The baseline JPEG format is not proprietary and is not owned by Forgent.
What happened here is that Forgent sat on a patent while the JPEG format was drafted with the purpose of being open and patent-free. Compression Labs (which Forgent now owns) was a part of the JPEG committee and thus was required to disclose any patents that might deal with the format that the committee was developing. Compression Labs was silent on the matter and Forgent only decided to litigate their patent after many years of silence and after JPEG had become a standard. The patent is likely invalidated by priori art and Forgent is probably also barred by laches due to their delay in enforcing the patent.
I'd rather that no one settle with them, but the reality is that settling is probably cheaper than litigating.
Just because everyone that buys an iPod doesn't buy music from the iTunes store doesn't mean that it (iTunes) isn't successful. Success is measured in different ways. If they are making a profit then they are successful. You don't have to dominate sales to be successful. Also, given that Apple has like 80-90% market share for all legal music downloads then I'd call them successful.
It's going to take a while before downloads overtake CD sales (if ever), but that doesn't mean that a new technology in a new market isn't successful.
I'm posting this from my treo in an airplane. we've just landed so cell phones are OK. anyway, the only thing banned on flights is liquids of all kinds (minus the exceptions). Only flights to the UK have restrictions on electronics. So don't worry about being without your laptop or phone unless you're flying to the UK. I imagine that the UK restrictions will be lifted when the threat has passed.
SCO filed the lawsuits in Utah, where they had the best chance of winning.
SCO filed the lawsuits (IBM & Novell, the AutoZone & DaimlerChrysler suits were filed elsewhere) in Utah because SCO is based in Utah. Also, SCO is based in Lindon, Utah, not Salt Lake City so I'm not sure how SLC is then associated with SCO - maybe because the court is located in SLC?
This list seems particularly tuned for Web development, not necessarily Mac developement. Tools listed such as MAMP, NVU, Zend Studio and CSSEdit really only have a place in a Web developer's toolkit and anyone doing Mac application developement would have little, if any, need for them.
So, for Mac application developers, here's a better list:
BBEdit - the best text editor, period.
Interface Builder - the best GUI builder.
Shark - if performance is important then there's no better tool.
Xcode - well, there's really no other choice these days, and it's getting better.
AppKiDo - for quick reference to the Cocoa APIs.
Terminal - good enough for me.
OmniGraffle - for application/class modeling and design.
There are many other important and useful applications, but these ones really are the core essentials for application development (at least for me). Anything I left out?
FileMerge - free with Apple's Developer tools - is a good utility for merging files and folders.
Also, BBEdit/TextWrangler both have a good compare utility and TextWrangler is free.
My favorite though is CodeWarrior's compare utility. It is simple and easy to use but CodeWarrior is now dead. Plus, there would be no point in buying CW just for its compare utility. Still, it's probably the one I use the most.
I've found that the OSX developer program Sampler (which comes free with the developer distribution) is also a great program useful for getting a quick feel for where the bottle necks in my program are. Sampler is really intuitive to use, and it provides a nice way of navigating the calling tree of your program allowing you to see how different functions are spending what fraction of compute time.
The only reason to be using Sampler instead of Shark is because you haven't found Shark yet. Shark is part of Apple's CHUD tools that you can download here. It is quite possibly the best profiler that you'll find anywhere on any platform. And best of all it's free.
I probably use Shark on average 2-3 times a day, every day. It has been instrumental in locating and fixing countless performance bottlenecks. Download it and give it a try, you won't regret it.
I agree the headline is horribly misleading. First of all, Western Union is just not blocking transfers outright, they are delaying or blocking some transfers. From the article:
Most of the flagged transactions are delayed a few hours. Some are blocked entirely. [Emphasis mine]
Second, it isn't just Western Union that is doing this, other financial institutions do it as well as the parent points out.
Third, they're not specifically targeting Arabs, it's just that many of the names of Arab terrorists are extremely common in the Arab world. And since it was Arab terrorists that struck on Sept. 11th then they are the ones that are currently under the most scrutiny.
