Of course, it's kinda funny that it's Microsoft saying the little plastic disc is dead. Since they rushed the 360 to market it doesn't have a built-in next-gen drive of any sort. So I suppose all their games are going to be limited to at most 9GB for now... which is a little more reasonable to download than 50GB. (Still not that reasonable.)
Of course, will 9GB will be sufficient for game designers? Or to cram in more features and HD graphics and 5.1 sound will they start putting content onto HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and thus force Xbox 360 owners to buy yet another external accessory? Call me a cynic, but my bet's on the latter.
That's a bit like Egon in Ghostbusters saying "Print is dead." Cute and funny, but not true. In 1984 it most certainly wasn't. More than twenty years later, you could say it's visibly on its way out -- you can do an awful lot of stuff online now -- but still lingering.
Plastic discs still have several big advantages for a game machine:
high capacity data transfer - Remember, snails carrying DVDs still outperform most types of broadband internet. And DVD is now pretty dated. Let's fast-forward to later this year when PS3 is released with its Blu-Ray drive. To get a game with 50GiB of content, you could either spend at least 24 hours downloading over a typical high-speed connection (~81 days over dialup, ha ha)... or you could simply buy one Blu-Ray disc.
storage - Your house's storage capacity for little plastic discs is effectively unlimited. Certainly the limit is much higher than you'll ever need.:-) But games at 50GiB a pop will fill up any hard-disk-style storage medium rapidly.
manufacturing and distribution cost - a single popular game today can sell over a million copies. If it's a 50GiB game, that's 50 petabytes. I don't buy bandwidth in that kind of bulk so I don't know what kind of rates a company like Sony or EA would get, but multiply that by 20 or so popular games and you're quickly into the exabyte range. While I can't say for sure, I'd bet a donut that it's still cheaper to mass-produce plastic discs and ship them in bulk to stores than to buy that much bandwidth.
Downloading is great, and we'll see more of it over time. In the long-term future it may even manage to kill off the little plastic disc. But so far plastic disc technology is keeping pace with improvements in bandwidth. And its advantages -- including the ability to sell to people with slow or nonexistent net connections -- will keep it around for a long time.
By that logic every restaurant that failed in the 70's has a chance to sue McDonald's.
1. Some guy comes up with idea for restaurant, opens one location, starts to develop it, wants to open a second location 2. Need money, so make publicity, attract investors 3. McDonalds opens a restaurant in town 4. Investors think: why should I invest in this guy, when McDonalds' is so much cheaper and they have that fun playground for the kids? 5. Without money, restaurant folds 6. McDonalds' food gets steadily crappier 7. Culinary arts stop for years, the world is set back in this field by about 5 years
I think the whole thing is fallacious. With a good product and the right connections you can attract venture money even in a crowded market. That was as true back then as it is now.
Microsoft's mere existence did not squash Go, nor did the field of handwriting recognition get set back by 5 years when Go folded. MS does some illegal and questionable stuff at times, but as far as I can see this suit is not about that -- it's just a guy getting in line for some free money.
Speaking of the "Apple makes their money on hardware" thing... I'm curious about whether that is true any more. I have not heard recent data (even in the plural of anecdotes) that says that hardware is still where Apple makes its money.
That was generally accepted to be true a decade ago, but with.Mac, iTMS, OSX, iLife, iWork, Final Cut, Logic, etc... is it really true any more?
Honestly it probably has to do with how you juggle the numbers. You get several hundred dollars worth of retail value software bundled with the computer now -- even my little Mac mini came with OSX ($129) and iLife '05 ($79), in addition to the non-Apple stuff (a few games, encyclopedia, whatever other crap there was that I didn't pay attention to). And OSX and iLife are in turn practically walking ads for.Mac ($99) and iTMS (as much as you want to spend).
If you charged all the bundled Apple software against the cost of the hardware, even at a discount, I bet it'd be a lot more of a toss-up as to whether the software or hardware makes more money, particularly at the low end.
