Using a one-point stylus. The patent application is for gestures using multiple points simultaneously. You can't do that with your Palm. Also note that it isn't a patent on multi-point touch screens or touch pads, which already exist, but on specific types of interfaces using them.
Palms have had this for awhile have they not? Not handwriting recognition - you could, say, drag the pen from top to bottom and the backlight would come on.
Palms only recognize one point at a time. The patent covers multi-point gestures, like (as described), zooming in on a point by simultaneously selecting the point with one finger and using another to control the zoom.
The post title, summary, and the article itself all make it sound like Apple is patenting all touch-screen gestures, but that's not what the patent application itself says.
Actually, Lightroom is expected to be Universal much sooner, as it is written largely in Lua, with the rest in Cocoa. Quite unlike the rest of Adobe's stuff.
I've been online since the BBS days, and blah blah blah Is it just me?
You've been online since the BBS days and you think narcissism and illiteracy are new things? Surely you would have realized by now that the things you so dispise have nothing to do with any given technology or trend, and have everything to do with the fact that idiots are everywhere, blending in seamlessly with regular people. The terrible truth is that many of them are regular people.
Take your post for example. You're making a sweeping negative generalization about a large number of people, and justifying it by claiming that you're smarter and speak from great authority. You sound like an idiot. It doesn't even matter what you're talking about, or if I agree with you, because your way of expressing your opinion draws far more attention to itself than anything you might be trying to say. I doubt that you meant to sound like an idiot, and I doubt that you are generally an idiot, and yet, like the very people you deride, you appear that way to others online.
why are people so obsessed with rewarding single people with success of organizations?
Perhaps it's because organizations almost invariably distribute rewards in proportion to responsibility. Higher positions within companies are almost always associated with greater accountability for success and failure. The official fiction is that the lower ranks are always working as hard as possible, and that the actual value of the work is determined by the decisions of the higher-ups. Hence, the success or failure of the organization as a whole rides on the decisions of the highest rank.
This also explains why the primary chore of many executives, managers, and government officials is to quietly redistribute that responsibility for failure ("pass the buck", as it were) among underlings, while enjoying all of the additional reward for success. The most well-respected leaders tend to be the ones that don't do much of this.
right up there with copyright of MLK's 'I Have A Dream' and Co$'s copyrighted "Trade Secrets"
Trade secrets and copyrights are two very different things, and you seem to have an understanding of neither. When you produce an original work, it is copyrighted, even if you give it away. On the other hand, trade secret law protects information (not particular works) with clear economic value that a reasonable effort has been made to keep secret.
In other news, writing inflammatory FUD about Intel and Apple is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Bonus points if you can lace your content with memorable phrases like "Potentially Catastrophic!".
I did not. I claimed he imagined having to listen to uninformed Mac Users reciting it. And unless he makes a habit of surrounding himself with idiots that he disagrees with (admittedly, Slashdot is a good place for that), he did imagine it.
My impression is that he is simply reading press releases and marketing materials and then imagining that that hordes of users are screaming it in his face. Kind of fucked up if you ask me.
Have you never read a press release before? Not only did you ignore what the parent was bitching about, but you're ignoring every other press release ever written. For instance, since we're talking about 64-bit dickwaving, here's AMD's version:
Specifically designed for gamers, PC enthusiasts and digital content creators, the AMD Athlon 64 FX processor is the most technically advanced and highest performing 32-bit and 64-bit PC processor in the world. Systems based on the AMD Athlon 64 FX processor enable a "cinematic computing" experience that is immersive, interactive and provides a new level of realism not available today except from DVD-quality films.
Are you going to suggest that the former (Apple's) is somehow misleading where the latter (AMD's) is not? "Cinematic computing"? Please.
And if you think Steve Jobs' "The 64-bit revolution has begun and the personal computer will never be the same again." is bad, try this from Hector Ruiz, CEO of AMD: "The growing number of people looking for cinema-quality PC performance that transforms imagination into reality can now fully realize their dreams."
If people are reading this kind of crap and taking it seriously, they're idiots independently of what kind of computer they use. On the other hand, I can fault people less for believing that "64-bit makes it go faster" than I could "64-bit transforms your imagination into reality."
Never mind that everything running on the CPU was compiled for 32bit and the 64bit claims applied only to address space and some of the narrow-purpose altivec stuff;
Everything that shipped with the computer was 32-bit, yes. See also 90% of AMD64 systems. It's still a 64-bit processor. Still runs 64-bit code concurrently with 32-bit code. Still ships with 64-bit libraries. Still runs 64-bit Linux. You're looking for lies, but all you're finding is marketing. And if you want to complain about marketing, I'd start by asking AMD what the hell "cinematic computing" is, or ask Intel how NetBurst makes the internet faster.
