It wasn't Woz - it was Bill Atkinson who developed QuickDraw and "regions."
What's funny is that he basically did it in his spare time to help out the Mac team, as he was a developer specifically assigned to Lisa during the Mac development.
Pre-IPO investment opportunity in a darling company that ended up generating more capital during their IPO than any company since Ford.
Damn, wish I could have gotten screwed like that. If Xerox got screwed by anybody, it was by themselves for: 1. not bringing the Alto system to market themselves, instead being too focused on copy machines to realize they had invented the future and had it to themselves. 2. not hanging on to the investment they did make in Apple, which would be worth 5x more than the IPO closing price (which was up 30% on that day) 10 years later.
Microsoft got plenty back on that investment, as well as all the revenue from selling Mac office apps (which was profitable for them) and then porting some of the features that the Mac App team came up with into Windows Office.
Oh, and they didn't pay $1B from stealing QuickTime right in the middle of their DoJ antitrust suit, which was the reason they settled anyway. They knew they were going to lose that one and the only strategy they had left was to wait for Apple to bleed out or settle.
You don't have to have massive sales volume to bring new ideas to the marketplace. There are stacks of examples of this across every industry and market segment going back to the first guy who traded something for something else thousands of years ago.
Look and Feel was closed in '94 when Apple's appeal to the US Supreme Court was denied.
The suit you mentioned that Jobs and Gates settled was a different ongoing action about unlicensed use of QuickTime code / patents that Apple would have won, which is why Microsoft settled. Apple didn't have the resources to pursue it over all the appeals and bullshit without no longer being a company that actually produced anything but lawsuits at the end.
Microsoft paid for their transgression. Apple got the cash they desperately needed to stay alive (added to the cash they got for liquidating their holdings in ARM at a massive profit) as well as a commitment from Microsoft to not hang the Mac out to dry on Office apps.
Turns out Microsoft made a nice little profit on Mac apps as well as the non-voting stock they bought in the settlement too.
You probably meant that they "stole" it from Xerox, except that they came and raided Xerox PARC with permission from Xerox, granted through giving them a bunch of Apple stock. Read: compensation.
It's not Apple's fault that they bought the future for such a meager price. That would be on Xerox for not knowing that they had already invented the next 30 years of computing at a sleepy little office in Palo Alto.
Much of your criticism is spot on, but how does a Mac not "play well" with corporate networks? They talk the same IP everything else does, they support 802.1x authentication, etc. There's even built-in support for Active Directory authentication and Kerberos, though it could use some work (or just complete replacement with the free Centrify agent).
Seriously, the rest of what you said is hard to argue with, but this particular point isn't true in my experience, and I've been working with Macs on enterprise networks for over 15 years.
It's probably the last time Microsoft will officially recognize Windows Media Center as existing.
But that's ok, because Cable companies will continue to encrypt every channel they legally can while renting you a CableCard, and the only software that you can get to decrypt it? Windows Media Center.
Legal lock-in for DVR rentals. And the cable companies wonder why we hate them.
So now "iteratively improving a base technology" is "copying" then?
Here's a hint: the entire march of technological progress of humanity is "copying" according to your assertion. We don't have anything we have today without someone "copying" what came before.
We get it, you don't like Apple. But whomever you do like is doing the exact same shit, be it Samsung, Google, LG, Lenovo / Motorola, HTC, etc. And yet you don't accuse any of them of "copying" even though many of their products are actual shameless copies of others.
So Apple isn't a fabless semiconductor designer who happens to have designed the most powerful mobile processor shipping in consumer devices right now, and has been for quite some time?
You seem to have forgotten about 90% of Apple's business (iOS), and you focused on the 10% or less that is the Mac in order to support your assertion.
Methinks you don't understand what the GP wrote, and responded anyway.
Nobody was talking about the A12x. Nobody was talking about any of the A-series processors. Nobody was even talking about any ARM-based CPUs.
He was referring to the IBM PowerPC 970, a.k.a "PowerPC G5". You know, the processor series that Apple abandoned 13 years ago due to IBM's complete inability (and disinterest) in making available in a thermal package capable of shipping in a notebook computer that has a battery life longer than 12 minutes, and wouldn't set your pants on fire if you actually used it as a laptop.
