Copyright is a legal right granted by the government. Making an unauthorized copy is a violation of the copyright holders rights.
You might want to read the entire USC 17 instead of stopping at Â106. Making a copy without authorization from the copyright holder is a violation in many circumstances but not in all.
Duh. Doughnuts!
But that's not answering why they bought PASemi. That's an argument for why they bought a chip design firm. They didn't choose this one out of the phone book. It wasn't a random phone book pick. Apple was looking into using PA Semi's PPC core, but chose to go with Intel because PA's chip wouldn't be ready in time.
Apple buying PA Semi to get access to PWRficient in order to use the chips in iTMS servers makes as much sense as Amazon buying Hitachi to use their products to run S3/Amazon web store.
In both cases, the cost of acquisition is orders of magnitude larger than the expected benefit/cost-saving of the supposed use of the technology acquired. Just like it is cheaper for Amazon to buy the servers they need for S3/Webstore off the general market instead of buying a server/storage manufacturer, it would likewise be cheaper for Apple to buy some PWRficient chips from PA Semi if they wanted to use them in servers running the iTMS backend than it is to buy PA Semi.
It is much more likely that Apple bought PA Semi for their brains and to get in-house chip design capabilities (the results of which we are unlikely to see for a couple of years) than Apple buying them because they want to use PWRficient chips to power iTMS.
You show examples of MS' current lack of good cross platform products and their current technical failings compared to Apple.
How does that have any import on your claim that "There was "no real demand" for NT's cross platform features because IT WASN'T VERY GOOD."? You have yet to show one example of the NT RISC ports being bad.
Seriously, what makes you defend a worthless sheister company I'm not, and you believing that I do is an excellent example of your bias. If you would re-read my reply, you will see that I'm not denying that MS' technologies are imperfect. Come on, coming up with examples of MS' fumbles is like shooting fish in a barrel, it is easy.
My problem is with you using proxy arguments that essentially boils down to "here are some other examples of MS' failings, so by inference the NT RISC ports were obviously bad too". I'm not defending MS, I'm attacking your faulty logic.
You're making the analogy of Apple:PASemi::Amazon:Hitachi, and you're accusing me of having no sense of scale? Sense(Apple:PASemi)::Sense(Amazon:Hitachi)
IA64 uses EFI, but MS won't adopt EFI for IA32 until PCs are all EFI, probably Windows 7 in 2010 (if it's on time, hehe). That's another three years of core compatibility failure between the two platforms. How does the choice of boot-rom format for different hardware platforms impact compatibility? You have to write platform-specific boot-code anyway.
Also, 64bit x86 and 32bit x86 are similarly binary incompatible because of MS' engineering decisions. Yup, that's a bad one. But I don't really see how MS' x86 32/64-bit snafu has any bearing on whether NT is portable or not.
Mac OS X is not only 64bit and EFI savvy, but there's no problem running the same software on 32/64 bit hardware, and there's even a smooth ramp between the PPC/Intel platforms. Yes, Apple did an excellent job with the PPC to Intel migration. But I don't really see how that has any bearing on whether NT is portable or not.
Apple even has their OS running on ARM, rather than a seperate "mobile version" that uses an entirely different kernel design, as MS did with WinCE. The NT kernel was perhaps a bit heavy for running on embedded hardware at the time that MS started work on WinCE? Apple ported the OSX kernel at a much later date, target hardware much more capable. Again, how is this an argument against NT's cross platform capabilities?
There was "no real demand" for NT's cross platform features because IT WASN'T VERY GOOD. You're batting above average today. Instead of innuendo and half-truths you actually managed to make a set of true statements. Unfortunately for your argument, those statements are totally irrelevant with regards to the point you are trying to make.
NT was designed to be very portable, Cutler made sure of that. That NT support for non-x86 architectures were dropped had a lot more to do with market forces and Intel hoodwinking most of the RISC CPU makers than with the quality of the ports.
Servers and storage that would likely be specialized for pushing a lot of data efficiently. Sounds great for the iTMS.
Apple buying PASemi for that reason would make as much sense as Amazon buying Hitachi because they need servers and hard drives for their web store / S3 service. Have some sense of scale, man.
Apple is essentially platform agnostic, with respect to hardware.