I think the Mac is on Intel simply because there was little else to do to generate new sales momentum.
Why would you think that? Apple's sales have been increasing pretty steadily since 1997. Switching architectures is not something you do just to boost sales. It is a long-term move. Now, you might be confusing the fact that they've started an ad campaign around the fact that they've begun to switch architectures. That, of course, is meant to drive sales.
Why would the general populace ever want to buy a Mac? You can talk it up all you want but the bottom line is price.
In what world do people only ever buy the cheapest products? I sure as hell look at things other than price when buying things. Don't you?
Nah, most people never use more than the basic features of most products.
Most of these very same people want do do things with their computer, but either don't know that they can, or don't know how. One of Apple's primary marketing messages is basically "Look at this cool shit you, yes you, can do with your (Apple) computer!". If people aren't doing cool shit with their computer it usually has more to do with sucky software that scares them than it does with a lack of desire to do cool shit.
So why would these new machines appeal to me?
Who are you even asking? They obviously don't appeal to you, but you're projecting that onto the rest of the world. "I don't want one, therefore nobody could possibly want one." I don't own or want a car, but I don't assume that other people don't want cars.
The PowerPC-derived Cell will rock for workstation and servers
Cell is not, and never will be a general-purpose CPU. The 8 SPE units that make it shine are basically useless for most computing tasks, and don't use the same ISA as AltiVec (which would mean a switch just as big as the switch to Intel for vectorized code). Maybe, maybe, they would use Cell for Xserve cluster nodes, but that's a stretch.
and the Meron will kick major butt for home user kit.
Merom is only the low-end branch of the unified architecture that Intel is moving to. The others being Conroe and Woodcrest, targeted at desktops and servers respectively. Each has similar performance projections, so to say that Merom will kick butt implies that Conroe and Woodcrest will too. It's probable that Apple will be using all three.
the famous NeXT "Fat Binary." Back in the day, the same NeXT executable would run on 68040, Sparc, PA-RISC and Pentiums. Why not now? Why tie yourself to x86 alone, when there are better alternatives to fit the niche you're targeting?
I think you've missed the fact that this is exactly what Apple is doing during the transition period, except they're calling it a "Universal Binary". For developers using Cocoa and Xcode, with no endian-specific or vector code, it's a checkbox away. But if you're using Carbon, or CodeWarrior, have endian-specific or AltiVec-specific code, or God Forbid, all of the above, it can be kind of rough. It's basically a pain in the ass for everybody, just not equally. Developers *will* write processor-specific code no matter how much you tell them not to.
So, in theory, they could hop architectures at a whim, but they would have to have some very compelling reason to put developers through that kind of change. In the case of PowerPC-to-Intel, I think they've made a solid case that Intel's roadmap is more inviting than IBM's.
Too much politics, and not enough engineering.
I think it more to do with avoiding too much engineering. Why use two architectures when you can get 80% of the performance out of one, with no additional cost, customer confusion, development time, etc. Why engineer yourself into a hole like that?
If Apple's going to be commodity CPU on the server front, then there's no incentive on the hardware front to pay for Apple.
In terms of raw performance there was never much reason to go with Xserve, except for clusters running highly vectorized code. But that's not a huge market. The selling points were always the features, the software, the hardware design, and everything else. The usual Apple stuff.
Does anyone know if QuickTime Pro users automatically get the encoder?
You get the component, yes. You don't get the license that enables you to use it.
Anyway, I pulled a short.mov that I had been working on, and sure enough, Quicktime gave me the option of encoding in.wmv. I tested it and it seemed to create a.wmv fine.
It creates a file, yes, but that file contains nothing.
The QuickTime plugin Flip4Mac is better in almost every respect and enabled transcoding to the plethora of formats that QuickTime offers.
No it doesn't. The free version only lets you watch. It does not support transcoding from WMV to any other format. For that you need the $30 "Import" version.
Yes, actually, but that's not always the reason sites use them. There are far more tools that natively support Windows Media or QuickTime than anything else, and a far greater installed base on the client side. OGG, for example, definitely has neither. What good would it be to use OGG if it meant asking people to download yet another program or codec?
FireWire 800 is backward compatible to FW400...I've got a 800>400 cable right here
You're right, of course, but what I really meant was that the connector is not same. To support both, they would need two connectors (as before), or require a dongle to use FW400. The former was obviously seen as unnecessary, and the latter make any sense when FW400 is much more common.
and I'm using a FW400 hard drive on it as we speak...
