Well I think that's also partially a personal opinion. Fujitsu does have Linux support information for all their notebooks on their Japanese pages, I only looked at a few models but it looks like they all pass. Toshiba only seems to have information for business models, but the personal models have detailed hardware information which you could probably use to determine compatibility. The thing about Toshiba is they design their own boards and pay extreme attention to detail, and I have yet to encounter any hardware used on Toshiba notebooks that required special drivers or did not support generic drivers (and I've installed Linux on quite a few at this point, rough count I'd say 20 different models over the last 4 years or so). Other than the Linux compatibility, the support from Toshiba has always been excellent, their warranties are international, I feel the screens are very nice (not too glossy, not to matte, very crisp and not dim), and the keyboards are the kind I like (just a little "crispy", not gummy, just the right amount of resistance). All of this is personal preference I'm sure; we had a Mac Book at the office for porting and I hated the keyboard shape and feel and that damn glossy screen made it impossible to use for me - yet many people seem really like the Apple keyboards and screens. Anyway, my recommendations are Toshiba and Fujitsu. Toshiba for luxury and very likely high Linux compatibility, and Fujitsu for more definite Linux compatibility and in general robust and well built machines.
I don't know about overseas, but here makers like Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Sharp have Linux compatibility information. Fujitsu has a detailed report of what worked and what did not, but it's rare they use hardware that is completely unsupported - they use pretty well known standard stuff. Toshiba only has the information for their business models, but like Fujitsu they use good hardware and I've never had a problem. Sharp is really big into Linux - I use both a Netwalker T1 and Z1 every day and they both come with Ubuntu only. My wife has a Mebius, and the graphical touch pad on it is actually a sub-machine running linux - and the drivers and interface software is open sourced and can be compiled in Linux surprisingly easily. Linux is here, and good makers are accepting it.
You must not have looked hard enough because the Human themes are available for download on a variety of theme sites. The thing is they are all in components so you have to dig to find all the pieces you want. Of course there are debs as well, so you can just browse the Ubuntu packages and grab the debs - installing them native on a Debian based distribution or with a package importer. While look I'd also recommend the Fedora mouse cursors, they are quite nice.
That's an interesting perspective, but you need to consider that since you can get Ubuntu for free after the fact simply purchasing the Windows version and then installing Ubuntu afterwards would get you twice the operating systems at the same price. Also, installing Ubuntu after Windows is fairly easy, whereas installing Windows after Ubuntu requires you screw with booting into you Ubuntu install using external boot media and then restore the boot loader after the fact.
I think it would be good if Dell did not offer an Ubuntu pre-installed PC, and instead offered you options on the first boot: install Windows only, Ubuntu only, or install Windows and Ubuntu (and have a slider to select how much of the drive you want to give to each). Include Windows install media or a media creator under Linux, have the windows serial on the bottom of the box so that if someone goes Ubuntu only and after-the-fact wants to put the Windows install they basically paid for on the machine they can.
NetBeans is awful, Eclipse is obtuse and never works right, Visual Studio often requires you to constantly screw with project and compiler settings to get things working correctly, and Xcode just doesn't offer much at all and fails on so many levels when it comes to dealing with errors and debugging. I agree with you on your IDE's being too helpful; which is why I use (G)Vim with a few plug-ins and extensions. I have everything from intellisense like suggestions to API reference help when I need it. Though I don't like it personally, emacs is also extremely awesome. The learning curve is a little rough, but pick one and stick to it for a week or so - you won't be able to go back to bulky commercial IDEs.
At this point I have used both OpenCOLLADA and OpenSocial from Google, and both I found overly complex and bizzare - as if their developers didn't understand how to write a clean API. They really feel to me like they were written by a graduate student who's experience with API coding up to that point was limited to a few College courses.
