The Zen offers the ability to edit playlists directly on the device, and a "Find" function to quality search thousands of songs.
The new iPods also allow you to edit playlists directly on the device ("On-The-Go" playlists), and I haven't seen a better interface yet than the iPod wheel/column browser for digging into thousands of files.
You could previously use the iPod wheel to change the volume of the current track or scrub back and forth through it. Another neat feature on the new iPods is that you can now also enter a "rate this song" mode and adjust the rating for tracks on the fly. These ratings get passed back to iTunes next time you sync, so you can set up playlists to do things like "Whenever I plug my iPod in, automatically fill it up with random songs I haven't heard in a while that I rated 3 stars or higher".
This press release is just basic marketing FUD - they're just touting the length of their (future) feature list, and forgetting that it's the integration with iTunes/etc that makes the iPod work so well.
Consider a Microsoft programmer working on Windows 2003. He knows that Microsoft is already working on the new improved Windows 2005, and the developer on Windows 2005 knows that plans are already under way for Windows 2007.
Do you really think they throw it away each time? Unless you're working on something that's pure marketing fluff, code written for one release has a very good chance of being around in the future.
It's a law of nature that code always lives longer than you expect - the cost of throwing things away and rewriting from scratch is almost always worse than the downside of massaging it to deal with the next requirement. It's the mark of good software that it's ameanable to that - unless you're writing a throw-away bit of toy code for yourself, you should assume that anything you check in is probably going to be around in some form for years...
Happened to me recently when doing consultancy work for a company I used to work for 10 years ago. They still have modules which are pretty much unchanged since I wrote them way back when as a new grad, minus the inevitable bug fixes and new features.
It is most certainly factually correct in a general way...
The whole issue, if you can call it that, is Apple did not emulate the fpu which I think was integrated on the 040 but not the 030
There was no FPU on the 020, 030, or 040LC - in fact the only Mac chip which had one built-in was the 040, so the possibility of using the math library you mention was well known at the time. People who did use it had no problem (from a math point of view) moving to PowerPC, and those that did were well aware that they were using instructions which were only supported by one type of 68K Mac.
The loss of 80 bit doubles is also a red herring - you now had native 64-bit doubles on all machines (which was a big deal at the time, since you could now assume there was a fast FPU present on all machines and not worry about trying to hack together implementations using fixed point math), and a (slower) 128-bit long double if you really really needed precision.
The original poster sounds like he has a massive chip on his shoulder about something (e.g., the fact that 90% of the Toolbox remained 68K code didn't really matter, since the critical 10% that was called most often - e.g., drawing bottlenecks - was native), but if you're interested in a more technical description of what the transition was like there's a useful article at BYTE.
Shikari is excellent - as well as letting you filter out time spent in the kernel, or monitoring a specific thread within a process, it will also give you an instruction-level breakdown of any routines that look suspicious. This is extremely useful when you're trying to understand why a particular routine is slow.
Individual instructions are tinted from blue to yellow based on how expensive they were, you get a cycle count and %ge for each instruction within the routine, indications of where your stalls are, and awesome pop-up tips on suspicious behaviour (e.g., float->int conversions, redundant loads in a loop implying the compiler was being conservative with pointer aliasing, mixing double and float math, and a number of other PowerPC specific optimisation tricks).
Like any profiler you have to bear in mind that it may not be telling the whole story, but when you have a routine that you've know you need to care what the compiler is emitting then Shikari is like having a PowerPC assembly guru give you a quick rundown over your code.
I've no idea if the original figure is correct (I suspect it might be missing a couple of zeroes...:-), however Open Transport (the pre-Mac OS X TCP/IP stack) is a Streams implementation licenced from Mentat.
It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
Guess what, it's that same hardware that currently keeps Apple in business... An x86 Mac is never going to happen.
Although they no doubt keep Mac OS X running on multiple platforms internally (it makes good sense from an engineering point of view), an x86 Mac is not in Apple's interests - 2 minutes after Apple released an x86 Mac + Mac OS X for x86, someone would have the OS running on some generic non-Apple hardware. Once that happens, nobody is ever going to buy an Apple machine when they could get their own box for less money.
And there just isn't a market in selling OS software on the x86 platform - the vast majority of people either get Windows free with their hardware, or rip a copy off from a friend. The number of people who pay for their copy of Linux/Be/etc is nothing like enough to keep a company the size of Apple in business, even assuming that every non-Windows person decided to buy Mac OS X instead.
A common suggestion is that Apple could build in some kind of dongle into the system to prevent the OS being modified to run on a generic box. The point this misses is that the only system like this which would ever work is the one they already use - their dongle is the Mac.
It looks like you can pick them up from Lik Sang. $13 with shipping, but it's truly bizarre that they didn't include it built in - after all it has a speaker anyway, so all you'd need is a tap off that.
Civil disobedience is quite distinct from criminal damage - many of the rights we take for granted today (the vote for women or non-whites, no slavery, trial by jury) were obtained through long campaigns of civil disobedience.
Gandhi's campaign against British rule in India would be a good example.
