Apple didn't license it. MS only packaged the technology, they neither developed it nor own it. MS was approached by the chip manufacturer as they're a major mouse vendor, MS took a look at it and then locked up the first few months production. Now there's several vendors, supply has eased up and the technology has been improved.
First of all I have to confess I neither use the Apple hockey-puck mouse nor a single-button mouse. I use am more traditionial mouse-shape on my Mac, one with two buttons, one aliased to command-click.
That said I have to confess the Hockeypuck mouse isn't too bad IF ONE USES IT AS INTENDED. Instead of resting one's palm over the body of the mouse the Hockeypuck mouse is meant to just be manipulated by fingers, your hand arched down so your delicate tendons aren't stretched. I know folks who use the hockeypuck that way, one of them a Techwriter and they looove it.
As for the single button - the reality is that most users are completely unaware that there even is a second button on their mouse. Several years ago we ran a mouse-tracking app at a company I worked at and discoved that 90-some percent of our users (all Windows) never used the right button in the month we ran the tracking (though they racked up an amazing number of mouse-miles.) Sure gamers, unix folks, and geeks (slashdotters) will use it but frankly J. Random User doesn't care all that much.
In the case of Apple's OS there really isn't all that much need for a second button. They've engineered the OS so that one never *needs* to take their hands off the keyboard (REAL geeks don't need no steenkin mouse!) and for point-and-click the single button covers all of the basic needs. For advanced stuff yeah it's a pain to use the modifier key but at that point one can get a new mouse rather then throwing it at the vast majority who'll never use it.
Apple has always been big on usability testing & Steve Jobs is not one to be held back by tradition. I expect Apple will continue with single button mice 'till the day that their testing shows that they'd be better-served with a double-button mouse. That day they'll undoubtably ship it - either as a BTO or standard across their entire line.
Personally I'm waiting for a wireless padless-optical mouse with two buttons & a rollerwheel. Logitech is releasing one any day now and assuming they deliver usable drivers I'll be purchasing a few.
In the meantime let Apple ship single-button mice. It works well with their OS, seems incredibly low maintainence and it's one less thing to distract the not-power users with.
What would happen if those in charge of Mozilla made the next milestone release "1.0" ?
Every tech journalist, web site, and semi-interested geek would download it and check it out. They're going to compare it to two things: the previous Netscape Communicator and to MS's Internet Explorer (the more dedicated might also do a sidebar on Opera, Lynx, or some platform-specic browser but this is really a two-horse race between Mozilla & MS IE.)
So how does Mozilla compare? Not well - yet. It's almost baked but it honestly isn't there. It crashes a little too often. It still chokes on the odd bit of HTML. It's interface is butt-ugly (though that can be changed pretty easily.) Some features only work erratically. In short it's gonna look like a well-intentioned failure next to IE.
Sure Mozilla has more potential but 99% of those reading the reviews and trying it out for themselves don't give a fig for 'potential'. Yeah it will adhere better to web-standards (though not nearly as completely as many had hoped.) Yeah it's much smaller then IE. Yeah it's potentially much faster. Yeah it's nicely componentized so parts of it can get reused into many, many other applications. Yeah it has many included tools like chat/irc/ldap/etc. that are better then their MS equivalents (if MS even has equivalents - conversely none of the included tools are really as good as the dedicated tools already out there.) But when it comes to that crucial all-important 'first impression' - well, it's gonna get it's tires kicked but they'll drive out of thew showroom with their good-ole MS IE.
Why? Because Mozilla still isn't done. Sure if you're the first in the market you can toss out bad code and the market will lap it up but then they've no other choice. In todays market there is another choice - a massive, mature, ubiquitious, free, no-risk (well, excepting security-wise) choice. It runs well on the #1 & #2 consumer & corporate desktops (Win & Mac.) Up against that Mozilla better look good, run good, feel good. It had better do all of that on all of the platforms it's released on (and "sucks less then NS on linux" isn't gonna get you much.)
The last thing Mozilla needs to is a premature release and to look like a looser next to MS IE. Sure under the hood it may not be a looser, and in six months it may not be a looser, but why take the hit for releasing something not ready when they can wait a bit more and really knock everyones' socks off.
Just hope that it's not too late and that it really does knock everyone's socks off.
As one of the few technology journalists familier to the general public how well do you feel the popular media covers high technology, specifically computers? Are there common flaws you see endemic to the various media (print, broadcast, internet) and what do you believe could be done to improve them? Which media do you feel do the best job, both as a class and with specific examples.
Around the US & around the world there are folks trying to recreate the success of Silicon Valley. As someone who's been in the thick of things for a generation how do you see it evolving?
Will "The Valley" remain remain the unique hothouse that it's been or will other regions develop their own equivalents? Is it possible that it's own success will strangle Silicon Valley with rising costs, traffic, and other quality-of-life issues? Will the need to remain in the thick of things, close to venture capitol, an appopriate workforce, and all of the other features of Silicon Valley over-ride it's negatives? Do you see the rise of contract-employment, telecommuting, and global technology diffusion eventually making such a concentration of resources irrelevant?
Finally, what can other places do to compete with Silicon Valley and encourage their own indigenious high-tech industries?
From your privilaged position what technologies do you think should-have-made-it but didn't? What technologies do you think were ahead-of-their time but might resurface? Finally, what companies that suprised you by not making a go of it when they seemed like sure-things?
Basically - where do you think things zigged when they shoulda zagged?
Though their web-site has been butchered the FTP servers and their files remain active. The beta Linux drivers are there as are the beta Win2K drivers. The Win9x drivers and developers kits also remain.
The interesting question is if someone does buy Aureal's technology will they open it (and expect to recoup on hardware sales) or at least license it to developers who can continue to support it.
What is it with the Apple-Rumor du jure? Is the Slashteam so bored they're collecting all of the 2nd rate rumors going around and post 'em all? Let's just rename this "Gossip for Nerds - Myths that don't matter". I thought only traditionial media had the 'silly season' when they were so starved they'd run anything.