Tells us something about the demand for FW800, doesn't it?
Why are they using 2GHz intel chips on the high end iMacs when 3Ghz ones are available on the PC?
Both the MacBook and the iMac use Core Duo chips, which produce significantly less heat than the 3GHz+ Pentium 4s commonly in use, while having similar or better performance. For very compact designs like the iMac, this is very important. A Pentium 4 D in an iMac body would probably burn a hole in the screen and melt your face off. Technically speaking, that is.
It also has a CardBus slot that you probably aren't using. The MacBook has an ExpressCard slot that I'm sure will accommodate a FireWire 800 card, if you need one. The thing is, most people, even PowerBook owners, don't need one. There just aren't that many peripherals that need it, and it isn't backwards compatable, so it was probably high on the list of things that can be left out.
Also, for what it's worth, the MacBook doesn't have a modem. Same story.
I would think that the PowerMac G5 made a much higher profit than the iMac.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The PowerMac has a lot more parts, a lot more assembly, a lot more weight (shipping), and so on. Even if they make more per-unit, they undoubtedly sell a lot more iMacs than PowerMacs. Being able to stoke that popularity with "And now twice as fast." will probably make up for any lost (or more accurately, delayed) sales of PowerMacs.
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What the heck am I doing on my Palm right now?
Using a one-point stylus. The patent application is for gestures using multiple points simultaneously. You can't do that with your Palm. Also note that it isn't a patent on multi-point touch screens or touch pads, which already exist, but on specific types of interfaces using them.
Palms have had this for awhile have they not? Not handwriting recognition - you could, say, drag the pen from top to bottom and the backlight would come on.
Palms only recognize one point at a time. The patent covers multi-point gestures, like (as described), zooming in on a point by simultaneously selecting the point with one finger and using another to control the zoom.
The post title, summary, and the article itself all make it sound like Apple is patenting all touch-screen gestures, but that's not what the patent application itself says.
So much for LightTable destroying Aperture!
Actually, Lightroom is expected to be Universal much sooner, as it is written largely in Lua, with the rest in Cocoa. Quite unlike the rest of Adobe's stuff.
I've been online since the BBS days, and blah blah blah Is it just me?
You've been online since the BBS days and you think narcissism and illiteracy are new things? Surely you would have realized by now that the things you so dispise have nothing to do with any given technology or trend, and have everything to do with the fact that idiots are everywhere, blending in seamlessly with regular people. The terrible truth is that many of them are regular people.
Take your post for example. You're making a sweeping negative generalization about a large number of people, and justifying it by claiming that you're smarter and speak from great authority. You sound like an idiot. It doesn't even matter what you're talking about, or if I agree with you, because your way of expressing your opinion draws far more attention to itself than anything you might be trying to say. I doubt that you meant to sound like an idiot, and I doubt that you are generally an idiot, and yet, like the very people you deride, you appear that way to others online.
why are people so obsessed with rewarding single people with success of organizations?
Perhaps it's because organizations almost invariably distribute rewards in proportion to responsibility. Higher positions within companies are almost always associated with greater accountability for success and failure. The official fiction is that the lower ranks are always working as hard as possible, and that the actual value of the work is determined by the decisions of the higher-ups. Hence, the success or failure of the organization as a whole rides on the decisions of the highest rank.
This also explains why the primary chore of many executives, managers, and government officials is to quietly redistribute that responsibility for failure ("pass the buck", as it were) among underlings, while enjoying all of the additional reward for success. The most well-respected leaders tend to be the ones that don't do much of this.
Quite a bit of it is in Microsoft stock.
Actually, Warren Buffet rather famously doesn't own any Microsoft stock, or that of any of the major technology companies.
right up there with copyright of MLK's 'I Have A Dream' and Co$'s copyrighted "Trade Secrets"
Trade secrets and copyrights are two very different things, and you seem to have an understanding of neither. When you produce an original work, it is copyrighted, even if you give it away. On the other hand, trade secret law protects information (not particular works) with clear economic value that a reasonable effort has been made to keep secret.
In other news, writing inflammatory FUD about Intel and Apple is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Bonus points if you can lace your content with memorable phrases like "Potentially Catastrophic!".
You claimed he imagined the Apple posturing.
I did not. I claimed he imagined having to listen to uninformed Mac Users reciting it. And unless he makes a habit of surrounding himself with idiots that he disagrees with (admittedly, Slashdot is a good place for that), he did imagine it.
My impression is that he is simply reading press releases and marketing materials and then imagining that that hordes of users are screaming it in his face. Kind of fucked up if you ask me.