Due to economies of scale, Apple must choose hardware with somewhat similar production volumes as the most popular hardware platform in that category. For desk-/laptop, that means x86. If you remember, Apple dropped PPC because of lower production volumes which translated to less R&D and cutting edge fab investments, which in turn led to PPC falling behind x86 in price/performance. On the handheld/ultramobile side, any new hardware platform will have to compete with the large existing ARM market (and soon the well-funded and x86 compatible Intel Atom). Unless Apple can get economies of scale within shouting distance of the most prevalent hardware platform in a given category, they will be in for an expensive lesson in how "obsolete" the "platform wars" are.
Not to mention that while Apple might be hardware agnostic, 3rd party software isn't.
Anyway.. they bought a chip design company that specializes in high performance low power network storage server chips, not mobile/laptop chips. In the short term nothing is likely to come from this except perhaps a hefty upgrade in the next XServe RAID.
But at the same time they like to work with Intel on chip designs. They had one specially made for the Macbook Air. Chip package, not chip. The Air CPU is a regular 65nm Merom in a small form factor package. A fabless chip designer like PA Semi is in a different ballpark.
Without directly using PA Semi chips they could use PA semi to improve their own power consumption. PA's PWRficient is a low power comms processor (think TCP/IP, iSCSI, RAID, 10Gb Ethernet). It's the kind of thing you use in a NAS, not in handhelds / laptops / desktops. In terms of PA's current products this purchase only makes sense if Apple wants to get into high performance network storage products.
In terms of the future, they bought the expertise to do in-house chip design. What they intend to do with this expertise is a more open question. Designing their own laptop/desktop CPU to compete with Intel/AMD is unlikely to happen, they would need access to cutting edge fabs for one.
A more likely scenario is rolling their own ARM SOC for use in future Apple handhelds. This might give them some advantage, but on the other hand they will have to keep up with companies like Samsung, TI and STMicro.
5) Notice when this InPhase "real soon now"(tm) holographic drive story has shown up on slashdot: 2005: April 19th 2006: March 29th 2007: May 18th 2008: April 20th
I think they forgot to run ntpclient on the machine with the April 1st press release cron-job.;-)
Only if you have zero noise. But that's like postulating a spherical cow of uniform density; useful for theoretical discussions at the water cooler, but not very useful for real world storage systems.
An other example of using confidence estimates is, if I have understood it correctly, turbo codes.
Data storage is a bit more complex than naively writing a pattern of 0 and 1 to the storage media; you use encoding techniques that take advantage of (or avoid disadvantages of) the properties of the media. Take for example a garden variety floppy disc. The storage capacity is limited by how close together you can store magnetic flux transitions, so you want an encoding that use as few flux transitions as possible to store your bits. It also rotates at a speed that's not perfectly stable, so you need some timing information in the signal ("was that 7 or 8 zeroes (non-transitions)?"); hence you use something like MFM
I'm sure they'll come up with encoding techniques for holographic media that have better properties for storage density / error correction / etc than a plain "store an image of black and white dots". How well holodiscs will handle degradation will depend on the kind of encoding used.
I'd stay away from preinstalling. Even if Apple doesn't go after Psystar (since it is apparently falling of the cliff without the need of a helping hand from Apple), they're rather likely to go after anyone making this a successful business.
I know arguing about EULAs is a favourite pastime on/., but if they preinstall that will give Apple enough of an argument to get past preliminary hearings and go to a full trial. One would be on safer ground selling a pre-assembled PC bundled with Leopard still in shrinkwrap.
And thank you for posting your snarky comment before doing 30 seconds worth of research. Pretty much all the alternatives listed are dead or dying, so pot kettle black on the amount of research done.
That's not likely to happen, given their continual desire not to even go towards quality. I'd beg to differ. Even if Chinese culture doesn't have the same cultural pride of quality as Japan (personally I don't know if that's the case, never having had the opportunity to get to know Chinese well), being the manufacturing centre of the world will lead to increased living standards. And with that comes the market and want for quality goods.
Ask your parental or grand-parental units. "Made in Japan" used to have the same "cheap crap" stigma as "Made in China" has now. I'd say give them some years to get living standards up a bit, and quality will go up too. Then the cycle continues, with cheap manufacturing moving to some place like Africa.
Depends on the type. The "night-shift at factory" or "factory surplus" variety is up and running at the same day that manufacture of the "true" product starts.
If it's the same product make by the same people with the same parts in the same factory then all this is not true
Even if comes off the same factory line it does not guarantee the same quality. A considerable part of the cost is in product testing after manufacture.
Since the counterfeiters are (1) leeching on quality / brand-name reputation and thus have nothing to lose if the product is low quality and (2) want the product at as low cost as possible, there is an incentive to skimp on testing. They might even use cheaper components or components rejected for use in the official product because they are marginal. Or even motherboards that were dumped in the reject bin because they are unstable when doing a 10-hour stress-test in high temperature.
