There are only two possible paths for Apple: continue to keep their OS working only on their hardware, or making it also work on x86.
Presumably by "x86" you mean "generic x86-based personal computers", as it already works on Apple's x86-based developer systems (and will presumably work on future Apple x86-based Macs).
Do you know that "cannot run on any x86" could either be interpreted as "is incapable of running on x86 processors" or as "does not run on some x86 processors"? (The original poster perhaps either didn't or didn't think it was likely that it would be interpreted in a way in which they didn't intend, as they might have phrased the claim differently otherwise.)
They presumably meant it in the latter sense, i.e. "you need an x86 processor that supports SSE3", not in the former sense.
And the worse is that they don't make station-wagons anymore
Well, there's the Malibu Maxx, but they call that a "5-Door Extended Sedan", and I don't know whether it'd qualify as a station wagon or not.
There's also the Dodge Magnum, but if by "they" you're referring to US companies, that doesn't really count. (If you're not referring to US companies, the same corporation that makes the Dodge Magnum also makes other wagons. Here's another wagon from a non-US company, but those aren't sold in North America, except perhaps through the gray market.)
You misspelled "single-chip processor for Datapoint". Yes, that article says that Seiko used the 8008 for "a sophisticated scientific calculator", but that's not what it was designed for. The 4004 was designed for use in a calculator.
Actually, my Texas Instruments Voyage 200 graphing calculator uses a 14MHz Motorola MC68000 CPU with 384 KB RAM and 4 MB flash EEPROM. Last time I checked, the Mac PPC lineage traces back to that chip.
A hell of a lot more of its lineage traces back to the RS/6000, as per this history of the POWER family . (And the 68K was used for a lot more than calculators.)
(But, then again, the 8008 wasn't a calculator chip; they were thinking of the 4004.)
Oh, hang on.. it must be just like their old version which also doesn't do anything on Safari.
And here I thought it was just that they were trying to out-minimalist Google. (Yes, I'm serious - and I was impressed, although I thought it was a bit *too* minimalist.)
apple can start making money just by selling the Software and selling hardware for people who want it but not making it mandatory
Apple are already making money; they don't have to start doing so.:-)
There are those who would argue that they'd make more money by selling OS X for (a possibly-but-not-necessarily-improper subset of) generic PCs, and there are those who would argue that they'd make less money. Of the latter, there are those who would argue that they'd make so much less money that they couldn't continue to develop OS X.
I suspect a large number of arguments on all sides of that issue are speculative and based more on how people thing Apple's business works than on how it actually does work. Plenty of people can convincingly prove - to themselves, at least, that Apple'd sell copies of OS X-for-generic-PCs by the bazillion (and not piss off Microsoft so badly that they said "no Office for you!") and reduce the number of sales of Macintoshes only by X%, or that if Apple sold OS X-for-generic PC's they'd {piss Microsoft off and lose Office,sell only a small number of copies to people who already have Macs and want something cheaper,sell a lot of copies and blow almost all the revenue on supporting OS X on J. Random PC, etc.} - but whether the numbers in their arguments are realistic or merely produced ex recto is another matter.
They should not be allowed to tell dvd vendors not to skip commercials or allow decryption. It's everyone's right under fair use doctrine to skip commercials and back up or personally manipulate media in their homes.
I agree - and I think Hollywood has no reason other than "we want to be allowed to pry your eyeballs open and force you to watch the commercial for the next movie we're putting out" for controlling what the DVD code interpreters are allowed to do.
I don't necessarily assume that they explicitly wanted to keep people from making personal copies for their own use. (I wouldn't absolutely rule it out, but I wouldn't definitively conclude that it's the case, either.) I do assume they wanted to keep people from making copies en masse and weren't sufficiently bothered by the fact that the solution they chose to that problem also meant that you couldn't copy the DVD onto a server or make personal re-edits or transcode it for your mobile phone or.... Perhaps the fact that you couldn't do that is an intentional feature, or perhaps it's a consequence that they simply didn't care about (or care enough about).
and there are already laws in place which severely punish pirates with hefty jail sentences and life long destitution.