Apple might be perfectly happy to get out of the cutthroat low-end side of hardware business. I doubt they'd give up the high end market though.
I know what you're talking about... I went through several cheap wireless controllers that drove me insane. Then I picked up the Logitech. Slightly more expensive but a beautiful controller, feels better than the standard controllers, and is completely lag-free (in my opinion, anyway, ymmv). Smart power-saving too; the crappier ones had a switch, but this one just powers itself off automatically after 5 minutes of idle time, and wakes up when the first button is punched. I have kids so that little detail is more important than you might think.:-)
Speaking of which, it's time for me to buy a new one. It lasted a good year under heavy use, but I abused it badly beating god mode in God of War. Between the button-mashing and the tension in my hands (oh shit, I can't get hit or I'll die AGAIN) the L1 button finally started sticking a little from overuse. Still, I'm quite happy with the investment.
I'd be amazed if the PS3 required Bluetooth controllers with no alternatives... I hope they will allow corded controllers if you really want them. For spectrum collisions if nothing else (it'd suck to be unable to play a game just because a neighbor is using their 802.11-enabled microwave while on their 2.4GHz phone).
If not, well, at least you can take solace in the fact that the games will be DESIGNED for wireless controllers and thus better able to handle whatever lag may result.:-)
Once you're talking about wormholes big enough to send a stream of photons through, there are many other implications. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days is an interesting thought experiment in that direction.
Basically they suggest that it opens up the possibility of wormhole cameras which can be used to view what's happening anywhere at any time without anyone's knowledge. Privacy is completely destroyed and civilization, um, takes a while to get over that fact. Later in the book other corollary results show up which are even more far out.
It's not a great book in terms of its plot, but it's classic SF... it breaks some interesting ground and is very thought provoking.
Oh come on. They will pick the one sold to them by the computer manufacturer or store ($200).
There IS a problem here, but it's not that. The real issue is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's not granny and grandpa, it's people who know enough to figure out where to find deals but aren't smart enough to discriminate. Mr. Pre-Teen Script Kiddie will have the problem, and granny and grandpa will only have the problem if Mr. PTSK buys unreliable RAM for them.
The real concerns come if you ever get a major supplier selling RAM with such a high failure rate and not putting a big warning label on it. I doubt that most computer manufacturers would do it without at least putting the RAM through their own test facilities, but I wouldn't put it past Fry's, CompUSA, Best Buy, etc nor would I put it past the IT departments of some shoddy corporations.
Something similar started happening a few years ago with CD-R media, and even before that with floppies. Basically the quality dropped off sharply because there was severe competitive pressure to create the cheapest product possible and a flood of generics entered the market.
With floppies, this led directly to the perception that floppies were unreliable and went bad all the time. (That never used to be true, but is a lot truer these days.)
With CD-R media, the generic spools of 100 that started popping up a few years ago would sometimes have failure rates of as high as 1 in 3 depending on the drive used. This caused pressure on support and engineering -- from the software perspective, I can't even tell you how many failure reports we had that were solved by switching from super-generic to name-brand media. Overall it naturally raised costs to the end user.
I'm out of that field now, so I can't tell you whether CD-R has gotten any better since then... my impression from my friends is that it has, at least a little bit. If so it's probably due to a combination of forces: (1) complaints against the low-quality stuff, (2) name-brands catching up to the price point without sacrificing quite as much quality, (3) hardware manufacturers creating drives with tolerances adjusted to deal better with super-crappy media, (4) consumer education ("I've had problems with generic media before, so let's avoid it"). So if there is fallout from this RAM it'll probably only last a few years before market forces take care of it.
Could be a long few years for those of you who have to deal with it, though.
CEOs of public companies get proper compensation even when they take a $1 salary... the idea is that they are working to increase the value of the stock and/or options that they hold or may be granted. Which is usually a whole lot.
In other cases I know of (Apple, Chrysler) taking a $1 salary has been a partly symbolic move used to indicate that the CEO isn't a robber baron squeezing ridiculous amounts of money from the corporation. It demonstrates that the CEO has incentive to increase the value of the stock, and thinks he/she can do so effectively.