You're quite correct - my mistake, they have introduced one bit of new hardware at a WWDC. What makes it worse is that I was there, but completely forgot that was a new product rather than a demo...:-)
A competitive hardware platform is certainly important, but they have to be extremely careful how they introduce it - if you look at the breakdown for the past couple of quarters, desktop systems haven't been doing terribly well. The last thing you want to do is introduce a new box that'll kill sales completely for a couple of months.
My guess is they will perform a technology demo showing Panther running on a 64-bit platform, but keep the machine itself off-stage (similarly to what's been done for AltiVec/MP in the past).
Apple have never introduced new hardware at WWDC, and aren't about to start this year. It's almost certainly pushed back due to delays on Panther.
Remember that WWDC is a developer conference, not a trade show - although the press is there for the keynote on the first day, the rest of the week is all under NDA.
Also, there are Iraqi government censors standing right beside those news crews sending out the live video feeds from Baghdad. Excercizing a degree of censorship (the jackbooted thug kind) that, if attempted by the US military against the media would kick off a screaming fit like we've not seen in awhile.
Actually there was a discussion about this on the BBC this morning with one of their correspondents in Baghdad (Rageh Omar). Filed broadcasts are vetted (just as they will be for those filed from "embedded" journalists on the US side), but live broadcasts are typically allowed without supervision.
OK, they could have someone standing off-camera waving a gun but it's unlikely - given that it's basically a journalist+camera guy+sound guy, you can't feasibly provide a government minder to track each and every journalist in the country.
Which also explains why the idea of "embedding" journalists is so popular with the our military - they know that people are far less likely to file a critical report if they're living in close proximity to the people they depend on for their safety.
CNN? Liberal bias? You've got to be kidding me - watch any news source outside of the US, and you'll see that CNN is about 3 microns to the left of FOX (and about as trustworthy).
Easy - they jumped off the OpenGL board specifically because they wouldn't commit to not using those patents against other ARB members (which is a requirement for being on the ARB).
Ergo, they intend to use those patents someday - and why not (from their point of view), they no longer require OpenGL to succeed in the 3D areas that interest them.
Slashdot Mirror
An excuse for Steve Gibson's paranoid ravings?
The Zen offers the ability to edit playlists directly on the device, and a "Find" function to quality search thousands of songs.
The new iPods also allow you to edit playlists directly on the device ("On-The-Go" playlists), and I haven't seen a better interface yet than the iPod wheel/column browser for digging into thousands of files.
You could previously use the iPod wheel to change the volume of the current track or scrub back and forth through it. Another neat feature on the new iPods is that you can now also enter a "rate this song" mode and adjust the rating for tracks on the fly. These ratings get passed back to iTunes next time you sync, so you can set up playlists to do things like "Whenever I plug my iPod in, automatically fill it up with random songs I haven't heard in a while that I rated 3 stars or higher".
This press release is just basic marketing FUD - they're just touting the length of their (future) feature list, and forgetting that it's the integration with iTunes/etc that makes the iPod work so well.
Consider a Microsoft programmer working on Windows 2003. He knows that Microsoft is already working on the new improved Windows 2005, and the developer on Windows 2005 knows that plans are already under way for Windows 2007.
Do you really think they throw it away each time? Unless you're working on something that's pure marketing fluff, code written for one release has a very good chance of being around in the future.
It's a law of nature that code always lives longer than you expect - the cost of throwing things away and rewriting from scratch is almost always worse than the downside of massaging it to deal with the next requirement. It's the mark of good software that it's ameanable to that - unless you're writing a throw-away bit of toy code for yourself, you should assume that anything you check in is probably going to be around in some form for years...
Happened to me recently when doing consultancy work for a company I used to work for 10 years ago. They still have modules which are pretty much unchanged since I wrote them way back when as a new grad, minus the inevitable bug fixes and new features.
If you have a noisy MDD, make sure you check out Apple's Power Mac G4 Power Supply Exchange Program.
The replacement power supply/fans are quite a bit quieter, and the kit is pretty easy to install.
The guy is quite hard to pinpoint on the political field.
It's not that hard - wherever you are, just look over to your right...
It is most certainly factually correct in a general way... The whole issue, if you can call it that, is Apple did not emulate the fpu which I think was integrated on the 040 but not the 030
There was no FPU on the 020, 030, or 040LC - in fact the only Mac chip which had one built-in was the 040, so the possibility of using the math library you mention was well known at the time. People who did use it had no problem (from a math point of view) moving to PowerPC, and those that did were well aware that they were using instructions which were only supported by one type of 68K Mac.
The loss of 80 bit doubles is also a red herring - you now had native 64-bit doubles on all machines (which was a big deal at the time, since you could now assume there was a fast FPU present on all machines and not worry about trying to hack together implementations using fixed point math), and a (slower) 128-bit long double if you really really needed precision.
The original poster sounds like he has a massive chip on his shoulder about something (e.g., the fact that 90% of the Toolbox remained 68K code didn't really matter, since the critical 10% that was called most often - e.g., drawing bottlenecks - was native), but if you're interested in a more technical description of what the transition was like there's a useful article at BYTE.