There's a reason that Apple kept using ancient Motorola / Freescale G4s in their notebooks until the Intel switch in 2006.
Unfortunately, you need to sink huge amounts of capital into spinning up a design and manufacturing organization that is quite far from your core competency, which is a long way of saying "a massive risk."
They pulled it off with their CPUs, mostly by making the very wise purchase of PA Semi. They whiffed spectacularly on that industrial sapphire plant in Arizona. We're still waiting to see if the "liquidmetal" purchase will ever amount to anything besides the SIM ejection tools they shipped with earlier iPhones. Where's the Apple self-driving car we heard so much about?
It turns out that making an energy-dense, thin, long-life, reliable battery cell that also doesn't explode is really hard. See: Samsung Galaxy S8. And Samsung has been making batteries for decades. As well as many other players with decades of experience.
It's arrogance to think you could just barge in on an established industry like that and do better. Sometimes that arrogance pays off (A-series CPUs), but it's a low percentage shot.
I'm not sure if it's a commentary on the story subject matter, or on the state of Slashdot story summary writing, but the entire conversation here is about trying to decipher what the fuck the summary actually said, and not about the actual story.
In three sentences that should have been in the summary, you made the entire discussion redundant. You're a conversation killer!
I have a problem with the assumptions that you are making. Slashdot has readers from many different fields of science and engineering, and not all of them are going to be deep-knowledge experts in every single subject that gets posted to Slashdot.
Not even yourself.
A little explanation takes the author (or the fucking editor who should know this) takes almost no time, and would make the barrier to entry much lower on understanding the subject being talked about, and even be able to intelligently discuss in the comments, generating more content for the site.
Instead we get 20 comments wondering what the bleeding hell this is even about, and 40 more of people either backing up that assertion, or telling people "just go google it" as if the burden is on hundreds of readers to figure out what the bleeding hell this article should be saying from one bad summary.
Here's a hint - the googling won't happen. The hundreds of readers will simply scroll on to something better written, probably on Reddit.
GP is usually an asshole, but he's exactly right in this case. Good journalism (not that Slashdot could really be mistaken for that in any time in the last 5+ years) is not assuming a level of knowledge of the reader and giving a brief synopsis of what in the bloody fuck you're even talking about.
I know this has something to do with 3D rendering, but I couldn't tell you any more than that.
What the hell is being accomplished here? Why does the world need it? The writer is comparing this new effort to some other shit that is completely unexplained. Explain what a "Gallium HUD" is, as those two terms being paired make no sense unless you already know what a "Gallium HUD" is.
I read that summary 3 times trying to comprehend. I understand some of the terms, but there's no context or even remedial explanation of anything at all.
1. They just cut 9% less than a year ago. 2. Arbitrary cutting of jobs by telling each manager that they have to lose X headcount isn't "thinning the dead wood". It's possible for a team to be highly performing and not carrying the water of half-asses. 3. The people cut aren't necessarily chosen for performance-based reasons. Example: Tesla really doesn't like remote workers, so remote workers are high on the to-cut list regardless of how indispensable those people may be to ongoing operations. Feel free to ask me how I know this - I worked for Tesla until last month, as a remote worker, and was scheduled to be cut in June. My management chain went to bat for me, knowing that I had a high degree of knowledge about the systems I work on, and instead they chose another remote developer.
I left in December of my own accord, and I'm really glad that I did now.
Way to not answer the question, and not back up your previous assertions.
You claimed this layoff was because increased manufacturing efficiency meant they had a bunch of extra people bumping around the factory they didn't need.
Then why are they laying off software developers and QA people in a completely different division that doesn't have anything to do with cars?
Back up your assertions. Or admit you're full of shit and buying the press release hook, line, and sinker.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that 5G isn't a thing yet. Other than that, your nationalistic screed is right on point, I guess?
Nobody wants a rehash of the "draft" 802.11n fiasco again, except this time with $1000 smartphones instead of $100 routers.
Nothing is "that big a deal" when it's already been done and you have orders of magnitude more computing power to play with.
It was very much a big deal in the early days of GUI development.
It wasn't Woz - it was Bill Atkinson who developed QuickDraw and "regions."
What's funny is that he basically did it in his spare time to help out the Mac team, as he was a developer specifically assigned to Lisa during the Mac development.