You failed to ask yourself the simple questions of "Why do Arabs do terrorist activities?".
And I'm sure the answer to that question in your warped mind is - Because the U.S. made them do it. Or maybe it's because the Devil made them do it, or Mohammed, or Jesus or Cartman. Any excuse you can come up with to blame anyone but the people directly responsible for carrying out terrorist activities. It's not their fault, it's because of someone else.
I find it interesting that he doesn't name the source at Apple that he spoke with. From the tone of the article it sounds more like he spoke with some marketing nitwit than an actual OS X Engineer/Manager. This is evidenced by the questions that Apple purportedly asked:
Has anybody ever written to you about this? How many people actually recompile their OS X kernels?
These seem like questions marketing would ask. People that are actually in charge of OS X's development wouldn't need to ask these questions because they would understand the reasons why people would want the kernel's source code.
At any rate, we still don't know why Apple hasn't released the source yet (or if they will at some point). There are some hints that there might be Intellectual Property issues involved. This post on one of Apple's Darwin mailing lists indicates that there are IP issues that precluded the release of one of their Intel ethernet drivers. If the Intel Kernel contains licensed code from Intel (for TPM or EFI or something else) or licensed code for Rosetta then they might have problems releasing the code.
People at the FDA are just scared that Alex Krycek is going to inject one of them with some nano-bots and then kill them with his PDA unless they do as he says.
The iPod page is back to normal now. I wasn't the only one who saw it though. Everything Apple caught it first. You can still catch the screenshot from my site as well.
If you go to the iPod page on Apple's website there appears to be an error. This is the text:
Home > Hardware > MacBook
Perhaps this is a slip-up signaling the near release of the MacBook (sans Pro) to replace the iBook line. You can catch a screenshot here (until my server melts down).
Lets just hope that those that trust the Internet are using multiple sources to get their information. That's one of the best aspects of the Internet - to quickly get information from many sources.
Hopefully people aren't putting all their trust in Joe Schmoe's blog (or any other single source).
Actually, when using Aperture the Graphics card is the most important part of your machine. You don't need the fastest G5 with 4 or 8 GB of memory (though it always helps), what you need is a very fast Graphics card. This has been very hard for many people to understand because traditional programs like Photoshop rely almost solely on the CPU for their speed. Aperture is an entirely different program because it relies very heavily on the GPU for its speed.
I'd guess that the low end G5 (Dual-core 2.0 GHz) with an NVIDIA 7800 GT would probably outperform a Quad 2.5 GHz G5 with the stock NVIDIA 6600 graphics card. Not to say that the NVIDIA 6600 performs badly in Aperture, it doesn't, but the 7800 should perform much better, even in a slower machine. Also, the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro which was the default GPU in many of the earlier G5s doesn't perform very well in Aperture. For people with this card you don't need a new/better/faster G5 so much as you just need a better GPU.
When you do have a good graphics card Aperture performs very, very well.
Except that these are bugs for Aperture 1.0. Now that 1.1 has been released I wonder how many of these are still an issue.
Also, there are problems with the Ars review. It starts out by saying that "Aperture is not a competitor to Photoshop" but then goes on to review Aperture as if it were a competitor to Photoshop. Basically it glosses over some of Aperture's strongest features, completely leaving out many of them, and then compares Aperture directly with Photoshop. The reviewer forgets that Aperture is not a competitor to Photoshop.
Most of the negative reviews of Aperture are done be people that don't actually understand that it is not Photoshop. And most of the positive reviews of Aperture are by people that understand what it should be used for. Understand your tools and use the right one for the specific job you need to do.
When I read the article on ThinkSecret, which is entirely a rumor, I thought to myself "I wonder how long it will take for this unfounded rumor to spread as if it were fact through the Internet like wildfire." Well, obviously the answer to that is not very long.
