Well... let's just put "won" in quotation marks. Nothing ever went to court: Ellison filed suit and made a big noise in the press, Cameron caved and gave him the "inspired by" credit in the final reel. Whether Cameron actually thought he owed anything to Ellison's work or whether he (and his lawyers) just decided that giving the credit (and whatever else was involved in the settlement) was easier, cheaper and less of a pain in the ass than a protracted fight with the notoriously litigious Ellison is not something anyone other than the two of them will ever know.
No, you don't. She's crazy and she has no case. For starters, someone else has already sued James Cameron for plagarising the "Terminator" script: Harlan Ellison, and he won. The story he claimed Cameron ripped off, Demon with a Glass Hand, was written before Sofia Smith was born. So unless Ms. Smith is herself a time traveller, it's not very likely that she has a case.
mmmmmph. I don't think it's that clean-cut. Management of this company may have been corrupt, but presumably not every other employee was in on it. (They're a big company.) So, assuming that you like your co-workers and don't want to see them all out of a job (either from the cops shutting down the company or from management firing anyone who was friendly to the whistleblower), and assuming also that you believe the company can be profitable without engaging in illegal behavior, I can see wanting to try to resolve it without immediately involving the cops. The police tend to not be very tech-savvy, and once they're involved it's hard to predict which way they'll jump.
He said he made an internal report of unethical and possibly illegal behaviour. It doesn't say he took this up with police at all.
Read the last paragraph of the letter again -- he was definitly threatening them with exposure to the legal authorities.
And hey, more power too him -- that was certainly the morally right thing to do. But as a practical matter, you want to make damn sure you have all of your ducks in a row and have an old-school carnivore lawyer in your corner before you throw that kind of threat down.
There's not really any need. At this point, there are really only three big players in the video card market: ATI, Nvidia and Intel. Everyone else is line noise in comparison, and at least two of them (ATI and nVidia) have a "unified" driver architecture that supports every card they'd made in the last 2-3 years with a single installer. Once they port that to OSX/intel, life gets very easy on the software side.
(This is, of course, modulo the BIOS question -- if Apple decides to go the OpenFirmware or EFI route, things will get complex again.)
My thought was that a gpu driver will exist in the darwin-x86 release [...] What part of this am I missing?
You're missing where the video driver lies and how it works. Darwin includes (or can use; I don't recall if they're actually bundled) X11 (x.org or xfree86) video drivers. Those drivers are specific to X11, and bear no relation to the video drivers that are used for Aqua/Quartz/QE on MacOS X.
(Well, if they're vendor-provided drivers there's probably some code overlap, but the driver interfaces are completely different, and that's what counts.)
Display drivers are not magic beans. They need to work, correctly, with every piece of hardware and software along the chain between the OS and the monitor.
In order to boot the developer x86 edition of OSX on a generic PC and have Aqua work, you will need a video driver that works with the following:
- MacOX X 10.4.2/x86's implementation of Quartz - little-endian CPUs - little-endian GPUs - PC BIOS -...and the PRECISE CHIPSET of the video card in question
At the moment, one such driver exists, and it is for the "Silicon Image Orion ADD2-N Dual Pad x16", a video card that cannot be bought at retail.
Now, in 4-6 months, when ATI and Nvidia have ported their unified drivers to OSX/intel, this situation should drastically change. But for right now, the chances of the above-described hack creating a working OSX instance on a generic PC is exactly zero.
Apple ships powerpc boxes with Radeons. So there's a driver for the big-endian Radeons that will allow them to work with Aqua on PPC motherboards using OpenFirmware. Those drivers will be useless on little-endian, BIOS-using, x86-based macs.
Steve doesn't mind the Opteron, but he's not using it.
For now.
If anyone thinks, even for a second, after the back-to-back heartbreaks of the PowerPC 7400 and 970 (not to mention the stillborn misfires of the 620, 8500 etc etc etc), that Apple will not -- having already gone through the pain of an x86 migration -- have an alternate supplier to Intel on deck... well, I'd like some of what that person is smoking.:)
Intel, AMD, Via, Transmeta: the whole gamut is open to Apple now, and they would be dumb indeed not to use whichever one makes the most sense for any given application.