Pre-IPO investment opportunity in a darling company that ended up generating more capital during their IPO than any company since Ford.
Damn, wish I could have gotten screwed like that. If Xerox got screwed by anybody, it was by themselves for:
1. not bringing the Alto system to market themselves, instead being too focused on copy machines to realize they had invented the future and had it to themselves.
2. not hanging on to the investment they did make in Apple, which would be worth 5x more than the IPO closing price (which was up 30% on that day) 10 years later.
Microsoft got plenty back on that investment, as well as all the revenue from selling Mac office apps (which was profitable for them) and then porting some of the features that the Mac App team came up with into Windows Office.
Oh, and they didn't pay $1B from stealing QuickTime right in the middle of their DoJ antitrust suit, which was the reason they settled anyway. They knew they were going to lose that one and the only strategy they had left was to wait for Apple to bleed out or settle.
You don't have to have massive sales volume to bring new ideas to the marketplace. There are stacks of examples of this across every industry and market segment going back to the first guy who traded something for something else thousands of years ago.
You're conflating Apple v Microsoft actions.
Look and Feel was closed in '94 when Apple's appeal to the US Supreme Court was denied.
The suit you mentioned that Jobs and Gates settled was a different ongoing action about unlicensed use of QuickTime code / patents that Apple would have won, which is why Microsoft settled. Apple didn't have the resources to pursue it over all the appeals and bullshit without no longer being a company that actually produced anything but lawsuits at the end.
Microsoft paid for their transgression. Apple got the cash they desperately needed to stay alive (added to the cash they got for liquidating their holdings in ARM at a massive profit) as well as a commitment from Microsoft to not hang the Mac out to dry on Office apps.
Turns out Microsoft made a nice little profit on Mac apps as well as the non-voting stock they bought in the settlement too.
What the fuck?
You probably meant that they "stole" it from Xerox, except that they came and raided Xerox PARC with permission from Xerox, granted through giving them a bunch of Apple stock. Read: compensation.
It's not Apple's fault that they bought the future for such a meager price. That would be on Xerox for not knowing that they had already invented the next 30 years of computing at a sleepy little office in Palo Alto.
Much of your criticism is spot on, but how does a Mac not "play well" with corporate networks? They talk the same IP everything else does, they support 802.1x authentication, etc. There's even built-in support for Active Directory authentication and Kerberos, though it could use some work (or just complete replacement with the free Centrify agent).
Seriously, the rest of what you said is hard to argue with, but this particular point isn't true in my experience, and I've been working with Macs on enterprise networks for over 15 years.
It's probably the last time Microsoft will officially recognize Windows Media Center as existing.
But that's ok, because Cable companies will continue to encrypt every channel they legally can while renting you a CableCard, and the only software that you can get to decrypt it? Windows Media Center.
Legal lock-in for DVR rentals. And the cable companies wonder why we hate them.
Fair enough.
So now "iteratively improving a base technology" is "copying" then?
Here's a hint: the entire march of technological progress of humanity is "copying" according to your assertion. We don't have anything we have today without someone "copying" what came before.
We get it, you don't like Apple. But whomever you do like is doing the exact same shit, be it Samsung, Google, LG, Lenovo / Motorola, HTC, etc. And yet you don't accuse any of them of "copying" even though many of their products are actual shameless copies of others.
So Apple isn't a fabless semiconductor designer who happens to have designed the most powerful mobile processor shipping in consumer devices right now, and has been for quite some time?
You seem to have forgotten about 90% of Apple's business (iOS), and you focused on the 10% or less that is the Mac in order to support your assertion.
Methinks you don't understand what the GP wrote, and responded anyway.
Nobody was talking about the A12x. Nobody was talking about any of the A-series processors. Nobody was even talking about any ARM-based CPUs.
He was referring to the IBM PowerPC 970, a.k.a "PowerPC G5". You know, the processor series that Apple abandoned 13 years ago due to IBM's complete inability (and disinterest) in making available in a thermal package capable of shipping in a notebook computer that has a battery life longer than 12 minutes, and wouldn't set your pants on fire if you actually used it as a laptop.
There's a reason that Apple kept using ancient Motorola / Freescale G4s in their notebooks until the Intel switch in 2006.