It's also obvious that whoever wrote the ThinkSecret article hasn't actually used Aperture. While Aperture is not perfect it does many thing much better than anyone else and some things that no else does. It's multi-monitor support is better than any other application on the market. And its photo organization and rating features are among the best. In my opinion Aperture was designed very well. Sure there are bugs, but it's only at 1.1 right now which is a good improvement over 1.0.
I don't think that Aperture will be going away any time soon.
Yes, but for most of the recent product introductions Apple has sent out media invitations a week or so before about their upcoming products. For this announcement there was nothing, just a press release. They've generated a lot more buzz with the special media events.
Interesting that the announcement was made without any kind of special media event that gets the entire tech world whipped up into a frenzy. Apple gets so much free press from their media events that it seems a bit unwise to have a product announcement without one. Maybe they didn't want the inevitable letdown by all the fanboyz wanting a new video iPod followed by predictions of Apple's pending doom because they only announced a new computer.
The potential for mass defections is definitely there, but I think the most likely new Apple customers will be the geek crowd, or those "in the know." I'm sure that Apple will get a lot of experienced computer users (a.k.a. the Slashdot crowd) to switch now that they can fall back to Windows when they need to, but I think that Joe users will just stick with what they know not even aware that an Apple computer could possibly run Windows.
As easy as Boot Camp is to use and get Windows installed, you still have to install Windows. That's not something that your average users knows how or even wants to do. They want their computer to just work.
I suppose as the expert crowd buys more Macs then they'll become the tech support for all their friends and relatives so they could take care of the Boot Camp installation. It's just not something that's going to happen overnight.
Does WinXP have drivers for the graphics card in the Intel Macs? That's the real question. If the graphics card isn't fully supported then it'll be difficult to play any modern game.
Darl can't even eat his own dogfood... http://www.sco.com/ was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 9-Mar-2006 20:57:45 GMT
Don't you get it, Darl owns Linux - IBM stole his code and put it in Linux therefore Darl owns Linux. So of course it's OK for SCO to run Linux because they own it all.
If that bit of reasoning makes sense to you then I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn that's for sale.
Slashdot Mirror
The baseline JPEG format is not proprietary and is not owned by Forgent.
What happened here is that Forgent sat on a patent while the JPEG format was drafted with the purpose of being open and patent-free. Compression Labs (which Forgent now owns) was a part of the JPEG committee and thus was required to disclose any patents that might deal with the format that the committee was developing. Compression Labs was silent on the matter and Forgent only decided to litigate their patent after many years of silence and after JPEG had become a standard. The patent is likely invalidated by priori art and Forgent is probably also barred by laches due to their delay in enforcing the patent.
I'd rather that no one settle with them, but the reality is that settling is probably cheaper than litigating.
Just because everyone that buys an iPod doesn't buy music from the iTunes store doesn't mean that it (iTunes) isn't successful. Success is measured in different ways. If they are making a profit then they are successful. You don't have to dominate sales to be successful. Also, given that Apple has like 80-90% market share for all legal music downloads then I'd call them successful.
It's going to take a while before downloads overtake CD sales (if ever), but that doesn't mean that a new technology in a new market isn't successful.
I'm posting this from my treo in an airplane. we've just landed so cell phones are OK. anyway, the only thing banned on flights is liquids of all kinds (minus the exceptions). Only flights to the UK have restrictions on electronics. So don't worry about being without your laptop or phone unless you're flying to the UK. I imagine that the UK restrictions will be lifted when the threat has passed.
SCO filed the lawsuits in Utah, where they had the best chance of winning.
SCO filed the lawsuits (IBM & Novell, the AutoZone & DaimlerChrysler suits were filed elsewhere) in Utah because SCO is based in Utah. Also, SCO is based in Lindon, Utah, not Salt Lake City so I'm not sure how SLC is then associated with SCO - maybe because the court is located in SLC?
So, for Mac application developers, here's a better list:
- BBEdit - the best text editor, period.