Mmmph. At the time of the 970's introduction, that claim could at least be defended on the facts.
In 2005, of course, matters are very different. The 970 didn't scale as far as even the P4, nevermind the Opteron, which is the reason for this whole debacle in the first place.
To be fair, this is far from a completely win-win deal: there are some other people involved who may not make out so well on the deal. For instance, there's:
1. Independent MacOS developers, who at a bare minimum are now going to have to fork over $1000 apiece for one of the new "developer transition kits", and who may have to spend anywhere from hours to years fixing their applications to work on both architectures, and supporting their applications on both architectures.
2. Apple's customers, who are inevitably going to have to re-purchase rather a lot of their software the next time they buy a new Macintosh... if new x86-compatible versions of their software exist at all. (Yes, Rosetta will handle some of that, but there are serious limitations.)
For what it's worth, the Cnet article claims that the Intel chips will initially go into the consumer lines (specifically the mini), and that the "Pro" computers will get one more generation of the 970s before converting over. So if the article's correct and you really do work in the PowerMac group, it's possible that these facts don't conflict.
That said, if apple is converting over to x86 or amd64, doing it first on the low-end would seem pretty backwards. People who buy their consumer kit aren't concerned about cutting-edge performance in the first place -- it's the high-end users who might be willing to consider the pain of switching if it'll get their Final Cut rendering times down by 20%...
AMD's "amd64" architecture and Intel's EMT64 architecture are exactly the same thing, and are binary compatible. AMD and Intel have had patent cross-licensing agreements in place for years that pretty much guarantee that either company can make chips that are 100% compatible with the other's products.
The only reason Intel keeps the waters a bit muddied on this point is that for marketing reasons it's embarrassing for them to admit that they are following AMD's lead and not doing their own thing.
Other posters asked for SunOne Calendar server to be opensourced. My first response is to suggest you have your head examined since that thing would die for absolutely no reason on a regular basis.
FWIW, whatever bugs were in the NSCP/Sun Calendar server were fixed in the Steltor/Oracle branch of the product, so while it might take some time to turn a hypothetical GPLed branch of SCS into something useful, I'm confident that it could be done.
But mainly, I want to see it done just to fuck Larry Ellison right in the damned eye for buying Steltor (a company with a great product and excellent support) and burying it underneath the rotting carcass of Oracle Collaboration Suite.
(Huh, guess you're not the only person in a weird mood today.)
LDAP architects would also wonder why on earth you would ask an ldap server to live under such a write intensive churn, and they'd be right again.
It could have been worse. Circa 1999, I worked as postmaster for one of the three largest webmail providers in the world, and we kept our entire user directory, which was consulted every single time a piece of email was delivered......in NIS+.
Yes, really. No, no one was willing to take responsibility for the decision by the time I got there. Yes, it worked about as badly as you'd imagine.
Sun tech support makes all sorts of amusing strangled noises when you tell them that you've got 3 million user objects in Passwd.org_dir. Then they stop returning your phone calls.
We eventually replaced the whole nightmare with a monstrously huge Oracle database running on an E6000, but for a few terrifying months, I could claim to be administering the largest NIS+ instance in the world. But for some reason, I never put that one on my resume...
Means nothing. Lockheed bought NS-LDAP under whatever commercial license Netscape sold it under. Unless they want to upgrade to the RedHat release, the terms of that license still apply.
The envelope printer thingy in OOo Writer consistantly mis-prints (2-3 inches off in seemingly random directions) on my Brother laser printer. No clue if it's a problem with OOo or with the Brother PPD.
OpenLDAP is basically an LDAP toolkit. You've got your LDAP server, client libraries, command-line tools... but that's it. What you build with it is up to you, and you're starting from scratch each time pretty much.