You see some of this in the RAM grey-market. Sticks sold by Crucial and by no-label/low-quality brands might actually come from the same production batch in the same factory, the difference is in the amount of testing done after manufacture to make sure that the chips are within spec.
routing functions have moved into switching hardware and we now have "layer 3 switches". Forget that it is one box, the switching and routing functions are logically separate and still follow the same rules as stand alone devices, but by running them on the same hardware you can get performance and features that are not possible on separate physical devices. Routing is routing whether it happens in software or in hardware. Yes, you can get performance and feature benefits by having both routing and switching done by a single device. But calling it a "layer 3 switch" still smells of marketese, it is mixing up L2 and L3 terminology.
Think about a company that has 200 remote offices that each have a server, if that server could be collapsed into a router blade (in combination with some other cisco technology like WAAS, that is possible) you reduce management, hardware and maintenance costs, electricity costs (green is also the word of the day) and provide the necessary services integrated into the heart of the network. Pretty cool. A Cisco blade will be cheaper than a Dell? Pull the other one.;-p
The blade is limited to running one particular Linux distro and you can't load software on it without a Cisco certificate. That will seriously reduce the possibility for replacing branch servers with this blade.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright is a legal right granted by the government. Making an unauthorized copy is a violation of the copyright holders rights.
You might want to read the entire USC 17 instead of stopping at Â106. Making a copy without authorization from the copyright holder is a violation in many circumstances but not in all.
For starters, there's Â107.
Is like you being the Plastic Man driving all the cars in a convoy.
One puzzling piece of information is that "P.A. Semi informed its customers it was being acquired and it could no longer guarantee supplies of its chips." Some customers are DoD contractors and are quite upset about this. That at least implies that Apple isn't interested in using PWRficient in upcoming products.
The comparator was sense, not size.
Apple buying PA Semi to get access to PWRficient in order to use the chips in iTMS servers makes as much sense as Amazon buying Hitachi to use their products to run S3/Amazon web store.
In both cases, the cost of acquisition is orders of magnitude larger than the expected benefit/cost-saving of the supposed use of the technology acquired. Just like it is cheaper for Amazon to buy the servers they need for S3/Webstore off the general market instead of buying a server/storage manufacturer, it would likewise be cheaper for Apple to buy some PWRficient chips from PA Semi if they wanted to use them in servers running the iTMS backend than it is to buy PA Semi.
It is much more likely that Apple bought PA Semi for their brains and to get in-house chip design capabilities (the results of which we are unlikely to see for a couple of years) than Apple buying them because they want to use PWRficient chips to power iTMS.
You show examples of MS' current lack of good cross platform products and their current technical failings compared to Apple.
How does that have any import on your claim that "There was "no real demand" for NT's cross platform features because IT WASN'T VERY GOOD."? You have yet to show one example of the NT RISC ports being bad. Seriously, what makes you defend a worthless sheister company I'm not, and you believing that I do is an excellent example of your bias. If you would re-read my reply, you will see that I'm not denying that MS' technologies are imperfect. Come on, coming up with examples of MS' fumbles is like shooting fish in a barrel, it is easy.
My problem is with you using proxy arguments that essentially boils down to "here are some other examples of MS' failings, so by inference the NT RISC ports were obviously bad too". I'm not defending MS, I'm attacking your faulty logic.
NT was designed to be very portable, Cutler made sure of that. That NT support for non-x86 architectures were dropped had a lot more to do with market forces and Intel hoodwinking most of the RISC CPU makers than with the quality of the ports.
Servers and storage that would likely be specialized for pushing a lot of data efficiently. Sounds great for the iTMS.
Apple buying PASemi for that reason would make as much sense as Amazon buying Hitachi because they need servers and hard drives for their web store / S3 service. Have some sense of scale, man.
Apple is essentially platform agnostic, with respect to hardware.
Due to economies of scale, Apple must choose hardware with somewhat similar production volumes as the most popular hardware platform in that category. For desk-/laptop, that means x86. If you remember, Apple dropped PPC because of lower production volumes which translated to less R&D and cutting edge fab investments, which in turn led to PPC falling behind x86 in price/performance. On the handheld/ultramobile side, any new hardware platform will have to compete with the large existing ARM market (and soon the well-funded and x86 compatible Intel Atom). Unless Apple can get economies of scale within shouting distance of the most prevalent hardware platform in a given category, they will be in for an expensive lesson in how "obsolete" the "platform wars" are.