A series of smart initiatives from a Google founder over the course of a year will increase his overall net worth by much more than any piddling salary.
It's a quantitative measure of the effect, rather than the qualitative and unsupported statement "obviously if you run an unpatched box you'll get crap installed".
Even when you know something is not optimal, there is worth in having some measure of how bad it is.
Good point. iTunes will burn MP3 CDs, yet it will not convert AAC files to MP3 for an MP3 disk.
Yes and no... That's not entirely true. When burning a data disc, you're right, it won't automatically convert the files for you.
However, if you rip in AAC but want to burn in MP3, you can manually convert a non-protected AAC file (.m4a) to MP3. For obvious reasons you can't do it with a protected AAC file (.m4p).
To do it, select MP3 in your import preferences, then select one or more AAC files and select Advanced -> Convert selection to MP3.
during the course of that IRC someone asserted that Steve said the way they got iTunes onto Windows was by porting Cocoa wholesale--and called it "Yellow Box."
iTunes isn't Cocoa. It's Carbon.
You can prove this in about 2 seconds on OSX by running this command: otool -Lv/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes
That's a technical delineation but in short it means that it's based on C/C++ (not Objective-C) and the Carbon / CoreFoundation family of APIs.
The term Yellow Box is normally used to refer to Objective-C / Cocoa / Foundation, which is an entirely different API and implementation that provides generally the same services.
Carbon and Cocoa share some of the lowest-level code in OSX, but for the most part they are entirely separate. Actually separate but equal is another way to say it -- you can do anything in one that you can do with the other.
Yes, having two native application frameworks built into the OS is wasteful, but remember that both Carbon and Cocoa have had long lives independent of each other before they came together in OSX. Rewriting one in terms of the other would be a lot of work and a compatibility nightmare... it's easier just to keep parallel implementations.
Apple has had a framework to let it deliver software on Windows for a while now. It's called QuickTime, and it's got a large chunk of Carbon already ported to Win32 APIs. A lot of the other stuff that might be used by applications (CoreFoundation, for example) is already x86-savvy thanks to Darwin.
So iTunes was ported, but almost certainly not through what is normally referred to as the Yellow Box. Unless of course they're re-using the term deliberately to confuse everyone.:-)
Could we see Safari for Windows soon?
I believe the iTMS content view in iTunes might be rendered with HTML, though I'm not sure. So maybe they ported their WebCore engine. Since that's based on KHTML it should also run nicely on x86 of course.
I suspect porting Safari or other apps is not so much a question of "is it technically possible" as "would it make economic sense?"
Remember, the only reason Apple's software is free is because they're trying to entice you to spend money in other ways, like on their hardware or their music store.:-) Making Windows and Dell/HP look better by porting Safari to their platform doesn't make Apple any money.
Which we all know was caused by UFOs. Have the utilities thoroughly considered the potential impact that aliens might be having on our power infrastructure?
OK, well let's assume Apple's going to eat their own dogfood.
Speaking of which, that's another rather nice way for Apple to ameliorate the cost. Since Apple develops its own RAID hardware and servers, they naturally spend money on testing the hardware to find bugs.
So using Apple hardware to serve everything would kill two birds with one stone... and the cost can be spread among the testing budget as well as the iTMS budget. The XServe and OSX Server teams get nice real-world testing data, and iTMS gets pretty much the best server support you could ask for, straight from the people who designed the hardware.
The Movie Archive of www.archive.org contains all sorts of fascinating, cool, and as far as I know redistributable movie files.
A tiny sample of a few that I've grabbed:
* "Duck and Cover" - the classic scary bomb-readiness film for schoolchildren
* "I like Ike" - Eisenhower political ad, animated
* "Are You Popular?" - bizarre and weird example of 1950's conformity and culture
The collection is just huge, and you can no doubt find some crazy cool stuff. Mirror the whole thing, and you'll probably start approaching 150GB very quickly, at the raw speed of your download pipe.