Now, that isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but when you're trying to bootstrap a real, useful corporate directory service from scratch, it's a hell of a learning curve.
Netscape/SunONE Directory Server was less hacker-friendly, but it would take you from zero to a functioning directory in about 30 minutes, not including hiring a temp to type in all of the corporate info.
It had its quirks, and I worry about the codebase being a bit... rotted these days. But I'm happy to see it hitting OSS-land. A little competition for OpenLDAP can only improve matters.
I think you're underestimating the amount of money that Microsoft and Sony both are willing to throw at this problem. That amount could be scientifically described as "ungodly", "mind-blowing" and "unlimited."
This isn't just about games. This is about control of the living room, and Microsoft trying to do to Sony, Amazon and Netflix now what they did to Apple, Digital, IBM and Novell in the 80s and 90s. The whole "HD-only, LIVE-always" pitch for the xbox? That has nothing to do with an extra 300 lines of vertical resolution, and everything to do with downloading WMV10-HD movies and WMA songs onto that 20gb (and, remember, expandable) drive.
With that as the goal, if Microsoft has to take a $400 loss per unit to make the xmas 2006 ship date, they'll do it. If they have to take a $1000 loss per console, they'll do it.
And if Microsoft is doing it, Sony will do it also. They have no choice.
This, incidentally, is why Nintendo is happy enough to sit this one out and ship later. They're not trying to own the living room, they're just trying to make great games, primarily with their own licenses (Mario, Zelda, etc). People will buy the next Mario game no matter what, so they've got the luxury of being able to take their time and do it right. If I were an engineer at MSFT or Sony, I might envy the heck out of them.:)
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Well... let's just put "won" in quotation marks. Nothing ever went to court: Ellison filed suit and made a big noise in the press, Cameron caved and gave him the "inspired by" credit in the final reel. Whether Cameron actually thought he owed anything to Ellison's work or whether he (and his lawyers) just decided that giving the credit (and whatever else was involved in the settlement) was easier, cheaper and less of a pain in the ass than a protracted fight with the notoriously litigious Ellison is not something anyone other than the two of them will ever know.
Sigh. Sophia Stewart, not Smith. Coffee first, posting later.
No, you don't. She's crazy and she has no case. For starters, someone else has already sued James Cameron for plagarising the "Terminator" script: Harlan Ellison, and he won. The story he claimed Cameron ripped off, Demon with a Glass Hand, was written before Sofia Smith was born. So unless Ms. Smith is herself a time traveller, it's not very likely that she has a case.
mmmmmph. I don't think it's that clean-cut. Management of this company may have been corrupt, but presumably not every other employee was in on it. (They're a big company.) So, assuming that you like your co-workers and don't want to see them all out of a job (either from the cops shutting down the company or from management firing anyone who was friendly to the whistleblower), and assuming also that you believe the company can be profitable without engaging in illegal behavior, I can see wanting to try to resolve it without immediately involving the cops. The police tend to not be very tech-savvy, and once they're involved it's hard to predict which way they'll jump.
He said he made an internal report of unethical and possibly illegal behaviour. It doesn't say he took this up with police at all.
Read the last paragraph of the letter again -- he was definitly threatening them with exposure to the legal authorities.
And hey, more power too him -- that was certainly the morally right thing to do. But as a practical matter, you want to make damn sure you have all of your ducks in a row and have an old-school carnivore lawyer in your corner before you throw that kind of threat down.
Retain, and have a very long chat with a very good lawyer before you threaten your bosses with police action.
There's not really any need. At this point, there are really only three big players in the video card market: ATI, Nvidia and Intel. Everyone else is line noise in comparison, and at least two of them (ATI and nVidia) have a "unified" driver architecture that supports every card they'd made in the last 2-3 years with a single installer. Once they port that to OSX/intel, life gets very easy on the software side.
(This is, of course, modulo the BIOS question -- if Apple decides to go the OpenFirmware or EFI route, things will get complex again.)
