That's really cool.