You're not assuming perfect rationality on the part of Hollywood executives - i.e., "there already exist laws to punish pirates, and they'll eventually be found and successfully prosecuted if they pirate enough copies for it to matter, so we don't need a technical solution to this problem" (if the second of those premises is true), rather than "sorry, I don't care, I'm Too Scared of the Bad Pirates, I want every single mechanism I can imagine in place"?
do you honestly think apple so infallible?
Do you honestly think I stated any opinion one way or the other about what Apple would do? I was just noting problems with the examples being given. (Frankly, I'd prefer to have a DVD player that could be told to squelch the ads. I'm not at all surprised Hollywood wanted to prevent that, however.)
they're laying out 10 miles of road when they only need 1
If TCPA was a canned solution that they didn't have to develop, maybe it's more a case of "they needed 1 mile of road, and they could either rent the road-construction hardware and lay out that 1 mile, or buy a Roll-O-Road(TM) and just unroll it, but they only sell Roll-O-Road in 10-mile units".
do you think they're not going to travel those next 9 miles?
I don't know one way or the other.
I believe they eventually will succumb to this temptation
Which means that this isn't necessarily an Evil Plot From Day One. It could be someething between that and what I said the print cartridge case was, i.e. they know that there are other capabilities they can get from the TCPA hardware (whereas the printer makers might not have intended the DMCA to be used as a club against third-party cartridges, but might have realized after the fact that it could - or might have switched to a protection scheme designed to fall under the DMCA once the DMCA came out and they realized they could use it), but they don't currently have any intent to use them now - which doesn't mean they won't later have that intent.
I.e., don't assume that Evil Intent is completely present from Day One - and bear in mind that it is, in some ways, irrelevant whether it is, as the availability of mechanisms that can be used for Evil Purposes, while it doesn't guarantee that they will be so used, means that they might be so used later, even if the people who put them in didn't intend to so use them from Day One (or even explicitly didn't intend to use them when they first put them in).
(A world in which They're Not All Out To Get You is perhaps, in some ways, more dangerous than a world in whic
Or, at least, not that it's what they necessarily plan. I've no idea what goop will be inside Macintels (other than an x86-compatible processor of some sort, as per the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, which contain the string "x86" in a number of places).
Those were quite uninformed given that Apple has publicly stated nothing will prevent you from running plain Windows on their machines. That would not be possible with stuff like that.
Even custom chipsets that are compatible with existing chipsets but that have Extra Features that OS X requires, or custom firmware that's compatible with existing firmware but that provides Extra Features that OS X requires?
(Not that this is what Apple plans, but I don't see it as technically impossible to build machines that could run Windows and that are the only machines capable of running some other OS. Do {BeOS,Solaris,etc.} run on all the PCs that Windows supports?)
I'm not sure what else the Infineon chip is good for aside from preventing operating systems not on the Palladium congress from running.
Isn't it the lack of that chip that prevents OSes that do use it from running? (I.e., a device to keep OS X/x86 from running on non-Apple hardware, rather than a device to keep non-Apple OSes from running on Apple hardware.)
More specifically, it includes "a TCPA/Palladium implementation that uses a Infineon 1.1 chip which will prevent certain parts of the OS from working unless authorized."
Or, to quote Apple's VP of Marketing from a CNet article, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac." (Scroll to the end of the article text.)
Anybody in the audience to whom this comes as a Sudden Surprise, only now provoking them to be pissed off at Apple, apparently missed that article (or anything quoting it).
Remember the DMCA? they just wanted to use it to "produce new innovative digital media". The next thing we know third party printer cartridges
Which might be nothing more than just opportunism on the printer maker's part, i.e. it's not necessarily "bwahahaha, we'll make sure the DMCA passes so we can stop those nasty third-party printer cartridge makers", it could be "hey, cool, our lawyers think we can use this 'DMCA' thing against those nasty third-party printer cartridge makers". (BTW, as far as I know, few if any movie or music studios make printers, so that use of the DMCA was probably not anticipated by Hollywood, much less being a goal of Hollywood.:-))
I.e., the lesson to draw from the third-party printer cartridge maker case isn't necessarily "They were out to Get Us", it might just be "even if some law isn't being done to Get You, it might later be discovered to be useful for Getting You and be used to do exactly that" (which is perhaps a more useful lesson; unintended consequences might be harder to predict than intended consequences, if you don't realize you should look for them).
linux dvd players
I suspect Hollywood doesn't care much about Linux DVD players in general; if they care at all, they probably think that, in theory, Linux DVD players might be a little nice if it means they sell some more DVDs to Linux geeks.