...press release...blah blah...
Have you never read a press release before? Not only did you ignore what the parent was bitching about, but you're ignoring every other press release ever written. For instance, since we're talking about 64-bit dickwaving, here's AMD's version:
Specifically designed for gamers, PC enthusiasts and digital content creators, the AMD Athlon 64 FX processor is the most technically advanced and highest performing 32-bit and 64-bit PC processor in the world. Systems based on the AMD Athlon 64 FX processor enable a "cinematic computing" experience that is immersive, interactive and provides a new level of realism not available today except from DVD-quality films.
Are you going to suggest that the former (Apple's) is somehow misleading where the latter (AMD's) is not? "Cinematic computing"? Please.
And if you think Steve Jobs' "The 64-bit revolution has begun and the personal computer will never be the same again." is bad, try this from Hector Ruiz, CEO of AMD: "The growing number of people looking for cinema-quality PC performance that transforms imagination into reality can now fully realize their dreams."
If people are reading this kind of crap and taking it seriously, they're idiots independently of what kind of computer they use. On the other hand, I can fault people less for believing that "64-bit makes it go faster" than I could "64-bit transforms your imagination into reality."
Never mind that everything running on the CPU was compiled for 32bit and the 64bit claims applied only to address space and some of the narrow-purpose altivec stuff;
Everything that shipped with the computer was 32-bit, yes. See also 90% of AMD64 systems. It's still a 64-bit processor. Still runs 64-bit code concurrently with 32-bit code. Still ships with 64-bit libraries. Still runs 64-bit Linux. You're looking for lies, but all you're finding is marketing. And if you want to complain about marketing, I'd start by asking AMD what the hell "cinematic computing" is, or ask Intel how NetBurst makes the internet faster.
And ironically, OSX still isn't a 64bit OS
That's not "ironic". Furthermore, it's not terribly relevant. Windows XP isn't 64-bit, and yet the majority of x86-64 systems ship with it.
and now their new 'performance' Mac is running on a Dual Core 32bit processor...
Actually, Apple's "performance" Mac is a Dual Dual-Core 64-bit G5.
What happened to leading the 64bit revolution crap we had to listen to uninformed Mac Users recite from the Apple Marketing book?
You imagined it.
And here I am sitting with a Dual Core 64bit Notebook, that is almost twice the rated SPEC 'benchmark' of the Mac Intel Duo
It's probably about twice the size, too, isn't it? What's your point here?
--
If you just hate Apple for whatever reason, just say so, instead of acting as though satisfied customers are stupid customers.
That's the sixth @$#%?!! car analogy in direct response to this guy someone's written.
Ok. How's this: I don't want a pony, but I don't assume that other people won't want ponies.
The 3 factors that are different from iTunes and usenet/BT are...
You forgot to mention that iTunes downloads are legal.
I think the Mac is on Intel simply because there was little else to do to generate new sales momentum.
Why would you think that? Apple's sales have been increasing pretty steadily since 1997. Switching architectures is not something you do just to boost sales. It is a long-term move. Now, you might be confusing the fact that they've started an ad campaign around the fact that they've begun to switch architectures. That, of course, is meant to drive sales.
Why would the general populace ever want to buy a Mac? You can talk it up all you want but the bottom line is price.
In what world do people only ever buy the cheapest products? I sure as hell look at things other than price when buying things. Don't you?
Nah, most people never use more than the basic features of most products.
Most of these very same people want do do things with their computer, but either don't know that they can, or don't know how. One of Apple's primary marketing messages is basically "Look at this cool shit you, yes you, can do with your (Apple) computer!". If people aren't doing cool shit with their computer it usually has more to do with sucky software that scares them than it does with a lack of desire to do cool shit.
So why would these new machines appeal to me?
Who are you even asking? They obviously don't appeal to you, but you're projecting that onto the rest of the world. "I don't want one, therefore nobody could possibly want one." I don't own or want a car, but I don't assume that other people don't want cars.
The PowerPC-derived Cell will rock for workstation and servers
Cell is not, and never will be a general-purpose CPU. The 8 SPE units that make it shine are basically useless for most computing tasks, and don't use the same ISA as AltiVec (which would mean a switch just as big as the switch to Intel for vectorized code). Maybe, maybe, they would use Cell for Xserve cluster nodes, but that's a stretch.
and the Meron will kick major butt for home user kit.