Shikari is excellent - as well as letting you filter out time spent in the kernel, or monitoring a specific thread within a process, it will also give you an instruction-level breakdown of any routines that look suspicious. This is extremely useful when you're trying to understand why a particular routine is slow.
Individual instructions are tinted from blue to yellow based on how expensive they were, you get a cycle count and %ge for each instruction within the routine, indications of where your stalls are, and awesome pop-up tips on suspicious behaviour (e.g., float->int conversions, redundant loads in a loop implying the compiler was being conservative with pointer aliasing, mixing double and float math, and a number of other PowerPC specific optimisation tricks).
Like any profiler you have to bear in mind that it may not be telling the whole story, but when you have a routine that you've know you need to care what the compiler is emitting then Shikari is like having a PowerPC assembly guru give you a quick rundown over your code.
I've no idea if the original figure is correct (I suspect it might be missing a couple of zeroes... :-), however Open Transport (the pre-Mac OS X TCP/IP stack) is a Streams implementation licenced from Mentat.
But I'd imagine that it's more hospitable than Siberia.
Spoken like someone who has never been to Pontypridd.
It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
Guess what, it's that same hardware that currently keeps Apple in business... An x86 Mac is never going to happen.
Although they no doubt keep Mac OS X running on multiple platforms internally (it makes good sense from an engineering point of view), an x86 Mac is not in Apple's interests - 2 minutes after Apple released an x86 Mac + Mac OS X for x86, someone would have the OS running on some generic non-Apple hardware. Once that happens, nobody is ever going to buy an Apple machine when they could get their own box for less money.
And there just isn't a market in selling OS software on the x86 platform - the vast majority of people either get Windows free with their hardware, or rip a copy off from a friend. The number of people who pay for their copy of Linux/Be/etc is nothing like enough to keep a company the size of Apple in business, even assuming that every non-Windows person decided to buy Mac OS X instead.
A common suggestion is that Apple could build in some kind of dongle into the system to prevent the OS being modified to run on a generic box. The point this misses is that the only system like this which would ever work is the one they already use - their dongle is the Mac.
LOL. Typical kid's response.
It's called a slashvertisement.
20,000 - not quite! There were 2,500 in 1999, and probably not more than another 1-2K since then.
It looks like you can pick them up from Lik Sang. $13 with shipping, but it's truly bizarre that they didn't include it built in - after all it has a speaker anyway, so all you'd need is a tap off that.
Civil disobedience is quite distinct from criminal damage - many of the rights we take for granted today (the vote for women or non-whites, no slavery, trial by jury) were obtained through long campaigns of civil disobedience.
Gandhi's campaign against British rule in India would be a good example.
You're quite correct - my mistake, they have introduced one bit of new hardware at a WWDC. What makes it worse is that I was there, but completely forgot that was a new product rather than a demo... :-)
A competitive hardware platform is certainly important, but they have to be extremely careful how they introduce it - if you look at the breakdown for the past couple of quarters, desktop systems haven't been doing terribly well. The last thing you want to do is introduce a new box that'll kill sales completely for a couple of months.
My guess is they will perform a technology demo showing Panther running on a 64-bit platform, but keep the machine itself off-stage (similarly to what's been done for AltiVec/MP in the past).
Uh, nope, the iMac was introduced at a special "Apple Event" on May 6th 1998. WWDC ran from May 11th to the 15th that year.
Apple have never introduced new hardware at WWDC, and aren't about to start this year. It's almost certainly pushed back due to delays on Panther.
Remember that WWDC is a developer conference, not a trade show - although the press is there for the keynote on the first day, the rest of the week is all under NDA.
this is apparently "one of the first". It's an ad for AT&T from Hotwired in 1994.
Anything earlier?
Cracking Toast, Grommit!
Also, there are Iraqi government censors standing right beside those news crews sending out the live video feeds from Baghdad. Excercizing a degree of censorship (the jackbooted thug kind) that, if attempted by the US military against the media would kick off a screaming fit like we've not seen in awhile.
Actually there was a discussion about this on the BBC this morning with one of their correspondents in Baghdad (Rageh Omar). Filed broadcasts are vetted (just as they will be for those filed from "embedded" journalists on the US side), but live broadcasts are typically allowed without supervision.
OK, they could have someone standing off-camera waving a gun but it's unlikely - given that it's basically a journalist+camera guy+sound guy, you can't feasibly provide a government minder to track each and every journalist in the country.
Which also explains why the idea of "embedding" journalists is so popular with the our military - they know that people are far less likely to file a critical report if they're living in close proximity to the people they depend on for their safety.
CNN? Liberal bias? You've got to be kidding me - watch any news source outside of the US, and you'll see that CNN is about 3 microns to the left of FOX (and about as trustworthy).
What do all these numbers mean, if anything?
Easy - they jumped off the OpenGL board specifically because they wouldn't commit to not using those patents against other ARB members (which is a requirement for being on the ARB).
Ergo, they intend to use those patents someday - and why not (from their point of view), they no longer require OpenGL to succeed in the 3D areas that interest them.
Wait, Fox News is important?