What bothers them are DVD players that can be modified not to Follow The Rules (no skipping commercials, no copying unencrypted movies onto DVDs and selling them extra cheap, etc.). They'd probably be far more upset by a hackable DVD player (even if it's not open-source and thus harder to hack) for Windows than a closed-source secure "plays-by-the-rules" DVD player for Linux (I think at least one exists).
One problem with *nix is that US and Canada time zones are intertwined. There are separate zones for Canada, but the Canada info is duplicated in the America folder for some idiotic reason.
"The America folder" is a directory for the Americas (North and South), not for the United States of America. The Olson database has an entry for, for example, America/Toronto; perhaps some OS vendors don't bother shipping the Canadian files as the differences are, at this point, historical, but if the bill gets signed into law, if Canada doesn't adopt the change, those vendors will have to ship them.
...with a pile of BSD-derived code on top of it (i.e., xnu isn't just the Mach kernel, the name mach_kernel nonwithstanding; it also has a large chunk of BSD-derived code in the bsd directory).
Kernel level file change notification -- This is why the finder now instantly reflects changed files in 10.4
Kernel-level file change notification isn't new in 10.4; kqueues first showed up in a previous release (10.3, I think). The Finder using kqueues is new in 10.4.
Of course, FreeBSD had it before OS X (and the other BSDs), and Konqueror in KDE 3.0, on my FreeBSD 4.6 laptop, used it before the Finder used it, so if I tweaked something in ~/Desktop on the command line on the FreeBSD machine, the desktop changed immediately, but if I did the same on a pre-10.4 Mac, it didn't (I had to click on the desktop for the Finder to wake up and notice the change).
(And, to be fair, Windows had file change notification APIs long before most if not all UN*Xes did; I don't remember whether Windows Explorer on my NT 4.0 partition immediately noticed it if I tweaked stuff in ~/Desktop from the command line, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.)
And more messaging overhead is part of using a microkernel.
If you're actually using the microkernel as such. Mach messaging is used in OS X, but it's not how the file system or networking stack or kernel drivers get called - they're called procedurally (the same applies to the various versions of Windows NT - NT 4.0, 2K, XP, W2K3, Vista, blah blah blah; it's no "microkernel-based" OS, either).
Slashdot Mirror
Is that you, Dave?
Actually, I think it sounds more like a cheesy thriller.
Presumably by "x86" you mean "generic x86-based personal computers", as it already works on Apple's x86-based developer systems (and will presumably work on future Apple x86-based Macs).
Do you know that "cannot run on any x86" could either be interpreted as "is incapable of running on x86 processors" or as "does not run on some x86 processors"? (The original poster perhaps either didn't or didn't think it was likely that it would be interpreted in a way in which they didn't intend, as they might have phrased the claim differently otherwise.)
They presumably meant it in the latter sense, i.e. "you need an x86 processor that supports SSE3", not in the former sense.
Well, there's the Malibu Maxx, but they call that a "5-Door Extended Sedan", and I don't know whether it'd qualify as a station wagon or not.
There's also the Dodge Magnum, but if by "they" you're referring to US companies, that doesn't really count. (If you're not referring to US companies, the same corporation that makes the Dodge Magnum also makes other wagons. Here's another wagon from a non-US company, but those aren't sold in North America, except perhaps through the gray market.)
You misspelled "single-chip processor for Datapoint". Yes, that article says that Seiko used the 8008 for "a sophisticated scientific calculator", but that's not what it was designed for. The 4004 was designed for use in a calculator.
A hell of a lot more of its lineage traces back to the RS/6000, as per this history of the POWER family . (And the 68K was used for a lot more than calculators.)
(But, then again, the 8008 wasn't a calculator chip; they were thinking of the 4004.)
And here I thought it was just that they were trying to out-minimalist Google. (Yes, I'm serious - and I was impressed, although I thought it was a bit *too* minimalist.)