Yes - Rumors claim Apple has been beta-testing a handwriting recognition system.
Yes - it is rumored to be based on the last generation of Newton handwriting recognition.
This is rather puzzling as there's almost no one left at Apple who understands the Newton OS or it's languages (most everyone from the Newton team is long gone.)
Appl has a long history of developing kewl technologies then letting them go stale: witness Plaintalk, Quickdraw GX, Dylan, OpenDoc, Bento, Data Detectors, Word Services, Mac Speech, Hot Tamale, Game Sprockets, etc. Handwriting recognition is one of that list and appears just as inactive - no new research visible, no APIs showing up for devolopers, etc.
There hasn't been any confirmation of any of this, just a set of rumors. No leaked copies, no screen-dumps, no products to utilize it, nothing. Like so many rumors (the set-top box, the Apple/Palm PDA, the new Duo, the 17" iMac, etc.) this just appears the wishful thinking of someone looking to generate page-hits.
The idea of Apple dropping keyboards in favor of handwriting recognition is foolish. Nobody on any platform is talking about this: Keyboards are far more mature & efficient at information entry then handwriting. Witness the 2 (or was it 3) incarnations of Pen-Windows.
The only likely uses of pen-input are for graphic-artists or for limited-interaction applications like web-browsing or TV/VCR programming. Palm-type stuff they're OK at but nobody seriously wants to spend all day scribbling away.
There is a part of Apples new product-line missing. With the cube's introduction the grid went from 4 items to 6; we still haven't seen #6. It could be a web-pad, it could be a set-top Mac/Tivo/WebTV-type device, it could be anything, mebbe even the fabled iBrator. Whatever it is you can be sure it won't involve stripping the keyboard FROM an existing product (not after just releasing a new keyboard & mouse!)
Handriting-recognition is like voice-recognition - it's an awkward interface that suffers from the 1-in-20-problem: Even if only 1-in-20 entries contains a mistake you loose all efficiency trying to catch & correct them.
Please - there are lots of interesting things going on with Apple these days, many of interest to Slashdots readership - why bother with the 2nd-rate rumors?
Seriously - publishers aren't dopes. They've lots of experience at selling folks material and making a profit for themselves (and some for their authors.)
Do you see any of them running into online-publishing? No. Why not? IP rights. Copying. Insufficient mass of readers. Nasty format: how many folks want to sit at a desk reading anything that takes a significent amount of time? How many books do you see printed in 8.5"x11" or A4 format? Lack of control: no numbers for the best-seller lists, no metrics for comparing popularity, no 2nd & 3rd reprints...
Furthermore there are entire libraries of free stuff out there that folks are ignoring (see Project Guttenberg) and you expect your for-cost story will make a splash? If that were so we'd be swamped by chain-mails of expired-copyright texts. I don't know about you but except for my cousin Bob's drunken email ramblings about "The Greys" I haven't gotten any books emailed to me lately.
Heck, the Stephen King thing was a publicity stunt and aside from a rash of piracy it's probably one of his least *read* stories ever. Few folks can get the kind of press he did and even then I doubt he made as much money as he could of with other mediums.
My advice? Write. Sweat blood. Try like mad to find a reptutable publisher. Listen to their editors and do as they tell you. Release the book in the traditionial (marginally profitable) fashion. Move on.
The unspoken assumption is that somehow Canada would be a haven for MS. Why? Canadian law is no friendlier to monoplies then US law. Indeed the Canadian "Competition Board" is more active then it's US equivalent.
As to being offered a campus and tax incentives to move - what place wouldn't? The worlds richest person, the worlds most profitable company, a couple thousand millionaires on staff, the rest highly paid/highly educated professionials... Every province / state / locality in the world would love to have them decamp from Redmond and set up shop locally.
Is it likely? Well, it's not like they have particularly unique facilities. Boeing couldn't leave it's home because it requires an airport, hangers, and enormous custom machinery that is difficult and costly to move. On the other hand MS just needs a large campus with fast net access and rooms full of PCs.
Wht would stop them? First Canada is *not* the US and becoming a Canadian company would require some financial restructuring, a completely different set of reviews for US Gov't/US Mil. contracts, staff would require Canadian Work Visa's, business and employment law differ, contracts would have to be rewritten, benefits differ, etc. Individuals would be likely loath to move from their homes and country and probably jump ship en masse to other high-tech firms. The disruption would be extensive and Bill Gates does *not* like distractions.
Frankly I don't think this is much of a news story. You could probably and get the same story for Fairfield County Virginia, Durham North Carolina, Austin Texas, Cork Ireland, or any other place aggressive about importing high-tech business. MS probably gets several offers a year of varying viability regarding moving. Offering to toss in some relocation rebates or a 'tax vacation' is standard practice.
I don't beleive Adobe & Apple wouldn't collaborate on this. Specs are great things but until they're implelemented no-one knows just how complete they are (or not.) Apple the first company doing a GUI rendering layer based on PDF and I can't believe Adobe has all of the answers required all laid out, or even knows all of the answers internally yet.
Rather I expect there was a daily stream of email between the Quartz/Aqua folks at Apple and the PDF folks at Adobe. I'll even bet there were a few Adobe staffers stationed at Apple for quick response time.
Furthermore there's a hell of a lot of patented material in this area - I'd be amazed if Apple didn't have to sign not a few agreements to get to use Adobe's material (sure the spec say "do this then that with alpha-blended layer using a strangename-algorithm" but guess who has the rights to algorithm, or has the optimal code snippet, etc?
Whaddya mean Adobe has nothing to do with Quartz? Who do you think designed it?
Long ago Apple came out with these neat machines called the "Lisa" and it's little cousin "Macintosh". To go with them Apple licensed this new lisp-derived language called "Postscript" from these guys called "Adobe". It was a hit and the one-two punch of a bitmapped display and a cheap high(ish) quality laserprinter running "Postscript" made Macs a hit in the graphics community. (Interestingly the most powerful computer Apple sold for a while was the CPU in it's Laserwriter.)