- Interface Builder - the best GUI builder.
- Shark - if performance is important then there's no better tool.
- Xcode - well, there's really no other choice these days, and it's getting better.
- AppKiDo - for quick reference to the Cocoa APIs.
- Terminal - good enough for me.
- OmniGraffle - for application/class modeling and design.
There are many other important and useful applications, but these ones really are the core essentials for application development (at least for me). Anything I left out?FileMerge - free with Apple's Developer tools - is a good utility for merging files and folders.
Also, BBEdit/TextWrangler both have a good compare utility and TextWrangler is free.
My favorite though is CodeWarrior's compare utility. It is simple and easy to use but CodeWarrior is now dead. Plus, there would be no point in buying CW just for its compare utility. Still, it's probably the one I use the most.
I've found that the OSX developer program Sampler (which comes free with the developer distribution) is also a great program useful for getting a quick feel for where the bottle necks in my program are. Sampler is really intuitive to use, and it provides a nice way of navigating the calling tree of your program allowing you to see how different functions are spending what fraction of compute time.
The only reason to be using Sampler instead of Shark is because you haven't found Shark yet. Shark is part of Apple's CHUD tools that you can download here. It is quite possibly the best profiler that you'll find anywhere on any platform. And best of all it's free.
I probably use Shark on average 2-3 times a day, every day. It has been instrumental in locating and fixing countless performance bottlenecks. Download it and give it a try, you won't regret it.
I agree the headline is horribly misleading. First of all, Western Union is just not blocking transfers outright, they are delaying or blocking some transfers. From the article:
Most of the flagged transactions are delayed a few hours. Some are blocked entirely. [Emphasis mine]
Second, it isn't just Western Union that is doing this, other financial institutions do it as well as the parent points out.
Third, they're not specifically targeting Arabs, it's just that many of the names of Arab terrorists are extremely common in the Arab world. And since it was Arab terrorists that struck on Sept. 11th then they are the ones that are currently under the most scrutiny.
Really this was just a loaded Slashdot headline.
You failed to ask yourself the simple questions of "Why do Arabs do terrorist activities?".
And I'm sure the answer to that question in your warped mind is - Because the U.S. made them do it. Or maybe it's because the Devil made them do it, or Mohammed, or Jesus or Cartman. Any excuse you can come up with to blame anyone but the people directly responsible for carrying out terrorist activities. It's not their fault, it's because of someone else.
And it's probably also safe to say that many more Arabs have died at the hands of their own people than by the U.S.
These seem like questions marketing would ask. People that are actually in charge of OS X's development wouldn't need to ask these questions because they would understand the reasons why people would want the kernel's source code.
At any rate, we still don't know why Apple hasn't released the source yet (or if they will at some point). There are some hints that there might be Intellectual Property issues involved. This post on one of Apple's Darwin mailing lists indicates that there are IP issues that precluded the release of one of their Intel ethernet drivers. If the Intel Kernel contains licensed code from Intel (for TPM or EFI or something else) or licensed code for Rosetta then they might have problems releasing the code.
HA HA!
People at the FDA are just scared that Alex Krycek is going to inject one of them with some nano-bots and then kill them with his PDA unless they do as he says.
The iPod page is back to normal now. I wasn't the only one who saw it though. Everything Apple caught it first. You can still catch the screenshot from my site as well.
If you go to the iPod page on Apple's website there appears to be an error. This is the text:
Home > Hardware > MacBook
Perhaps this is a slip-up signaling the near release of the MacBook (sans Pro) to replace the iBook line. You can catch a screenshot here (until my server melts down).
Lets just hope that those that trust the Internet are using multiple sources to get their information. That's one of the best aspects of the Internet - to quickly get information from many sources.
Hopefully people aren't putting all their trust in Joe Schmoe's blog (or any other single source).