Now, as an application developer I really appreciate the power C/C++ affords me. Thread handling in C++ has been clumsy without libraries like boost::thread, but it's getting better and for obscenely complex threaded applications you can combine languages like OCaml and C++ with wrappers. I didn't RTFA because from the title I can tell it's another "I used this super high level language and it runs like crap but the code looks really pretty so I like it" article. I have two things to say about that:
1. If you are a competent low-level coder who just blows off all high level languages - learn Ruby: it's powerful and gorgeous and lets you code magnificently elegant software like you are creating art all without taking away control.
2. If you can't stand the complexity of C/C++; stick to coding applets and flash because you are not mentally capable or not properly trained at writing heavy system code. If you have never written an embedded C application with inline assembler, have never had to process data at the bit level, or don't fully understand what a "register" is or how to use one then you have no right to badmouth C. If you have never written a complex modular application that requires both high level interfaces and extremely fine control of hardware and memory then you have no right to badmouth C++.
So I guess my point is "shut up and just use the right tool for the right job".
I only boot Windows in a VM to test, I don't use windows regularly. And F5 is universal across a wide variety of interfaces, including nautilus and every other manager I can recall using on Linux, as well as Windows Explorer. The least they could have done was enable BOTH ctrl/cmd + R AND F5. Chrome by the way responds to F5. To me it still feels like Apple did it differently because they refuse to do things like everyone else (irrelevant of the result being good or bad).
As for web development, it's a nightmare. JavaScript sucks on every browser for several reasons:
No standard timeouts or waiting, you have to event chain
No "include" or "require" to allow you to include other scripts (there are hacks, but they all suck)
Loading is always handed to the browser, always asynchronous, and if the browser fails there is no standard event that fires
"document" and "window" are basically the same, but some browsers use one some the other... why not just define both of them to the same obejct!?
But seriously, Safari, NOT WebKit, does things in such a non standard and incompatible way that at this point we basically just test our applications in Safari last and see if we can fix them or at least make them run half-broken.
They sell them in sheets of different sizes (here in Japan at least). They go on like stickers but the "adhesive" is usually pretty weak so you can peel them off, rinse them, and stick them again. I had one on my previous notebook (15" screen) and my Zaurus, but my current notebook I don't use outside and my Zaurus has been replaced with a Z1 which has a screen that works fine in sunlight. As I recall the 15" sheet was somewhat expensive but it worked great.
I use it once in a while to test compatibility with web applications I'm developing, but even then I find it frustrating to use. Perhaps it is just the windows version, but buttons never respond quickly, in general the browser just feels slow and heavy, and the fact that F5 doesn't refresh a page annoys the hell out of me (as I use it constantly in every other browser). On top of that Safari renders everything in tables, and if you save a rendered snapshot of the page you get this one line table vomit which makes it impossible to figure out what exactly is going wrong. Chrome of course gives the same output, but at least the default developer tools in Chromium are decent. My last WTF point about Safari is something that Apple is obviously handling differently for their own products: JavaScript mouse events, including drags - Safari will immediately reclaim the mouse and not let you implement a JavaScript drag easily unless you use their 800 line device detection library script and then set up a CSS3 framework of all sorts of bizzare obviously not standard garbage. This is what you see if you are able to view the HTML5+CSS3 demos on the Apple web page. Sure it looks good and perhaps even makes sense on an Apple device - but the whole thing could be done in JavaScript even without HTML5 (we're doing it!) and 3D stuff should be handled in Canvas; NOT Apple brand "it's a standard because we say it is" CSS3. Just look at the source to those demos, we achieved similar functionality in less than a quarter of the code using only actual standards and it even works on IE7+ (but the drag does not work on Apple devices, and we have no intention of adding hundreds of lines of code to allow it to).
People have this misconception that things were easier when you would manipulate individual pixels on the screen (directly to the memory/registers the display was reading from). The thing is you can do that with a variety of libraries basically as easily and in some cases more easily than you could before. Just check out SDL or SFML. Especially in the case of SFML, you can move on to adding OpenGL code into your application when you feel you are ready.