Later on Steve Jobs founded NeXT and having seen the popularity of Postscript and also the problems of having two rendering-models decided to equip his boxes with Postscript all of the way through. So he paid Adobe a pretty penny to develop "Display Postscript" for him which he then licensed. Jobs went on to use this single-rendering-model and to also ship a cheap printer who's brains were actually your system's CPU running D-PS. Adobe took the skills it had developed in the project and rolled them back into faster and more sophisticated Postscript engines such as commonly found in Postscript level II products.
In the meantime the world went on and Adobe started to realize that there were some inherent limitations on having an entirely stream-based file-format (eg it's pretty difficult to pull a single part out of it for seperate manipulation) and that there was a coming need for a cross-platform device-independant rich-content documuments. So Adobe developed Postscript level III which is a fairly object-oriented architecture and then went all out and turned it into Portable Document File (PDF) technology.
In the meantime Apple buys Next and looks to renogiate the Postscript license. Adobe isn't interested in this but decides to go back to the well and convinces Apple to underwrite the development of a Display PDF (hmm - sounds like we've been here before..) Apple agrees and thus begins the process that produces "Quartz" - a joint Adobe/Apple rendering layer implementing Adobe's PDF technologies on Apple's shiny rebuilt OS.
So who "owns" Quartz? Well, they both did the work on it and although Adobe owns the basic file-formats and technologies it's Apple's implementations of them.
There'll probably be some small (smaller then for Display Postscript at least) licensing fee going from Apple to Adobe for every copy of MacOS X sold but Adobe of course also now has a bunch of paid-for engineering, retained a critical position with one of it's most influential customers and assured adoption of it's next-gen product. They've also killed any chance of Apple's own GX technologies ever surfacing or any futher development of the Apple/Microsoft TrueType threat. Finally Apple of course now has the most advanced rendering technology out there, one that can assure cross-platform fidelity and complete integration into every serious graphics application in the forseeable future.
So how to get Display PDF onto some other platform? Well you can try and do a Ghostscript-type re-engineering but as folks have learnt this is some very sophisticated, very patented, very specialized material. The existing code is a good starting point but it's going to be a lot of work to re-apply and who knows what obstacles there are.
Adobe themselves might come out with it for other platforms in the future depending on their contracts and licensing with Apple (Apple might get a two year lead on anything for instance.) This will likely be closed-source and probably fairly expensive. I could see graphics-folks wanting it on NT for instance but MS is gung-ho about their own technologies and this would be both competition and an additionial layer of abstraction for applications to deal with.
Adobe could concievably be convinced that it's in their best interest to release it for a next-gen X-type product. Unfortunatly I doubt they'd let out anything like a complete implementation but rather something that couldn't be used to compete with their own products.
So - Quartz on abother platform? Not unless Apple and Adobe see a profit in this. Display PDF on another platform? Not unless Adobe (and possibly Apple) see a profit in this. Unauthorized ports? Possible but unlikely due to the sophisitication required.
-- Michael
*I couldn't be bothered to keep all of the biCapitalizations straight - deal.
"... twice as fast." to a reporter sitting in a chair watching a trade-show presentation - we're not talking about benchmarks here.
Two processors doesn't mean 2x speed. However Apple has moved to a microkernel design in the past year (hey - nobody noticed!) and Photoshop was redesigned for multi-processing years ago when Daystar developed the technology for Apple.
Thus it could well be approximately twice as fast for some operations in some applications.
Now, since there are only a very few applications that even begin to warm up a G4 this isn't that big a deal to the general public. However for those who are running cycle-eaters like Photoshop it is great to see this technology back on Apple's roadmap.
Make the ship date for Mac OSX Consumer pre-installed January 2001 (not 11 months later.)
Actually, a bit more on ship dates. I'd like to note that Next was usually quite good about getting things out on schedule and back under Jobs Apple's ship-dates and product-avialability have improved dramatically.
-- Michael
ps - For the l00sers who constantly post to every story saying "Please explain this to me" or "What does XYZ mean" fer Cthulus-sake this is news for GEEKS on the freaking WEB! Just how damn hard is it to actually look up something on your own? It's not like your ass has to ever even leave it's comfy chair... If you're lost with things like Carbon, Cocoa, Darwin, etc. then why not just go to the obvious place like apple.com or at least to a search engine before bleating out your ignorance.
Sorry, but every time an interesting story comes out 30% of the postings are from folks who couldn't be bothered to actully read the reference material before compulsively posting and another 30% are from folks too lazy to make at least an attempt to look up something for themselves (hint: your butt is at the end of your thumb!)
OK, lots of Slashdotters are really out of touch with the Apple & the Mac market. Here's a few points to keep folks on the reality track:
Apple is a hardware company. MacOS is simply another way of selling their boxes.
Apple is not interested in becoming a OS vendor. They have a closed platform to develop for and know their limitations: the wild-'n'wooly world of Intel x86 boxes is not a profitable place for them. They've stated repeatedly and has the numbers to back it up: they're not going to become an OS vendor. They're more likely to start selling hairdryers (or the fabled iBrator) then shrink-wrapped MacOS-X-for-Intel-x86 at Wal-Mart.
The chance of Apple opening up Quartz, Carbon, Cocoa, QuickTime, or Aqua to Open Source or GPL is something approaching nil. These are the technologies Apple has paid a pretty penny to develop and their customers pay a premium to use. If you were an Apple stock-holder would you want them to do so?
Apple never had "clones" (Apple's proprietary "Toolbox" embedded in a ROM stopped that.) They did have a "licensing program" with which they attempted to reach markets that Apple itself couldn't. They killed the program when the licensees started to savage Apple's core markets. Apple was loosing money on both the licenses and on the lost sales - not a smart move for a company and one they eventually stopped. Oh - and Power Computing? it was about to collapse anyway as it's financials proved out.