Not to mention that while Apple might be hardware agnostic, 3rd party software isn't.
Anyway.. they bought a chip design company that specializes in high performance low power network storage server chips, not mobile/laptop chips. In the short term nothing is likely to come from this except perhaps a hefty upgrade in the next XServe RAID.
In terms of the future, they bought the expertise to do in-house chip design. What they intend to do with this expertise is a more open question. Designing their own laptop/desktop CPU to compete with Intel/AMD is unlikely to happen, they would need access to cutting edge fabs for one.
A more likely scenario is rolling their own ARM SOC for use in future Apple handhelds. This might give them some advantage, but on the other hand they will have to keep up with companies like Samsung, TI and STMicro.
You forgot
;-)
5) Notice when this InPhase "real soon now"(tm) holographic drive story has shown up on slashdot:
2005: April 19th
2006: March 29th
2007: May 18th
2008: April 20th
I think they forgot to run ntpclient on the machine with the April 1st press release cron-job.
Only if you have zero noise. But that's like postulating a spherical cow of uniform density; useful for theoretical discussions at the water cooler, but not very useful for real world storage systems.
An other example of using confidence estimates is, if I have understood it correctly, turbo codes.
Data storage is a bit more complex than naively writing a pattern of 0 and 1 to the storage media; you use encoding techniques that take advantage of (or avoid disadvantages of) the properties of the media. Take for example a garden variety floppy disc. The storage capacity is limited by how close together you can store magnetic flux transitions, so you want an encoding that use as few flux transitions as possible to store your bits. It also rotates at a speed that's not perfectly stable, so you need some timing information in the signal ("was that 7 or 8 zeroes (non-transitions)?"); hence you use something like MFM
I'm sure they'll come up with encoding techniques for holographic media that have better properties for storage density / error correction / etc than a plain "store an image of black and white dots". How well holodiscs will handle degradation will depend on the kind of encoding used.
A very important factor in CD/DVD longevity is the type of dye and reflective layer used. If you have a low quality disc it will have a limited shelf life even if you treat it like that reference kilogram sitting in a vault in France.
I'd stay away from preinstalling. Even if Apple doesn't go after Psystar (since it is apparently falling of the cliff without the need of a helping hand from Apple), they're rather likely to go after anyone making this a successful business.
/., but if they preinstall that will give Apple enough of an argument to get past preliminary hearings and go to a full trial. One would be on safer ground selling a pre-assembled PC bundled with Leopard still in shrinkwrap.
I know arguing about EULAs is a favourite pastime on
Ah, I completely misread your comment. Agreed, and I'll pick up that cookware on my way out.
As much as it annoys me, I think we have lost "bricked" just like we lost "hacker". I expect "jailbreak" to be next in line, damn the iCrowd..
And thank you for posting your snarky comment before doing 30 seconds worth of research. Pretty much all the alternatives listed are dead or dying, so pot kettle black on the amount of research done.
Ask your parental or grand-parental units. "Made in Japan" used to have the same "cheap crap" stigma as "Made in China" has now. I'd say give them some years to get living standards up a bit, and quality will go up too. Then the cycle continues, with cheap manufacturing moving to some place like Africa.
Copy-cats don't literally spring up over night
Depends on the type. The "night-shift at factory" or "factory surplus" variety is up and running at the same day that manufacture of the "true" product starts.
If it's the same product make by the same people with the same parts in the same factory then all this is not true
Even if comes off the same factory line it does not guarantee the same quality. A considerable part of the cost is in product testing after manufacture.
Since the counterfeiters are (1) leeching on quality / brand-name reputation and thus have nothing to lose if the product is low quality and (2) want the product at as low cost as possible, there is an incentive to skimp on testing. They might even use cheaper components or components rejected for use in the official product because they are marginal. Or even motherboards that were dumped in the reject bin because they are unstable when doing a 10-hour stress-test in high temperature.
You see some of this in the RAM grey-market. Sticks sold by Crucial and by no-label/low-quality brands might actually come from the same production batch in the same factory, the difference is in the amount of testing done after manufacture to make sure that the chips are within spec.
The blade is limited to running one particular Linux distro and you can't load software on it without a Cisco certificate. That will seriously reduce the possibility for replacing branch servers with this blade.
Yeah, backplane is kinda bummer.
As generic blade it looks like fail. Only one OS supported, probably expensive, Cisco license needed to build application packages.
Could be useful for making network appliances. Datasheet mentions IOS integration.