Before I point this out, just let me state I'm not a fan of flash in the least. But there are some points on the HTML5 vs Flash issue most people don't seem to be realizing.
1. Flash supports things like web cam, microphone, and other input. Want a video/audio chat application or want to use video or audio input for your application? Well, you have two choices: Flash or Java(FX)... oh wait the JavaFX audio/video input libraries have been unsupported and not updated for years and now basically don't run on anything. It's Flash or a straight up native application.
2. Flash can handle sophisticated communication with protocols other than HTTP. That's a big deal.
3. There is only one real Flash player. This is a bad thing in many many ways, but it also means that if you are a designer and your application works in your browser it also means it will work in anybody elses browser as long as they have the plugin. Furthermore you don't have to worry about different HTML and JavaScript parsers/engines. Getting complex pages heavy with JavaScript and CSS to display in all browsers can be a nightmare - even Gecko and Webkit render the same "standard" code totally differently in many many cases.
4. Compression and encryption. Flash can do it in-application. With HTML if you want to send a big blob of data compressed and uncompress it on the client there is no way I know of to do it unless you want to somehow try and pull that off in JavaScript. Encryption basically requires HTTPS/SSL which is a feature of the server, but with flash you can do it inter-application.
Please don't get me wrong, I really really dislike using flash. But very recently I have learned it's merits when I had to develop an application that required use of a web cam, needed compression and encryption, and would be deployed on a variety of different servers which our clients usually have little to no control over (basic website hosting plans). In the end there was literally no other way to do it than with flash, it was our only option and in the end it worked out very well. I still wish we could have used Java or something like that, but the reality is Java just didn't cut it - we couldn't get web cam access even on our own boxes working after a few days of trying and in the end the install base is significantly smaller than flash.
H.264 licenses are currently free, but the free licenses are all set to expire at some point and renewal/new acquisition may cost money. I have a feeling they'll start charging for hardware and embedded implementations but leave pure software implementations free, but that's not the point. The point is it is not an open standard, and it is also not necessarily a free standard.
Oh, and I can't listen to your album on Spotify because, as their website states: "Not available in your country" and "Not available for your OS". Ah well, it's not like you care about choosing things that aren't artificially locked down in order to try and profit off of some obscure fragments of IP. Well, as long as it's the "best tool for the job" for you then you go ahead and keep on using it.
The hardware for the Netwon was developed by Sharp - look it up. The Newton was an Apple OS and an Apple case with some Apple exclusive "features" all with Sharp insides.
Oh don't get me wrong, 1394 FireWire is a nice hardware standard - and the requirement for it to be hardware driven makes it an excellent standard for inter-device communication especially among lower powered devices that still require high transfer rates (ie video and audio hardware). However, the licensing and general cost of hardware, along with the general non-openness of the standard basically killed it for everything but AV hardware. That's unfortunate, but it's also partially Apples fault. They are basically trying to do the same thing with h.264, and h.264 vs Theora resembles Firewire vs USB in more than just a few ways.
Choosing Sharp hardware was a good move if you ask me. I've carried Zaurus and now the Z1 regularly for 10 years or so now and owned several Sharp cell phones, and my wife has a Mebius which she loves. I wonder if the multi-touch capability on the Mebius not being attacked by Apples legal department has anything to do with Apple and Sharps previous or perhaps continuing relationship.
Firewire requries a dedicated hardware implementation and a licensing fee, and the "FireWire" standard is not open or controlled by a committee (the equivalent 1394 is). USB on the other hand is a very open standard and it is easy to implement in software - and does not really require a licensing fee. It survives today in notebooks because at this point it's a small feature that's basically on-board either way that some people still use. You know, kind of like the line-in and line-out jacks and telephone modems. Despite the fact it survives outside of the AV community you'll basically find most people have never even owned a FireWire device or if they did they did no realize it.