Apple is again over 5% of the market and growing quickly. That doesn't mean they're about to challenge MS's OS dominance but they're going strong and expanding their market. That's not bad for a company that was written off a few years ago.
Darwin is not the same as MacOS X - it's simply the Next-derived Mach kernel and support services. Yes, it's the base layer, but it's not the goodies. Getting it to run in Intel x86 is no great feat - NextStep was ported to 5 CPU's already including Intel x86 (PowerPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS.) All Apple's done is maintained that Intel x86 portability for the kernel. The big question would be if Apple could do the same for the other layers such as the Quartz rendering layer or the Aqua interface. Without those you've just got a very nice, very mature formerly-commercial Mach implementation - hot but not MacOS X.
MacOS X has been shipping for well over a year. MacOS XServer is available at your local Apple Vendor or direct from Apple. What everyone is talking about is the MacOS X Workstation implementation. While everyone's been staring at that hand though Apple's been busy learning and tweaking with the Server version so when it finally ships the rest they'll have it nailed.
Porting to Darwin won't be any more difficult then porting to any other BSD. With X now in place it'll be that much easier to use an interface. The big question will be how easy it'll be to make those same apps work through the Quartz/Aqua layers and become "native". If it's as straightforward as it now appears then Apple may have a tremendous position sitting at the crossroads of the market.
Don't ignore the contributions Apple can make to the market as a whole. They've already pioneered the use of XML for putting a uniform graphical interface on the notoriously idiosyncratic *nix config files.^1 They also provide a great transition market for ISV's heading towards the *nix market but wanting to go through a more traditional platform. This could well be the *nix for "the rest of them" (the non-geek population.)
As to behind schedule - well the beta is indeed going to be a few months behind schedule. How does this affect the rest of the timeline? Well, Apple hasn't changed their "will ship pre-installed in December 2001" commitment. Furthermore with Apple's Unified Motherboard Architecture finally in place (gone are the days of 50 models a year all with unique slots and ROMs and bus variations!) this looks like a legitimate possibility.
Finally, remember Apple has been a massive developer of cool ahead-of-their-time technologies. Apparently Jobs has been going through the warehouse and pulling some of these off of the shelf now that they've a strong OS and a massively powerful CPU to ride upon. Expect to see some surprises coming out from Apple - Jobs is ever the showman and no slouch when it comes to hot tech.
-- Michael
1. Yes, some invariably CS Sophomore will pop up saying *they* thought of whatever, in this case XML-based forms for providing a uniform interface to the various config files years ago and mebbe they even have a few lines of code somewhere - well it didn't really happen then and Apple has now made it so. That alone is "A Good Thing".
TV commercials automatically print coupons to your TV-Printer?
The TV News comes with a summary of the headlines and URLs to the online vid-clips and script?
"Sweeps Week" means an endless streams of printed ads for "A Very Special Episode Of..."
Another MS Outlook virus generates billions of copies of itself all CC'd to folks TV-Printers resulting in a 9-month print backlog of "ILOVEYOU"s...
After 10pm you recieve a pizza-delivery service ad every 15 minutes...
You come home and discover the neighbor down the street with a basement full of Ham & CB trnasmitters has accidentally hit the frequency that not only completely snows your cable but also generates page after page of solid black printouts from your nifty TV-Printer...
A bizarre and inexplicable interaction between your ITV, TV-Printer, TIVO, Cable Modem, DVD player, VCR and PC creates an autonomous entity that insists on watching TV-Judge shows 24 hours a day and messes with your home-banking if you so much as approach it...
Just a quick note - the hard drives used in these applications aren't the cheapie ones avialiable at your corner screwdriver-shoppe but rather "AV" models. These are designed to stream data without interruption. Most of the other drives are built to periodically recalibrate themselves which of course would lead to an interruption in your "Powderpuff Girls" viewing pleasure.
Re:iMovie's lack of features
on
iMovie For Free
·
· Score: 3
Credits are created almost instantly if you feed a properly formatted text file directly into QuickTime. You can then take the resulting movie and drop it into your project in under a minute, including setting fancy effects.
As to crashing while MacOS 9.04 isn't going to set records for stability it's probably the most stable MacOS in years (and more stable then Win9x.) I'd suggest taking a look into your settings and see if there's not something odd someplace (patched a few too many traps in the system with 3rd party add-ons is most common.)
You'll also learn to save before doing anything dramatic with any editing package on any platform. This will become second nature to you eventually. Indeed I've seen professionials who freak out if they can't do their usual cycle of save-sip coffee-plan the next step-resume (not naming names.)
This wasn't so much altruism on Apple's part as practicality.
The software is easily availiable everywhere on the net, their automated update isn't particularly good at discerning Mac models (and can be fooled easily if someone cared) and it's not like the software can be used on anything but Apple hardware anyway.
Finally, the ability to edit digital video isn't much good unless you can get *at* the digital video so what you're really getting is another incentive to buy a Firewire (aka 1394 aka iLink) Mac.*
So they've eliminated the qualifier-hassle and given folks more reasons to buy their Mac's, particularly ones with Firewire. This is much like when they shipped the original Macs with a software suite (MacWrite, MacPaint, etc.) to show off their capabilities.
Lastly - it's not entirely clear that Apple *wanted* to give away the software or it just wasn't able to get the qualifiers to work.
-- Michael
*Trust me, if you really just want to edit down the family video so they look less like a 'Cops' episode and more like folks enjoying themselves you'll want onboard Firewire.
First lesson of business writing: Write to your audience.
What we just saw was clearly clueless as to it's audience - it's what I'd expect to read in one of those lame sidebars in "CIO". It's not vetted - it's gelded. I expect a public statement to go through a review process (heck, I've been part of that team) but there's a point beyond which the thing gets so anemic on content you just gotta have mercy on it.
One trick I learnt long ago is to picture how smoething would be presented; the layout, the typeface, paper stock, etc - apply the tone of the text into a physical manifestation. This would be Courier 10pt on a damp piece of cheap photo-copy paper. If it was a speech it would have been delivered in monotone to an emptying room.