Unfortunately, you need to sink huge amounts of capital into spinning up a design and manufacturing organization that is quite far from your core competency, which is a long way of saying "a massive risk."
They pulled it off with their CPUs, mostly by making the very wise purchase of PA Semi. They whiffed spectacularly on that industrial sapphire plant in Arizona. We're still waiting to see if the "liquidmetal" purchase will ever amount to anything besides the SIM ejection tools they shipped with earlier iPhones. Where's the Apple self-driving car we heard so much about?
It turns out that making an energy-dense, thin, long-life, reliable battery cell that also doesn't explode is really hard. See: Samsung Galaxy S8. And Samsung has been making batteries for decades. As well as many other players with decades of experience.
It's arrogance to think you could just barge in on an established industry like that and do better. Sometimes that arrogance pays off (A-series CPUs), but it's a low percentage shot.
I'm not sure if it's a commentary on the story subject matter, or on the state of Slashdot story summary writing, but the entire conversation here is about trying to decipher what the fuck the summary actually said, and not about the actual story.
In three sentences that should have been in the summary, you made the entire discussion redundant. You're a conversation killer!
I am a Linux user. Every day.
I still didn't have a fucking clue what that summary was on about.
By the way, if you feel that one has to know all that shit to be a Linux user, then desktop Linux has failed horribly.
Have no idea why this wasn't in the summary.
I have a problem with the assumptions that you are making. Slashdot has readers from many different fields of science and engineering, and not all of them are going to be deep-knowledge experts in every single subject that gets posted to Slashdot.
Not even yourself.
A little explanation takes the author (or the fucking editor who should know this) takes almost no time, and would make the barrier to entry much lower on understanding the subject being talked about, and even be able to intelligently discuss in the comments, generating more content for the site.
Instead we get 20 comments wondering what the bleeding hell this is even about, and 40 more of people either backing up that assertion, or telling people "just go google it" as if the burden is on hundreds of readers to figure out what the bleeding hell this article should be saying from one bad summary.
Here's a hint - the googling won't happen. The hundreds of readers will simply scroll on to something better written, probably on Reddit.
GP is usually an asshole, but he's exactly right in this case. Good journalism (not that Slashdot could really be mistaken for that in any time in the last 5+ years) is not assuming a level of knowledge of the reader and giving a brief synopsis of what in the bloody fuck you're even talking about.
I know this has something to do with 3D rendering, but I couldn't tell you any more than that.
What the hell is being accomplished here?
Why does the world need it?
The writer is comparing this new effort to some other shit that is completely unexplained. Explain what a "Gallium HUD" is, as those two terms being paired make no sense unless you already know what a "Gallium HUD" is.
I read that summary 3 times trying to comprehend. I understand some of the terms, but there's no context or even remedial explanation of anything at all.
That they wanted to put out a bugfix and security release?
I read it as "There are no new features in the production releases, but there weren't any new features in any of the betas up to this point either."
As in, they didn't slip one past the goalie at the last second. Which is good.
1. They just cut 9% less than a year ago.
2. Arbitrary cutting of jobs by telling each manager that they have to lose X headcount isn't "thinning the dead wood". It's possible for a team to be highly performing and not carrying the water of half-asses.
3. The people cut aren't necessarily chosen for performance-based reasons. Example: Tesla really doesn't like remote workers, so remote workers are high on the to-cut list regardless of how indispensable those people may be to ongoing operations. Feel free to ask me how I know this - I worked for Tesla until last month, as a remote worker, and was scheduled to be cut in June. My management chain went to bat for me, knowing that I had a high degree of knowledge about the systems I work on, and instead they chose another remote developer.
I left in December of my own accord, and I'm really glad that I did now.
Way to not answer the question, and not back up your previous assertions.
You claimed this layoff was because increased manufacturing efficiency meant they had a bunch of extra people bumping around the factory they didn't need.
Then why are they laying off software developers and QA people in a completely different division that doesn't have anything to do with cars?
Back up your assertions. Or admit you're full of shit and buying the press release hook, line, and sinker.
The layoff was across the entire company. There's people in the Energy business that are packing their shit out to the parking lot.
This layoff was NOT about car manufacturing.
Who would that be? Hint: It's not Tesla, unless you completely redefine the term "make a profit" to be outside the normally accepted definitions.