Apple are already making money; they don't have to start doing so. :-)
There are those who would argue that they'd make more money by selling OS X for (a possibly-but-not-necessarily-improper subset of) generic PCs, and there are those who would argue that they'd make less money. Of the latter, there are those who would argue that they'd make so much less money that they couldn't continue to develop OS X.
I suspect a large number of arguments on all sides of that issue are speculative and based more on how people thing Apple's business works than on how it actually does work. Plenty of people can convincingly prove - to themselves, at least, that Apple'd sell copies of OS X-for-generic-PCs by the bazillion (and not piss off Microsoft so badly that they said "no Office for you!") and reduce the number of sales of Macintoshes only by X%, or that if Apple sold OS X-for-generic PC's they'd {piss Microsoft off and lose Office,sell only a small number of copies to people who already have Macs and want something cheaper,sell a lot of copies and blow almost all the revenue on supporting OS X on J. Random PC, etc.} - but whether the numbers in their arguments are realistic or merely produced ex recto is another matter.
I agree - and I think Hollywood has no reason other than "we want to be allowed to pry your eyeballs open and force you to watch the commercial for the next movie we're putting out" for controlling what the DVD code interpreters are allowed to do.
I don't necessarily assume that they explicitly wanted to keep people from making personal copies for their own use. (I wouldn't absolutely rule it out, but I wouldn't definitively conclude that it's the case, either.) I do assume they wanted to keep people from making copies en masse and weren't sufficiently bothered by the fact that the solution they chose to that problem also meant that you couldn't copy the DVD onto a server or make personal re-edits or transcode it for your mobile phone or.... Perhaps the fact that you couldn't do that is an intentional feature, or perhaps it's a consequence that they simply didn't care about (or care enough about).
You're not assuming perfect rationality on the part of Hollywood executives - i.e., "there already exist laws to punish pirates, and they'll eventually be found and successfully prosecuted if they pirate enough copies for it to matter, so we don't need a technical solution to this problem" (if the second of those premises is true), rather than "sorry, I don't care, I'm Too Scared of the Bad Pirates, I want every single mechanism I can imagine in place"?
Do you honestly think I stated any opinion one way or the other about what Apple would do? I was just noting problems with the examples being given. (Frankly, I'd prefer to have a DVD player that could be told to squelch the ads. I'm not at all surprised Hollywood wanted to prevent that, however.)
If TCPA was a canned solution that they didn't have to develop, maybe it's more a case of "they needed 1 mile of road, and they could either rent the road-construction hardware and lay out that 1 mile, or buy a Roll-O-Road(TM) and just unroll it, but they only sell Roll-O-Road in 10-mile units".
I don't know one way or the other.
Which means that this isn't necessarily an Evil Plot From Day One. It could be someething between that and what I said the print cartridge case was, i.e. they know that there are other capabilities they can get from the TCPA hardware (whereas the printer makers might not have intended the DMCA to be used as a club against third-party cartridges, but might have realized after the fact that it could - or might have switched to a protection scheme designed to fall under the DMCA once the DMCA came out and they realized they could use it), but they don't currently have any intent to use them now - which doesn't mean they won't later have that intent.
I.e., don't assume that Evil Intent is completely present from Day One - and bear in mind that it is, in some ways, irrelevant whether it is, as the availability of mechanisms that can be used for Evil Purposes, while it doesn't guarantee that they will be so used, means that they might be so used later, even if the people who put them in didn't intend to so use them from Day One (or even explicitly didn't intend to use them when they first put them in).
(A world in which They're Not All Out To Get You is perhaps, in some ways, more dangerous than a world in whic
Or, at least, not that it's what they necessarily plan. I've no idea what goop will be inside Macintels (other than an x86-compatible processor of some sort, as per the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, which contain the string "x86" in a number of places).
Even custom chipsets that are compatible with existing chipsets but that have Extra Features that OS X requires, or custom firmware that's compatible with existing firmware but that provides Extra Features that OS X requires?
(Not that this is what Apple plans, but I don't see it as technically impossible to build machines that could run Windows and that are the only machines capable of running some other OS. Do {BeOS,Solaris,etc.} run on all the PCs that Windows supports?)