It's not that/. is a particularly great venue for SCO to be interacting in but they accepted the interview, presumably scouted the territory, then burped up something that could have been pasted together by an over-medicated intern.
Thus they blew what could have been a decent opportunity to plant some marketing seeds, get some geeks interested in what they're doing, establish some creds with a market they're moving into.
Anyone remember Byte Magazine's "Cazuin Reader" circa 1982? It was a device you could swipe over specially printed barcodes on the pages of Byte - I think it lasted 6 months.
That was the first time I saw someone try to integrate different media. It happened again with toys and TV shows (where are they now...) Remember Captain Power and his custom toys that interacted with the TV show? It was also tried with home bar-coders for your groceries (turns out folks don't really care to do their own clerking at home.)
Last year it was "WaveTop" - get your TV schedules and game-demos from PBS TV signals in Win98SE (or Win95v.7 if you prefer.)
Now we're hearing it again. I still don't buy it.
I don't believe there are legions of folks with webcams just itching to install some custom software (which you just *know* will mess up your system *somehow*) for the privilage of holding up magazine pages to the camera. Or newspapar pages. Or catalogs. Besides most folks who have these cams are more interested in holding up decidely more, er, organic things to the cam then trying to get the right focus and lighting on some part of a printed page.
Ain't gonna happen. Or at least - not enough will do so.
Same holds true for folks willing to run an audio-cable from their TV to their PC. Some will, but will enough? No.
Again true for some Palm-size and styled device I've got to dig around to find, scrub over some inconvenient part of the page, walk over and plug into some weird reader (oh great, another thing to plug into my PC and have a wire running across the desk...) in order to see a web page.
Until it's some small cheap device (under US$5.00 per dohickey in bulk) the size, shape and weight of a credit-card calculator, battery life of months, that can be run over an article of interest, tossed in a pocket 'till later, then waved in front of a PC to automagically make the link it ain't gonna happen.
Otherwise too many wires, too much software, too awkward, too embaressing, too little return to bother. URLs are a heck of a lot easier then these other gadgets.
-- Michael
Read the book, saw the movie, starred in the musical...
Frankly I don't have a problem if a company skips the big reference binder if the following conditions are met:
Your phone number, street address, and URL absolutely clearly stamped everywhere on the packaging and in the product.
Free support while I get the damn thing working.
Some kind of decent limited-manual inluded with the most common questions and answers.
A professionially produced online manual, searchable, with direct-access to your bug-list and a clear way to contact your tech-support.
A 3rd party hired to keep the 'online-manual' around for at least a decade in case you folks tank!
A coupon included for some discount on a recommended 3rd-party manual and it had better be a GOOD reference! (not just because some publisher paid you to toss in the coupon...)
They touted it as the next "Titanic". It's not. Indeed it's not even doing that impressively against "The Sixth Sense" when you consider the promotions-engine behind it. It's already being heavily discounted in places like Costco and my corner drug-store.
I stand by my claim that the videotape is not doing at well when compared to it's earlier projections.
It's all moot anyhow as it appears the DVD rumors were unfounded.
-- Michael
Is everyone else already sick of the NYC-Cab-Driving/Pod-Racing Pepsi TV advert for the video?
If Be cared they could be running on current Macs - the truth is they don't care and they're just badmouthing their competitor. The various Linux folks have succeeded, some with Apple's support, others with none, but the results of all of their work is open for Be to study even if it can't be bothered to do so on it's own.
The simple truth is Be ported to Intel, then got invested in by Intel (sits on Board of Directors) and is now moving away from from the Desktop OS market altogether after a decade of never really succeeding. Their giving away of BeOS-lite is simply a publicity stunt (what, they're going to *sell* lots of copies after they've announced they're dropping the product?) and an attempt to mollify the developers they've burnt.
Be's inability to move to the moden Macs speaks more about Jean-Louis Gassée and his team then it does about Apple. It also speaks very loudly about Be's enthusiasm for disinformation and blaming everyone else for their lack of success.
Here's to the little guys and gals who succeeded where Be couldn't go.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple didn't license it. MS only packaged the technology, they neither developed it nor own it. MS was approached by the chip manufacturer as they're a major mouse vendor, MS took a look at it and then locked up the first few months production. Now there's several vendors, supply has eased up and the technology has been improved.
That said I have to confess the Hockeypuck mouse isn't too bad IF ONE USES IT AS INTENDED. Instead of resting one's palm over the body of the mouse the Hockeypuck mouse is meant to just be manipulated by fingers, your hand arched down so your delicate tendons aren't stretched. I know folks who use the hockeypuck that way, one of them a Techwriter and they looove it.
As for the single button - the reality is that most users are completely unaware that there even is a second button on their mouse. Several years ago we ran a mouse-tracking app at a company I worked at and discoved that 90-some percent of our users (all Windows) never used the right button in the month we ran the tracking (though they racked up an amazing number of mouse-miles.) Sure gamers, unix folks, and geeks (slashdotters) will use it but frankly J. Random User doesn't care all that much.
In the case of Apple's OS there really isn't all that much need for a second button. They've engineered the OS so that one never *needs* to take their hands off the keyboard (REAL geeks don't need no steenkin mouse!) and for point-and-click the single button covers all of the basic needs. For advanced stuff yeah it's a pain to use the modifier key but at that point one can get a new mouse rather then throwing it at the vast majority who'll never use it.
Apple has always been big on usability testing & Steve Jobs is not one to be held back by tradition. I expect Apple will continue with single button mice 'till the day that their testing shows that they'd be better-served with a double-button mouse. That day they'll undoubtably ship it - either as a BTO or standard across their entire line.
Personally I'm waiting for a wireless padless-optical mouse with two buttons & a rollerwheel. Logitech is releasing one any day now and assuming they deliver usable drivers I'll be purchasing a few.
In the meantime let Apple ship single-button mice. It works well with their OS, seems incredibly low maintainence and it's one less thing to distract the not-power users with.