Merom is only the low-end branch of the unified architecture that Intel is moving to. The others being Conroe and Woodcrest, targeted at desktops and servers respectively. Each has similar performance projections, so to say that Merom will kick butt implies that Conroe and Woodcrest will too. It's probable that Apple will be using all three.
the famous NeXT "Fat Binary." Back in the day, the same NeXT executable would run on 68040, Sparc, PA-RISC and Pentiums. Why not now? Why tie yourself to x86 alone, when there are better alternatives to fit the niche you're targeting?
I think you've missed the fact that this is exactly what Apple is doing during the transition period, except they're calling it a "Universal Binary". For developers using Cocoa and Xcode, with no endian-specific or vector code, it's a checkbox away. But if you're using Carbon, or CodeWarrior, have endian-specific or AltiVec-specific code, or God Forbid, all of the above, it can be kind of rough. It's basically a pain in the ass for everybody, just not equally. Developers *will* write processor-specific code no matter how much you tell them not to.
So, in theory, they could hop architectures at a whim, but they would have to have some very compelling reason to put developers through that kind of change. In the case of PowerPC-to-Intel, I think they've made a solid case that Intel's roadmap is more inviting than IBM's.
Too much politics, and not enough engineering.
I think it more to do with avoiding too much engineering. Why use two architectures when you can get 80% of the performance out of one, with no additional cost, customer confusion, development time, etc. Why engineer yourself into a hole like that?
If Apple's going to be commodity CPU on the server front, then there's no incentive on the hardware front to pay for Apple.
In terms of raw performance there was never much reason to go with Xserve, except for clusters running highly vectorized code. But that's not a huge market. The selling points were always the features, the software, the hardware design, and everything else. The usual Apple stuff.
Does anyone know if QuickTime Pro users automatically get the encoder?
.mov that I had been working on, and sure enough, Quicktime gave me the option of encoding in .wmv. I tested it and it seemed to create a .wmv fine.
You get the component, yes. You don't get the license that enables you to use it.
Anyway, I pulled a short
It creates a file, yes, but that file contains nothing.
The QuickTime plugin Flip4Mac is better in almost every respect and enabled transcoding to the plethora of formats that QuickTime offers.
No it doesn't. The free version only lets you watch. It does not support transcoding from WMV to any other format. For that you need the $30 "Import" version.
Are the proprietary formats superior?
Yes, actually, but that's not always the reason sites use them. There are far more tools that natively support Windows Media or QuickTime than anything else, and a far greater installed base on the client side. OGG, for example, definitely has neither. What good would it be to use OGG if it meant asking people to download yet another program or codec?
Ok, so iTunes "spies" on you if:
* You don't press the button that tells it not to.
How is this spyware/malware again?
How is this different from them tracking your browsing habits in the music store?
(Which I can't imagine any reasonable person objecting to.)
How is this different from them making recommendations based on your past purchases?
(Which can be disabled right from the front page of the store.)
I'm not saying that it's not obnoxious, but calling it "spyware" is ridiculous.
FireWire 800 is backward compatible to FW400...I've got a 800>400 cable right here
You're right, of course, but what I really meant was that the connector is not same. To support both, they would need two connectors (as before), or require a dongle to use FW400. The former was obviously seen as unnecessary, and the latter make any sense when FW400 is much more common.
and I'm using a FW400 hard drive on it as we speak...
Tells us something about the demand for FW800, doesn't it?
If you'd bothered to read the sentance before the one you quoted, you would have seen this:
I'm sorry, I guess I've just gotten used to tuning out shrill ignorance. I guess that's what makes Slashdot tolerable.
Why are they using 2GHz intel chips on the high end iMacs when 3Ghz ones are available on the PC?
Both the MacBook and the iMac use Core Duo chips, which produce significantly less heat than the 3GHz+ Pentium 4s commonly in use, while having similar or better performance. For very compact designs like the iMac, this is very important. A Pentium 4 D in an iMac body would probably burn a hole in the screen and melt your face off. Technically speaking, that is.
My 15" Powerbook has Firewire 800
It also has a CardBus slot that you probably aren't using. The MacBook has an ExpressCard slot that I'm sure will accommodate a FireWire 800 card, if you need one. The thing is, most people, even PowerBook owners, don't need one. There just aren't that many peripherals that need it, and it isn't backwards compatable, so it was probably high on the list of things that can be left out.
Also, for what it's worth, the MacBook doesn't have a modem. Same story.
I would think that the PowerMac G5 made a much higher profit than the iMac.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The PowerMac has a lot more parts, a lot more assembly, a lot more weight (shipping), and so on. Even if they make more per-unit, they undoubtedly sell a lot more iMacs than PowerMacs. Being able to stoke that popularity with "And now twice as fast." will probably make up for any lost (or more accurately, delayed) sales of PowerMacs.