As for RISC, IBM chips are a drop in the bucket compared to what ARM, Renesas, Atmel, MIPS, Motorolla, AMD, and yes even Intel (they make RISC chips too!) have done. Intelligent Systems chose the IBM chips because they met their requirements, price point, and because IBM was willing to work with them in designing the internal architecture to the Dolphin. It's the same reason the went with Cypress chips in the AGB. And modern consoles do have ARM chips - the Nitro (NDS) has two of them, an ARM 9 supersystem (Nitro) and an ARM7-TDMI subsystem (Mongoose). Of course you were referring to larger high performance systems which is a market ARM isn't even remotely concerned with, ARM is a strictly compact core that focuses on efficiency which they basically lead in - and they are selling significantly more cores than IBM is either way so even if you weren't comparing apples and oranges your argument would basically be moot.
And I hate to burst your bubble over the Newton, but most of the hardware was developed by Sharp and the Netwon was basically just a repacked Sharp PenCon (http://img.f.hatena.ne.jp/images/fotolife/y/ystu/20071224/20071224065215.jpg) with Apples own operating system. Look it up if you don't believe me. Because the Newton was basically the Apple version of the Sharp PI all the Sharp PI models met or exceeded it's performance and capabilities, and the PI series later evolved into the Zaurus and now into the Z1. Of course there is also the fact the PALM annihilated the Newton in terms of sales and popularity in most of the world the PI and Zaurus weren't widely available in despite the fact it was less powerful and had an inferior interface. On that front I honestly can't figure out how Apple screwed up so bad; the features of the Newton should have been able to demolish the PALM and the fact you could use the system without having to learn that ridiculous PALM lettering system alone should have been enough.
OK, hold it right there: Firewire was certainly a reasonable competitor to USB, but other than high end AV hardware it lost out due to simple parts and licensing prices. Even then my new HDD video camera and the few audio devices I have at hand do not have any fire-wire functionality at all. Face it, it lost to USB. And there were plenty of other touch screen PDAs and tablets competing with the Netwon - I owned one that was basically the same size as the Newton (though shaped much more like a brick) that ran Windows and had a keyboard, parallel, and DB9 serial port. IBM's development of it's CPU's was certainly driven by sales to Apple for a while, but to "extend that" to it's sales of the CPU to Nintendo and MS is a little out there - it's like saying the Gameboy Advance drove ARM into the Smart Phone market.I have no idea what Open Transport or HyperCard are, so I can't make a counter-point to either of those.
It's funny you point that out. The Apple IIe had the screen built in, and it was built in such a way that if you did not have a special tool to discharge the CRT you could actually kill yourself opening the thing up and touching certain parts of the inside. To anyone saying this is BS let me tell you how I learned it: as a kid I worked at a computer repair shop, and all the Mac techs were out for the day when an IIe came in. A PC tech with no experience with the IIe decided to take a look and try fixing it while the Mac techs were out and touched that part. There was a massive spark and he actually got knocked out. He came to before the paramedics came, but he was messed up for a little bit. Needless to say his casual dislike for Macs quickly grew into outright vitriolic hatred.
TC doesn't lock up and break like SQL does. I've had a lot of trouble accessing with multiple applications with MySQL especially. PostgreSQL I admit I have not had such problems that I can recall; but regardless TokyoCabinet is significantly simpler to use and I have yet to encounter any lock problems or problems where multiple access corrupted the database. Then again I guess if YOU have spent the last 20 years dealing with SQL you may find it pretty easy; but you know what I don't want to spend any more time than I need to dealing with DB crap and just want working applications now so I'll stick with TokyoCabinet.