Every tech journalist, web site, and semi-interested geek would download it and check it out. They're going to compare it to two things: the previous Netscape Communicator and to MS's Internet Explorer (the more dedicated might also do a sidebar on Opera, Lynx, or some platform-specic browser but this is really a two-horse race between Mozilla & MS IE.)
So how does Mozilla compare? Not well - yet. It's almost baked but it honestly isn't there. It crashes a little too often. It still chokes on the odd bit of HTML. It's interface is butt-ugly (though that can be changed pretty easily.) Some features only work erratically. In short it's gonna look like a well-intentioned failure next to IE.
Sure Mozilla has more potential but 99% of those reading the reviews and trying it out for themselves don't give a fig for 'potential'. Yeah it will adhere better to web-standards (though not nearly as completely as many had hoped.) Yeah it's much smaller then IE. Yeah it's potentially much faster. Yeah it's nicely componentized so parts of it can get reused into many, many other applications. Yeah it has many included tools like chat/irc/ldap/etc. that are better then their MS equivalents (if MS even has equivalents - conversely none of the included tools are really as good as the dedicated tools already out there.) But when it comes to that crucial all-important 'first impression' - well, it's gonna get it's tires kicked but they'll drive out of thew showroom with their good-ole MS IE.
Why? Because Mozilla still isn't done. Sure if you're the first in the market you can toss out bad code and the market will lap it up but then they've no other choice. In todays market there is another choice - a massive, mature, ubiquitious, free, no-risk (well, excepting security-wise) choice. It runs well on the #1 & #2 consumer & corporate desktops (Win & Mac.) Up against that Mozilla better look good, run good, feel good. It had better do all of that on all of the platforms it's released on (and "sucks less then NS on linux" isn't gonna get you much.)
The last thing Mozilla needs to is a premature release and to look like a looser next to MS IE. Sure under the hood it may not be a looser, and in six months it may not be a looser, but why take the hit for releasing something not ready when they can wait a bit more and really knock everyones' socks off.
Just hope that it's not too late and that it really does knock everyone's socks off.
As one of the few technology journalists familier to the general public how well do you feel the popular media covers high technology, specifically computers? Are there common flaws you see endemic to the various media (print, broadcast, internet) and what do you believe could be done to improve them? Which media do you feel do the best job, both as a class and with specific examples.
Will "The Valley" remain remain the unique hothouse that it's been or will other regions develop their own equivalents? Is it possible that it's own success will strangle Silicon Valley with rising costs, traffic, and other quality-of-life issues? Will the need to remain in the thick of things, close to venture capitol, an appopriate workforce, and all of the other features of Silicon Valley over-ride it's negatives? Do you see the rise of contract-employment, telecommuting, and global technology diffusion eventually making such a concentration of resources irrelevant?
Finally, what can other places do to compete with Silicon Valley and encourage their own indigenious high-tech industries?
Basically - where do you think things zigged when they shoulda zagged?
The interesting question is if someone does buy Aureal's technology will they open it (and expect to recoup on hardware sales) or at least license it to developers who can continue to support it.
Please - there are lots of interesting things going on with Apple these days, many of interest to Slashdots readership - why bother with the 2nd-rate rumors?
Seriously - publishers aren't dopes. They've lots of experience at selling folks material and making a profit for themselves (and some for their authors.)
Do you see any of them running into online-publishing? No. Why not? IP rights. Copying. Insufficient mass of readers. Nasty format: how many folks want to sit at a desk reading anything that takes a significent amount of time? How many books do you see printed in 8.5"x11" or A4 format? Lack of control: no numbers for the best-seller lists, no metrics for comparing popularity, no 2nd & 3rd reprints...
Furthermore there are entire libraries of free stuff out there that folks are ignoring (see Project Guttenberg) and you expect your for-cost story will make a splash? If that were so we'd be swamped by chain-mails of expired-copyright texts. I don't know about you but except for my cousin Bob's drunken email ramblings about "The Greys" I haven't gotten any books emailed to me lately.
Heck, the Stephen King thing was a publicity stunt and aside from a rash of piracy it's probably one of his least *read* stories ever. Few folks can get the kind of press he did and even then I doubt he made as much money as he could of with other mediums.
My advice? Write. Sweat blood. Try like mad to find a reptutable publisher. Listen to their editors and do as they tell you. Release the book in the traditionial (marginally profitable) fashion. Move on.
The unspoken assumption is that somehow Canada would be a haven for MS. Why? Canadian law is no friendlier to monoplies then US law. Indeed the Canadian "Competition Board" is more active then it's US equivalent.
As to being offered a campus and tax incentives to move - what place wouldn't? The worlds richest person, the worlds most profitable company, a couple thousand millionaires on staff, the rest highly paid/highly educated professionials... Every province / state / locality in the world would love to have them decamp from Redmond and set up shop locally.
Is it likely? Well, it's not like they have particularly unique facilities. Boeing couldn't leave it's home because it requires an airport, hangers, and enormous custom machinery that is difficult and costly to move. On the other hand MS just needs a large campus with fast net access and rooms full of PCs.
Wht would stop them? First Canada is *not* the US and becoming a Canadian company would require some financial restructuring, a completely different set of reviews for US Gov't/US Mil. contracts, staff would require Canadian Work Visa's, business and employment law differ, contracts would have to be rewritten, benefits differ, etc. Individuals would be likely loath to move from their homes and country and probably jump ship en masse to other high-tech firms. The disruption would be extensive and Bill Gates does *not* like distractions.
Frankly I don't think this is much of a news story. You could probably and get the same story for Fairfield County Virginia, Durham North Carolina, Austin Texas, Cork Ireland, or any other place aggressive about importing high-tech business. MS probably gets several offers a year of varying viability regarding moving. Offering to toss in some relocation rebates or a 'tax vacation' is standard practice.