My thought was that a gpu driver will exist in the darwin-x86 release [...] What part of this am I missing?
You're missing where the video driver lies and how it works. Darwin includes (or can use; I don't recall if they're actually bundled) X11 (x.org or xfree86) video drivers. Those drivers are specific to X11, and bear no relation to the video drivers that are used for Aqua/Quartz/QE on MacOS X.
(Well, if they're vendor-provided drivers there's probably some code overlap, but the driver interfaces are completely different, and that's what counts.)
What on earth are you talking about? Seriously.
...and the PRECISE CHIPSET of the video card in question
Display drivers are not magic beans. They need to work, correctly, with every piece of hardware and software along the chain between the OS and the monitor.
In order to boot the developer x86 edition of OSX on a generic PC and have Aqua work, you will need a video driver that works with the following:
- MacOX X 10.4.2/x86's implementation of Quartz
- little-endian CPUs
- little-endian GPUs
- PC BIOS
-
At the moment, one such driver exists, and it is for the "Silicon Image Orion ADD2-N Dual Pad x16", a video card that cannot be bought at retail.
Now, in 4-6 months, when ATI and Nvidia have ported their unified drivers to OSX/intel, this situation should drastically change. But for right now, the chances of the above-described hack creating a working OSX instance on a generic PC is exactly zero.
Apple ships powerpc boxes with Radeons. So there's a driver for the big-endian Radeons that will allow them to work with Aqua on PPC motherboards using OpenFirmware. Those drivers will be useless on little-endian, BIOS-using, x86-based macs.
...watch aqua completely and totally fail to start because there is no Quartz driver for your video card.
"Yes"
Steve doesn't mind the Opteron, but he's not using it.
:)
For now.
If anyone thinks, even for a second, after the back-to-back heartbreaks of the PowerPC 7400 and 970 (not to mention the stillborn misfires of the 620, 8500 etc etc etc), that Apple will not -- having already gone through the pain of an x86 migration -- have an alternate supplier to Intel on deck... well, I'd like some of what that person is smoking.
Intel, AMD, Via, Transmeta: the whole gamut is open to Apple now, and they would be dumb indeed not to use whichever one makes the most sense for any given application.
Mmmph. At the time of the 970's introduction, that claim could at least be defended on the facts.
In 2005, of course, matters are very different. The 970 didn't scale as far as even the P4, nevermind the Opteron, which is the reason for this whole debacle in the first place.
To be fair, this is far from a completely win-win deal: there are some other people involved who may not make out so well on the deal. For instance, there's:
1. Independent MacOS developers, who at a bare minimum are now going to have to fork over $1000 apiece for one of the new "developer transition kits", and who may have to spend anywhere from hours to years fixing their applications to work on both architectures, and supporting their applications on both architectures.
2. Apple's customers, who are inevitably going to have to re-purchase rather a lot of their software the next time they buy a new Macintosh... if new x86-compatible versions of their software exist at all. (Yes, Rosetta will handle some of that, but there are serious limitations.)
It's gonna be a bumpy few years for us mac fans.
For what it's worth, the Cnet article claims that the Intel chips will initially go into the consumer lines (specifically the mini), and that the "Pro" computers will get one more generation of the 970s before converting over. So if the article's correct and you really do work in the PowerMac group, it's possible that these facts don't conflict.
That said, if apple is converting over to x86 or amd64, doing it first on the low-end would seem pretty backwards. People who buy their consumer kit aren't concerned about cutting-edge performance in the first place -- it's the high-end users who might be willing to consider the pain of switching if it'll get their Final Cut rendering times down by 20%...
AMD's "amd64" architecture and Intel's EMT64 architecture are exactly the same thing, and are binary compatible. AMD and Intel have had patent cross-licensing agreements in place for years that pretty much guarantee that either company can make chips that are 100% compatible with the other's products.
The only reason Intel keeps the waters a bit muddied on this point is that for marketing reasons it's embarrassing for them to admit that they are following AMD's lead and not doing their own thing.