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Well I think that's also partially a personal opinion. Fujitsu does have Linux support information for all their notebooks on their Japanese pages, I only looked at a few models but it looks like they all pass. Toshiba only seems to have information for business models, but the personal models have detailed hardware information which you could probably use to determine compatibility. The thing about Toshiba is they design their own boards and pay extreme attention to detail, and I have yet to encounter any hardware used on Toshiba notebooks that required special drivers or did not support generic drivers (and I've installed Linux on quite a few at this point, rough count I'd say 20 different models over the last 4 years or so). Other than the Linux compatibility, the support from Toshiba has always been excellent, their warranties are international, I feel the screens are very nice (not too glossy, not to matte, very crisp and not dim), and the keyboards are the kind I like (just a little "crispy", not gummy, just the right amount of resistance). All of this is personal preference I'm sure; we had a Mac Book at the office for porting and I hated the keyboard shape and feel and that damn glossy screen made it impossible to use for me - yet many people seem really like the Apple keyboards and screens. Anyway, my recommendations are Toshiba and Fujitsu. Toshiba for luxury and very likely high Linux compatibility, and Fujitsu for more definite Linux compatibility and in general robust and well built machines.
You know you could just purchase from a company that uses good hardware, like Fujitsu or Toshiba.
I don't know about overseas, but here makers like Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Sharp have Linux compatibility information. Fujitsu has a detailed report of what worked and what did not, but it's rare they use hardware that is completely unsupported - they use pretty well known standard stuff. Toshiba only has the information for their business models, but like Fujitsu they use good hardware and I've never had a problem. Sharp is really big into Linux - I use both a Netwalker T1 and Z1 every day and they both come with Ubuntu only. My wife has a Mebius, and the graphical touch pad on it is actually a sub-machine running linux - and the drivers and interface software is open sourced and can be compiled in Linux surprisingly easily. Linux is here, and good makers are accepting it.
You must not have looked hard enough because the Human themes are available for download on a variety of theme sites. The thing is they are all in components so you have to dig to find all the pieces you want. Of course there are debs as well, so you can just browse the Ubuntu packages and grab the debs - installing them native on a Debian based distribution or with a package importer. While look I'd also recommend the Fedora mouse cursors, they are quite nice.
That's an interesting perspective, but you need to consider that since you can get Ubuntu for free after the fact simply purchasing the Windows version and then installing Ubuntu afterwards would get you twice the operating systems at the same price. Also, installing Ubuntu after Windows is fairly easy, whereas installing Windows after Ubuntu requires you screw with booting into you Ubuntu install using external boot media and then restore the boot loader after the fact.
I think it would be good if Dell did not offer an Ubuntu pre-installed PC, and instead offered you options on the first boot: install Windows only, Ubuntu only, or install Windows and Ubuntu (and have a slider to select how much of the drive you want to give to each). Include Windows install media or a media creator under Linux, have the windows serial on the bottom of the box so that if someone goes Ubuntu only and after-the-fact wants to put the Windows install they basically paid for on the machine they can.
NetBeans is awful, Eclipse is obtuse and never works right, Visual Studio often requires you to constantly screw with project and compiler settings to get things working correctly, and Xcode just doesn't offer much at all and fails on so many levels when it comes to dealing with errors and debugging. I agree with you on your IDE's being too helpful; which is why I use (G)Vim with a few plug-ins and extensions. I have everything from intellisense like suggestions to API reference help when I need it. Though I don't like it personally, emacs is also extremely awesome. The learning curve is a little rough, but pick one and stick to it for a week or so - you won't be able to go back to bulky commercial IDEs.
At this point I have used both OpenCOLLADA and OpenSocial from Google, and both I found overly complex and bizzare - as if their developers didn't understand how to write a clean API. They really feel to me like they were written by a graduate student who's experience with API coding up to that point was limited to a few College courses.
Now, as an application developer I really appreciate the power C/C++ affords me. Thread handling in C++ has been clumsy without libraries like boost::thread, but it's getting better and for obscenely complex threaded applications you can combine languages like OCaml and C++ with wrappers. I didn't RTFA because from the title I can tell it's another "I used this super high level language and it runs like crap but the code looks really pretty so I like it" article. I have two things to say about that:
1. If you are a competent low-level coder who just blows off all high level languages - learn Ruby: it's powerful and gorgeous and lets you code magnificently elegant software like you are creating art all without taking away control.