I don't beleive Adobe & Apple wouldn't collaborate on this. Specs are great things but until they're implelemented no-one knows just how complete they are (or not.) Apple the first company doing a GUI rendering layer based on PDF and I can't believe Adobe has all of the answers required all laid out, or even knows all of the answers internally yet.
Rather I expect there was a daily stream of email between the Quartz/Aqua folks at Apple and the PDF folks at Adobe. I'll even bet there were a few Adobe staffers stationed at Apple for quick response time.
Furthermore there's a hell of a lot of patented material in this area - I'd be amazed if Apple didn't have to sign not a few agreements to get to use Adobe's material (sure the spec say "do this then that with alpha-blended layer using a strangename-algorithm" but guess who has the rights to algorithm, or has the optimal code snippet, etc?
Long ago Apple came out with these neat machines called the "Lisa" and it's little cousin "Macintosh". To go with them Apple licensed this new lisp-derived language called "Postscript" from these guys called "Adobe". It was a hit and the one-two punch of a bitmapped display and a cheap high(ish) quality laserprinter running "Postscript" made Macs a hit in the graphics community. (Interestingly the most powerful computer Apple sold for a while was the CPU in it's Laserwriter.)
Later on Steve Jobs founded NeXT and having seen the popularity of Postscript and also the problems of having two rendering-models decided to equip his boxes with Postscript all of the way through. So he paid Adobe a pretty penny to develop "Display Postscript" for him which he then licensed. Jobs went on to use this single-rendering-model and to also ship a cheap printer who's brains were actually your system's CPU running D-PS. Adobe took the skills it had developed in the project and rolled them back into faster and more sophisticated Postscript engines such as commonly found in Postscript level II products.
In the meantime the world went on and Adobe started to realize that there were some inherent limitations on having an entirely stream-based file-format (eg it's pretty difficult to pull a single part out of it for seperate manipulation) and that there was a coming need for a cross-platform device-independant rich-content documuments. So Adobe developed Postscript level III which is a fairly object-oriented architecture and then went all out and turned it into Portable Document File (PDF) technology.
In the meantime Apple buys Next and looks to renogiate the Postscript license. Adobe isn't interested in this but decides to go back to the well and convinces Apple to underwrite the development of a Display PDF (hmm - sounds like we've been here before..) Apple agrees and thus begins the process that produces "Quartz" - a joint Adobe/Apple rendering layer implementing Adobe's PDF technologies on Apple's shiny rebuilt OS.
So who "owns" Quartz? Well, they both did the work on it and although Adobe owns the basic file-formats and technologies it's Apple's implementations of them.
There'll probably be some small (smaller then for Display Postscript at least) licensing fee going from Apple to Adobe for every copy of MacOS X sold but Adobe of course also now has a bunch of paid-for engineering, retained a critical position with one of it's most influential customers and assured adoption of it's next-gen product. They've also killed any chance of Apple's own GX technologies ever surfacing or any futher development of the Apple/Microsoft TrueType threat. Finally Apple of course now has the most advanced rendering technology out there, one that can assure cross-platform fidelity and complete integration into every serious graphics application in the forseeable future.
So how to get Display PDF onto some other platform? Well you can try and do a Ghostscript-type re-engineering but as folks have learnt this is some very sophisticated, very patented, very specialized material. The existing code is a good starting point but it's going to be a lot of work to re-apply and who knows what obstacles there are.
Adobe themselves might come out with it for other platforms in the future depending on their contracts and licensing with Apple (Apple might get a two year lead on anything for instance.) This will likely be closed-source and probably fairly expensive. I could see graphics-folks wanting it on NT for instance but MS is gung-ho about their own technologies and this would be both competition and an additionial layer of abstraction for applications to deal with.
Adobe could concievably be convinced that it's in their best interest to release it for a next-gen X-type product. Unfortunatly I doubt they'd let out anything like a complete implementation but rather something that couldn't be used to compete with their own products.
So - Quartz on abother platform? Not unless Apple and Adobe see a profit in this. Display PDF on another platform? Not unless Adobe (and possibly Apple) see a profit in this. Unauthorized ports? Possible but unlikely due to the sophisitication required.
-- Michael
*I couldn't be bothered to keep all of the biCapitalizations straight - deal.
Two processors doesn't mean 2x speed. However Apple has moved to a microkernel design in the past year (hey - nobody noticed!) and Photoshop was redesigned for multi-processing years ago when Daystar developed the technology for Apple.
Thus it could well be approximately twice as fast for some operations in some applications.
Now, since there are only a very few applications that even begin to warm up a G4 this isn't that big a deal to the general public. However for those who are running cycle-eaters like Photoshop it is great to see this technology back on Apple's roadmap.
-- Michael
Make the ship date for Mac OSX Consumer pre-installed January 2001 (not 11 months later.)
Actually, a bit more on ship dates. I'd like to note that Next was usually quite good about getting things out on schedule and back under Jobs Apple's ship-dates and product-avialability have improved dramatically.
-- Michael
ps - For the l00sers who constantly post to every story saying "Please explain this to me" or "What does XYZ mean" fer Cthulus-sake this is news for GEEKS on the freaking WEB! Just how damn hard is it to actually look up something on your own? It's not like your ass has to ever even leave it's comfy chair... If you're lost with things like Carbon, Cocoa, Darwin, etc. then why not just go to the obvious place like apple.com or at least to a search engine before bleating out your ignorance.
Sorry, but every time an interesting story comes out 30% of the postings are from folks who couldn't be bothered to actully read the reference material before compulsively posting and another 30% are from folks too lazy to make at least an attempt to look up something for themselves (hint: your butt is at the end of your thumb!)
-- Michael
1. Yes, some invariably CS Sophomore will pop up saying *they* thought of whatever, in this case XML-based forms for providing a uniform interface to the various config files years ago and mebbe they even have a few lines of code somewhere - well it didn't really happen then and Apple has now made it so. That alone is "A Good Thing".
Bandley 3 was(is?) an office building at Apple. It's where most of the Lisa/Macintosh team worked out of when it shipped.