Actually, when using Aperture the Graphics card is the most important part of your machine. You don't need the fastest G5 with 4 or 8 GB of memory (though it always helps), what you need is a very fast Graphics card. This has been very hard for many people to understand because traditional programs like Photoshop rely almost solely on the CPU for their speed. Aperture is an entirely different program because it relies very heavily on the GPU for its speed.
I'd guess that the low end G5 (Dual-core 2.0 GHz) with an NVIDIA 7800 GT would probably outperform a Quad 2.5 GHz G5 with the stock NVIDIA 6600 graphics card. Not to say that the NVIDIA 6600 performs badly in Aperture, it doesn't, but the 7800 should perform much better, even in a slower machine. Also, the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro which was the default GPU in many of the earlier G5s doesn't perform very well in Aperture. For people with this card you don't need a new/better/faster G5 so much as you just need a better GPU.
When you do have a good graphics card Aperture performs very, very well.
Except that these are bugs for Aperture 1.0. Now that 1.1 has been released I wonder how many of these are still an issue.
Also, there are problems with the Ars review. It starts out by saying that "Aperture is not a competitor to Photoshop" but then goes on to review Aperture as if it were a competitor to Photoshop. Basically it glosses over some of Aperture's strongest features, completely leaving out many of them, and then compares Aperture directly with Photoshop. The reviewer forgets that Aperture is not a competitor to Photoshop.
Most of the negative reviews of Aperture are done be people that don't actually understand that it is not Photoshop. And most of the positive reviews of Aperture are by people that understand what it should be used for. Understand your tools and use the right one for the specific job you need to do.
When I read the article on ThinkSecret, which is entirely a rumor, I thought to myself "I wonder how long it will take for this unfounded rumor to spread as if it were fact through the Internet like wildfire." Well, obviously the answer to that is not very long.
It's also obvious that whoever wrote the ThinkSecret article hasn't actually used Aperture. While Aperture is not perfect it does many thing much better than anyone else and some things that no else does. It's multi-monitor support is better than any other application on the market. And its photo organization and rating features are among the best. In my opinion Aperture was designed very well. Sure there are bugs, but it's only at 1.1 right now which is a good improvement over 1.0.
I don't think that Aperture will be going away any time soon.
Yes, but for most of the recent product introductions Apple has sent out media invitations a week or so before about their upcoming products. For this announcement there was nothing, just a press release. They've generated a lot more buzz with the special media events.
Interesting that the announcement was made without any kind of special media event that gets the entire tech world whipped up into a frenzy. Apple gets so much free press from their media events that it seems a bit unwise to have a product announcement without one. Maybe they didn't want the inevitable letdown by all the fanboyz wanting a new video iPod followed by predictions of Apple's pending doom because they only announced a new computer.
The potential for mass defections is definitely there, but I think the most likely new Apple customers will be the geek crowd, or those "in the know." I'm sure that Apple will get a lot of experienced computer users (a.k.a. the Slashdot crowd) to switch now that they can fall back to Windows when they need to, but I think that Joe users will just stick with what they know not even aware that an Apple computer could possibly run Windows.
As easy as Boot Camp is to use and get Windows installed, you still have to install Windows. That's not something that your average users knows how or even wants to do. They want their computer to just work.
I suppose as the expert crowd buys more Macs then they'll become the tech support for all their friends and relatives so they could take care of the Boot Camp installation. It's just not something that's going to happen overnight.
This just means that his kids do use Google and they do have iPods.
Why?
Games.
Does WinXP have drivers for the graphics card in the Intel Macs? That's the real question. If the graphics card isn't fully supported then it'll be difficult to play any modern game.
Darl can't even eat his own dogfood ...
http://www.sco.com/ was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 9-Mar-2006 20:57:45 GMT
Don't you get it, Darl owns Linux - IBM stole his code and put it in Linux therefore Darl owns Linux. So of course it's OK for SCO to run Linux because they own it all.
If that bit of reasoning makes sense to you then I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn that's for sale.