2. If you can't stand the complexity of C/C++; stick to coding applets and flash because you are not mentally capable or not properly trained at writing heavy system code. If you have never written an embedded C application with inline assembler, have never had to process data at the bit level, or don't fully understand what a "register" is or how to use one then you have no right to badmouth C. If you have never written a complex modular application that requires both high level interfaces and extremely fine control of hardware and memory then you have no right to badmouth C++.
So I guess my point is "shut up and just use the right tool for the right job".
I appreciate your description, but as someone who regularly develops embedded software I honestly didn't need it.
I only boot Windows in a VM to test, I don't use windows regularly. And F5 is universal across a wide variety of interfaces, including nautilus and every other manager I can recall using on Linux, as well as Windows Explorer. The least they could have done was enable BOTH ctrl/cmd + R AND F5. Chrome by the way responds to F5. To me it still feels like Apple did it differently because they refuse to do things like everyone else (irrelevant of the result being good or bad).
As for web development, it's a nightmare. JavaScript sucks on every browser for several reasons:
No standard timeouts or waiting, you have to event chain
No "include" or "require" to allow you to include other scripts (there are hacks, but they all suck)
Loading is always handed to the browser, always asynchronous, and if the browser fails there is no standard event that fires
"document" and "window" are basically the same, but some browsers use one some the other... why not just define both of them to the same obejct!?
But seriously, Safari, NOT WebKit, does things in such a non standard and incompatible way that at this point we basically just test our applications in Safari last and see if we can fix them or at least make them run half-broken.
They sell them in sheets of different sizes (here in Japan at least). They go on like stickers but the "adhesive" is usually pretty weak so you can peel them off, rinse them, and stick them again. I had one on my previous notebook (15" screen) and my Zaurus, but my current notebook I don't use outside and my Zaurus has been replaced with a Z1 which has a screen that works fine in sunlight. As I recall the 15" sheet was somewhat expensive but it worked great.
I use it once in a while to test compatibility with web applications I'm developing, but even then I find it frustrating to use. Perhaps it is just the windows version, but buttons never respond quickly, in general the browser just feels slow and heavy, and the fact that F5 doesn't refresh a page annoys the hell out of me (as I use it constantly in every other browser). On top of that Safari renders everything in tables, and if you save a rendered snapshot of the page you get this one line table vomit which makes it impossible to figure out what exactly is going wrong. Chrome of course gives the same output, but at least the default developer tools in Chromium are decent. My last WTF point about Safari is something that Apple is obviously handling differently for their own products: JavaScript mouse events, including drags - Safari will immediately reclaim the mouse and not let you implement a JavaScript drag easily unless you use their 800 line device detection library script and then set up a CSS3 framework of all sorts of bizzare obviously not standard garbage. This is what you see if you are able to view the HTML5+CSS3 demos on the Apple web page. Sure it looks good and perhaps even makes sense on an Apple device - but the whole thing could be done in JavaScript even without HTML5 (we're doing it!) and 3D stuff should be handled in Canvas; NOT Apple brand "it's a standard because we say it is" CSS3. Just look at the source to those demos, we achieved similar functionality in less than a quarter of the code using only actual standards and it even works on IE7+ (but the drag does not work on Apple devices, and we have no intention of adding hundreds of lines of code to allow it to).
Embedded browsers do.
People have this misconception that things were easier when you would manipulate individual pixels on the screen (directly to the memory/registers the display was reading from). The thing is you can do that with a variety of libraries basically as easily and in some cases more easily than you could before. Just check out SDL or SFML. Especially in the case of SFML, you can move on to adding OpenGL code into your application when you feel you are ready.