-- Michael
Just a quick note - the hard drives used in these applications aren't the cheapie ones avialiable at your corner screwdriver-shoppe but rather "AV" models. These are designed to stream data without interruption. Most of the other drives are built to periodically recalibrate themselves which of course would lead to an interruption in your "Powderpuff Girls" viewing pleasure.
Credits are created almost instantly if you feed a properly formatted text file directly into QuickTime. You can then take the resulting movie and drop it into your project in under a minute, including setting fancy effects.
As to crashing while MacOS 9.04 isn't going to set records for stability it's probably the most stable MacOS in years (and more stable then Win9x.) I'd suggest taking a look into your settings and see if there's not something odd someplace (patched a few too many traps in the system with 3rd party add-ons is most common.)
You'll also learn to save before doing anything dramatic with any editing package on any platform. This will become second nature to you eventually. Indeed I've seen professionials who freak out if they can't do their usual cycle of save-sip coffee-plan the next step-resume (not naming names.)
-- Michael
This wasn't so much altruism on Apple's part as practicality.
The software is easily availiable everywhere on the net, their automated update isn't particularly good at discerning Mac models (and can be fooled easily if someone cared) and it's not like the software can be used on anything but Apple hardware anyway.
Finally, the ability to edit digital video isn't much good unless you can get *at* the digital video so what you're really getting is another incentive to buy a Firewire (aka 1394 aka iLink) Mac.*
So they've eliminated the qualifier-hassle and given folks more reasons to buy their Mac's, particularly ones with Firewire. This is much like when they shipped the original Macs with a software suite (MacWrite, MacPaint, etc.) to show off their capabilities.
Lastly - it's not entirely clear that Apple *wanted* to give away the software or it just wasn't able to get the qualifiers to work.
-- Michael
*Trust me, if you really just want to edit down the family video so they look less like a 'Cops' episode and more like folks enjoying themselves you'll want onboard Firewire.
First lesson of business writing: Write to your audience.
/. is a particularly great venue for SCO to be interacting in but they accepted the interview, presumably scouted the territory, then burped up something that could have been pasted together by an over-medicated intern.
What we just saw was clearly clueless as to it's audience - it's what I'd expect to read in one of those lame sidebars in "CIO". It's not vetted - it's gelded. I expect a public statement to go through a review process (heck, I've been part of that team) but there's a point beyond which the thing gets so anemic on content you just gotta have mercy on it.
One trick I learnt long ago is to picture how smoething would be presented; the layout, the typeface, paper stock, etc - apply the tone of the text into a physical manifestation. This would be Courier 10pt on a damp piece of cheap photo-copy paper. If it was a speech it would have been delivered in monotone to an emptying room.
It's not that
Thus they blew what could have been a decent opportunity to plant some marketing seeds, get some geeks interested in what they're doing, establish some creds with a market they're moving into.
They also wasted everyones time.
'Nuf said on a throw-away.
-- Michael
Anyone remember Byte Magazine's "Cazuin Reader" circa 1982? It was a device you could swipe over specially printed barcodes on the pages of Byte - I think it lasted 6 months.
That was the first time I saw someone try to integrate different media. It happened again with toys and TV shows (where are they now...) Remember Captain Power and his custom toys that interacted with the TV show? It was also tried with home bar-coders for your groceries (turns out folks don't really care to do their own clerking at home.)
Last year it was "WaveTop" - get your TV schedules and game-demos from PBS TV signals in Win98SE (or Win95v.7 if you prefer.)
Now we're hearing it again. I still don't buy it.
I don't believe there are legions of folks with webcams just itching to install some custom software (which you just *know* will mess up your system *somehow*) for the privilage of holding up magazine pages to the camera. Or newspapar pages. Or catalogs. Besides most folks who have these cams are more interested in holding up decidely more, er, organic things to the cam then trying to get the right focus and lighting on some part of a printed page.
Ain't gonna happen. Or at least - not enough will do so.
Same holds true for folks willing to run an audio-cable from their TV to their PC. Some will, but will enough? No.
Again true for some Palm-size and styled device I've got to dig around to find, scrub over some inconvenient part of the page, walk over and plug into some weird reader (oh great, another thing to plug into my PC and have a wire running across the desk...) in order to see a web page.
Until it's some small cheap device (under US$5.00 per dohickey in bulk) the size, shape and weight of a credit-card calculator, battery life of months, that can be run over an article of interest, tossed in a pocket 'till later, then waved in front of a PC to automagically make the link it ain't gonna happen.
Otherwise too many wires, too much software, too awkward, too embaressing, too little return to bother. URLs are a heck of a lot easier then these other gadgets.
-- Michael
Read the book, saw the movie, starred in the musical...
-- Michael
They touted it as the next "Titanic". It's not. Indeed it's not even doing that impressively against "The Sixth Sense" when you consider the promotions-engine behind it. It's already being heavily discounted in places like Costco and my corner drug-store.
I stand by my claim that the videotape is not doing at well when compared to it's earlier projections.
It's all moot anyhow as it appears the DVD rumors were unfounded.
-- Michael
Is everyone else already sick of the NYC-Cab-Driving/Pod-Racing Pepsi TV advert for the video?
If Be cared they could be running on current Macs - the truth is they don't care and they're just badmouthing their competitor. The various Linux folks have succeeded, some with Apple's support, others with none, but the results of all of their work is open for Be to study even if it can't be bothered to do so on it's own.
The simple truth is Be ported to Intel, then got invested in by Intel (sits on Board of Directors) and is now moving away from from the Desktop OS market altogether after a decade of never really succeeding. Their giving away of BeOS-lite is simply a publicity stunt (what, they're going to *sell* lots of copies after they've announced they're dropping the product?) and an attempt to mollify the developers they've burnt.
Be's inability to move to the moden Macs speaks more about Jean-Louis Gassée and his team then it does about Apple. It also speaks very loudly about Be's enthusiasm for disinformation and blaming everyone else for their lack of success.
Here's to the little guys and gals who succeeded where Be couldn't go.