Other posters asked for SunOne Calendar server to be opensourced. My first response is to suggest you have your head examined since that thing would die for absolutely no reason on a regular basis.
FWIW, whatever bugs were in the NSCP/Sun Calendar server were fixed in the Steltor/Oracle branch of the product, so while it might take some time to turn a hypothetical GPLed branch of SCS into something useful, I'm confident that it could be done.
But mainly, I want to see it done just to fuck Larry Ellison right in the damned eye for buying Steltor (a company with a great product and excellent support) and burying it underneath the rotting carcass of Oracle Collaboration Suite.
(Huh, guess you're not the only person in a weird mood today.)
LDAP architects would also wonder why on earth you would ask an ldap server to live under such a write intensive churn, and they'd be right again.
...in NIS+.
It could have been worse. Circa 1999, I worked as postmaster for one of the three largest webmail providers in the world, and we kept our entire user directory, which was consulted every single time a piece of email was delivered...
Yes, really. No, no one was willing to take responsibility for the decision by the time I got there. Yes, it worked about as badly as you'd imagine.
Sun tech support makes all sorts of amusing strangled noises when you tell them that you've got 3 million user objects in Passwd.org_dir. Then they stop returning your phone calls.
We eventually replaced the whole nightmare with a monstrously huge Oracle database running on an E6000, but for a few terrifying months, I could claim to be administering the largest NIS+ instance in the world. But for some reason, I never put that one on my resume...
Means nothing. Lockheed bought NS-LDAP under whatever commercial license Netscape sold it under. Unless they want to upgrade to the RedHat release, the terms of that license still apply.
The envelope printer thingy in OOo Writer consistantly mis-prints (2-3 inches off in seemingly random directions) on my Brother laser printer. No clue if it's a problem with OOo or with the Brother PPD.
As annoyances go, I've certainly had worse.
OpenLDAP is basically an LDAP toolkit. You've got your LDAP server, client libraries, command-line tools... but that's it. What you build with it is up to you, and you're starting from scratch each time pretty much.
Now, that isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but when you're trying to bootstrap a real, useful corporate directory service from scratch, it's a hell of a learning curve.
Netscape/SunONE Directory Server was less hacker-friendly, but it would take you from zero to a functioning directory in about 30 minutes, not including hiring a temp to type in all of the corporate info.
It had its quirks, and I worry about the codebase being a bit... rotted these days. But I'm happy to see it hitting OSS-land. A little competition for OpenLDAP can only improve matters.
The purpose of the CAN-SPAM act wasn't to stop spam, it was to legitimize spam sent by the DMA and its members.
I think you're underestimating the amount of money that Microsoft and Sony both are willing to throw at this problem. That amount could be scientifically described as "ungodly", "mind-blowing" and "unlimited."
:)
This isn't just about games. This is about control of the living room, and Microsoft trying to do to Sony, Amazon and Netflix now what they did to Apple, Digital, IBM and Novell in the 80s and 90s. The whole "HD-only, LIVE-always" pitch for the xbox? That has nothing to do with an extra 300 lines of vertical resolution, and everything to do with downloading WMV10-HD movies and WMA songs onto that 20gb (and, remember, expandable) drive.
With that as the goal, if Microsoft has to take a $400 loss per unit to make the xmas 2006 ship date, they'll do it. If they have to take a $1000 loss per console, they'll do it.
And if Microsoft is doing it, Sony will do it also. They have no choice.
This, incidentally, is why Nintendo is happy enough to sit this one out and ship later. They're not trying to own the living room, they're just trying to make great games, primarily with their own licenses (Mario, Zelda, etc). People will buy the next Mario game no matter what, so they've got the luxury of being able to take their time and do it right. If I were an engineer at MSFT or Sony, I might envy the heck out of them.
The Cell is a joint Sony/IBM/Toshiba project, and it uses the PowerPC instruction set.
See here and a bunch of other arstechnica articles for details.