Before I point this out, just let me state I'm not a fan of flash in the least. But there are some points on the HTML5 vs Flash issue most people don't seem to be realizing.
1. Flash supports things like web cam, microphone, and other input. Want a video/audio chat application or want to use video or audio input for your application? Well, you have two choices: Flash or Java(FX)... oh wait the JavaFX audio/video input libraries have been unsupported and not updated for years and now basically don't run on anything. It's Flash or a straight up native application.
2. Flash can handle sophisticated communication with protocols other than HTTP. That's a big deal.
3. There is only one real Flash player. This is a bad thing in many many ways, but it also means that if you are a designer and your application works in your browser it also means it will work in anybody elses browser as long as they have the plugin. Furthermore you don't have to worry about different HTML and JavaScript parsers/engines. Getting complex pages heavy with JavaScript and CSS to display in all browsers can be a nightmare - even Gecko and Webkit render the same "standard" code totally differently in many many cases.
4. Compression and encryption. Flash can do it in-application. With HTML if you want to send a big blob of data compressed and uncompress it on the client there is no way I know of to do it unless you want to somehow try and pull that off in JavaScript. Encryption basically requires HTTPS/SSL which is a feature of the server, but with flash you can do it inter-application.
Please don't get me wrong, I really really dislike using flash. But very recently I have learned it's merits when I had to develop an application that required use of a web cam, needed compression and encryption, and would be deployed on a variety of different servers which our clients usually have little to no control over (basic website hosting plans). In the end there was literally no other way to do it than with flash, it was our only option and in the end it worked out very well. I still wish we could have used Java or something like that, but the reality is Java just didn't cut it - we couldn't get web cam access even on our own boxes working after a few days of trying and in the end the install base is significantly smaller than flash.
H.264 licenses are currently free, but the free licenses are all set to expire at some point and renewal/new acquisition may cost money. I have a feeling they'll start charging for hardware and embedded implementations but leave pure software implementations free, but that's not the point. The point is it is not an open standard, and it is also not necessarily a free standard.
Oh, and I can't listen to your album on Spotify because, as their website states: "Not available in your country" and "Not available for your OS". Ah well, it's not like you care about choosing things that aren't artificially locked down in order to try and profit off of some obscure fragments of IP. Well, as long as it's the "best tool for the job" for you then you go ahead and keep on using it.
ARM license the ARM core, the cores are put into chips by the licensees. There is no monopoly issue here at all.
The hardware for the Netwon was developed by Sharp - look it up. The Newton was an Apple OS and an Apple case with some Apple exclusive "features" all with Sharp insides.
Oh don't get me wrong, 1394 FireWire is a nice hardware standard - and the requirement for it to be hardware driven makes it an excellent standard for inter-device communication especially among lower powered devices that still require high transfer rates (ie video and audio hardware). However, the licensing and general cost of hardware, along with the general non-openness of the standard basically killed it for everything but AV hardware. That's unfortunate, but it's also partially Apples fault. They are basically trying to do the same thing with h.264, and h.264 vs Theora resembles Firewire vs USB in more than just a few ways.
Choosing Sharp hardware was a good move if you ask me. I've carried Zaurus and now the Z1 regularly for 10 years or so now and owned several Sharp cell phones, and my wife has a Mebius which she loves. I wonder if the multi-touch capability on the Mebius not being attacked by Apples legal department has anything to do with Apple and Sharps previous or perhaps continuing relationship.
Firewire requries a dedicated hardware implementation and a licensing fee, and the "FireWire" standard is not open or controlled by a committee (the equivalent 1394 is). USB on the other hand is a very open standard and it is easy to implement in software - and does not really require a licensing fee. It survives today in notebooks because at this point it's a small feature that's basically on-board either way that some people still use. You know, kind of like the line-in and line-out jacks and telephone modems. Despite the fact it survives outside of the AV community you'll basically find most people have never even owned a FireWire device or if they did they did no realize it.