Isn't it the lack of that chip that prevents OSes that do use it from running? (I.e., a device to keep OS X/x86 from running on non-Apple hardware, rather than a device to keep non-Apple OSes from running on Apple hardware.)
Or, to quote Apple's VP of Marketing from a CNet article, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac." (Scroll to the end of the article text.)
Anybody in the audience to whom this comes as a Sudden Surprise, only now provoking them to be pissed off at Apple, apparently missed that article (or anything quoting it).
Which might be nothing more than just opportunism on the printer maker's part, i.e. it's not necessarily "bwahahaha, we'll make sure the DMCA passes so we can stop those nasty third-party printer cartridge makers", it could be "hey, cool, our lawyers think we can use this 'DMCA' thing against those nasty third-party printer cartridge makers". (BTW, as far as I know, few if any movie or music studios make printers, so that use of the DMCA was probably not anticipated by Hollywood, much less being a goal of Hollywood. :-))
I.e., the lesson to draw from the third-party printer cartridge maker case isn't necessarily "They were out to Get Us", it might just be "even if some law isn't being done to Get You, it might later be discovered to be useful for Getting You and be used to do exactly that" (which is perhaps a more useful lesson; unintended consequences might be harder to predict than intended consequences, if you don't realize you should look for them).
I suspect Hollywood doesn't care much about Linux DVD players in general; if they care at all, they probably think that, in theory, Linux DVD players might be a little nice if it means they sell some more DVDs to Linux geeks.
What bothers them are DVD players that can be modified not to Follow The Rules (no skipping commercials, no copying unencrypted movies onto DVDs and selling them extra cheap, etc.). They'd probably be far more upset by a hackable DVD player (even if it's not open-source and thus harder to hack) for Windows than a closed-source secure "plays-by-the-rules" DVD player for Linux (I think at least one exists).
Presumably you meant "use CodeWarrior"; using Carbon doesn't, as far as I know, prevent you from using XCode.
Sí, es verdad. :-) (Not that I said we were....)
True, but we Yanks aren't the only ones with a game called "football" that involves oval-shaped objects thrown around by hand. Those two flavors do have some differences.
Which is especially perverse, given that he's Canadian; is this how the Canadian government supports successful Canadians?
I.e., they're leaving it open for the potential use of Celerons or Xeons as well?
Because it's the standard text editor.
(And, yes, I do use it on occasion on Macs, when firing up MicroEMACS and using that would take too much time.)
"The America folder" is a directory for the Americas (North and South), not for the United States of America. The Olson database has an entry for, for example, America/Toronto; perhaps some OS vendors don't bother shipping the Canadian files as the differences are, at this point, historical, but if the bill gets signed into law, if Canada doesn't adopt the change, those vendors will have to ship them.
...with a pile of BSD-derived code on top of it (i.e., xnu isn't just the Mach kernel, the name mach_kernel nonwithstanding; it also has a large chunk of BSD-derived code in the bsd directory).
Kernel-level file change notification isn't new in 10.4; kqueues first showed up in a previous release (10.3, I think). The Finder using kqueues is new in 10.4.
Of course, FreeBSD had it before OS X (and the other BSDs), and Konqueror in KDE 3.0, on my FreeBSD 4.6 laptop, used it before the Finder used it, so if I tweaked something in ~/Desktop on the command line on the FreeBSD machine, the desktop changed immediately, but if I did the same on a pre-10.4 Mac, it didn't (I had to click on the desktop for the Finder to wake up and notice the change).
(And, to be fair, Windows had file change notification APIs long before most if not all UN*Xes did; I don't remember whether Windows Explorer on my NT 4.0 partition immediately noticed it if I tweaked stuff in ~/Desktop from the command line, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.)
If you're actually using the microkernel as such. Mach messaging is used in OS X, but it's not how the file system or networking stack or kernel drivers get called - they're called procedurally (the same applies to the various versions of Windows NT - NT 4.0, 2K, XP, W2K3, Vista, blah blah blah; it's no "microkernel-based" OS, either).
...based on BSD and Mach, so they didn't create it entirely from scratch.
That still doesn't mean Darwin was done entirely by other people, with NeXT/Apple just taking their work, however.