As for RISC, IBM chips are a drop in the bucket compared to what ARM, Renesas, Atmel, MIPS, Motorolla, AMD, and yes even Intel (they make RISC chips too!) have done. Intelligent Systems chose the IBM chips because they met their requirements, price point, and because IBM was willing to work with them in designing the internal architecture to the Dolphin. It's the same reason the went with Cypress chips in the AGB. And modern consoles do have ARM chips - the Nitro (NDS) has two of them, an ARM 9 supersystem (Nitro) and an ARM7-TDMI subsystem (Mongoose). Of course you were referring to larger high performance systems which is a market ARM isn't even remotely concerned with, ARM is a strictly compact core that focuses on efficiency which they basically lead in - and they are selling significantly more cores than IBM is either way so even if you weren't comparing apples and oranges your argument would basically be moot.
And I hate to burst your bubble over the Newton, but most of the hardware was developed by Sharp and the Netwon was basically just a repacked Sharp PenCon (http://img.f.hatena.ne.jp/images/fotolife/y/ystu/20071224/20071224065215.jpg) with Apples own operating system. Look it up if you don't believe me. Because the Newton was basically the Apple version of the Sharp PI all the Sharp PI models met or exceeded it's performance and capabilities, and the PI series later evolved into the Zaurus and now into the Z1. Of course there is also the fact the PALM annihilated the Newton in terms of sales and popularity in most of the world the PI and Zaurus weren't widely available in despite the fact it was less powerful and had an inferior interface. On that front I honestly can't figure out how Apple screwed up so bad; the features of the Newton should have been able to demolish the PALM and the fact you could use the system without having to learn that ridiculous PALM lettering system alone should have been enough.
You are correct, it was the SE and beyond - all the units with the CRT built in.
Uh, SGI? Oh, or how about SUN? NeXT had known competition and put out a product to a market that was already being fully serviced.
OK, hold it right there: Firewire was certainly a reasonable competitor to USB, but other than high end AV hardware it lost out due to simple parts and licensing prices. Even then my new HDD video camera and the few audio devices I have at hand do not have any fire-wire functionality at all. Face it, it lost to USB. And there were plenty of other touch screen PDAs and tablets competing with the Netwon - I owned one that was basically the same size as the Newton (though shaped much more like a brick) that ran Windows and had a keyboard, parallel, and DB9 serial port. IBM's development of it's CPU's was certainly driven by sales to Apple for a while, but to "extend that" to it's sales of the CPU to Nintendo and MS is a little out there - it's like saying the Gameboy Advance drove ARM into the Smart Phone market.I have no idea what Open Transport or HyperCard are, so I can't make a counter-point to either of those.
It's funny you point that out. The Apple IIe had the screen built in, and it was built in such a way that if you did not have a special tool to discharge the CRT you could actually kill yourself opening the thing up and touching certain parts of the inside. To anyone saying this is BS let me tell you how I learned it: as a kid I worked at a computer repair shop, and all the Mac techs were out for the day when an IIe came in. A PC tech with no experience with the IIe decided to take a look and try fixing it while the Mac techs were out and touched that part. There was a massive spark and he actually got knocked out. He came to before the paramedics came, but he was messed up for a little bit. Needless to say his casual dislike for Macs quickly grew into outright vitriolic hatred.
TC doesn't lock up and break like SQL does. I've had a lot of trouble accessing with multiple applications with MySQL especially. PostgreSQL I admit I have not had such problems that I can recall; but regardless TokyoCabinet is significantly simpler to use and I have yet to encounter any lock problems or problems where multiple access corrupted the database. Then again I guess if YOU have spent the last 20 years dealing with SQL you may find it pretty easy; but you know what I don't want to spend any more time than I need to dealing with DB crap and just want working applications now so I'll stick with TokyoCabinet.
Oh, I'm sorry it's not OO. I somehow misread OO as OSS. Feel free to just ignore me and move along then.