New FireWire connector. I know that this might not be Apples fault, but yet another connector type for 800Gb FireWire, ugh. Yeah yeah, an adapters available, but couldn't IEEE figure out a way to make the two compatable?
From what I understand (and what I heard from some of the folks who work on FireWire at Apple), the implementation of 1394b changed a lot, due to issues they found with 1394a. The biggest change is that they wanted the connections to work over long distances, and part of that involved adding 2 pins for "signal integrity". A third pin was also added for future expansion.
I think the distance was the biggest factor. 1394b is designed to last and be functional as a local backbone. B is supposed to be capable of 2Gbps speeds over a 100m hop without a repeater. A could only get 400Mbps through at most a 5m hop (a 20m hop if you drop to 100Mbps). To get the extra signal fidelity and really open it up for fiber media, they needed to add a few pins. Here's another article about that.
Yes, I definitely agree it sucks, but sometimes you've just got to bend over and take it... standards are made by committees, so I guess it's not suprising they don't always get everything right the first time.:-)
"I've been super impressed by OS X having used it as my primary laptop for the last couple weeks. It really is a great unix box- and this is one of the important missing puzzle pieces."
B-tree was basically spaghetti: reformat and reinstall time. I've seen it happen a few times before: the most spectacular being a crash during a defrag.
It's worth noting that Apple has never shipped a defrag utility. Having a crash trash your disk is probably the fault of the utility itself... there are ways to do it safely, and there are ways to do it unsafely.
Once you've unmounted the volume and are poking around at the raw blocks, no amount of journaling in the filesystem is going to help you.
MacOS hasn't even had real multitasking or (shipped with) two-button mice "for years" so I think MS has a point here.
Your comment about shipped with is correct, but feeble. Two-button mice (as well as three-button mice, four-button mice, etc, with and without scroll wheels) have been available and worked great... "for years". Specifically all multibutton USB mice have worked fine on Macs - with full software support - since the introduction of USB in the iMac in 1997. Not "for years", how about "five years"?
Preemptive threading has been available on Macs since MacOS 8.6. The marketing name for it back then was Multiprocessing Services 2.0. Yes, a real preemptive thread scheduler - read the technote. For compatibility's sake, most of the rest of the machine still ran as cooperative threads inside a single preemptive task, but the preemptive threading was available even on uniprocessor machines. The release date for that was May 10, 1999. So, not "for years", perhaps merely "three and a half years".
These features weren't marketed heavily, nor were they widely used before OS8/9 was abandoned... so your ignorance is understandable and forgiven. But it's just false to say that these simple things weren't available back then.
Right on! In point of fact, there are TONS of things their computers don't do. Just the other day I opened up the case of a friend's Mac, put in a roll of undeveloped film, and waited... but nothing happened. I mean, isn't it marketed like it's supposed to make digital photography easier?
I'm sure that if I had shelled out the bucks for Windows XP, I would have had 5x7 prints spitting out of that little slot thingy in the front in no time!
(Or better yet, as the unknown author suggests, Windows XP Pro... I really didn't need that extra $110 anyway. Knowing me, I'd only spend it on hookers and booze.)
OTOH, ClarisWorks and FMP are consumer and home office level products. Shake and Rayz are obviously for high end pro video production houses. I don't see DVD Studio or Final Cut Pro being put on Windows any time soon.
Nope, and they won't be. Apple's always made its money from hardware, not software. DSP and FCP have healthy price tags, but they both have excellent free equivalents... they're not aimed at the small consumer.
The kind of people who will pay $1000 each to buy the pro tools, and another $1000 for the effects pack, will happily expense another $3000 for a sexy new TiBook, no prob. Having people using Mac hardware is not only profitable, but increases mindshare (did I just use a dot-com word?) and sells more units.
QuickTime was ported to Windows very early, maybe version 1, but I'm quite sure about version 2. This was in the early 90's and Linux was not important at that time.
Of course he means QuickTime 2, not Windows 2.0.:-) This page actually has some good history, though some of the links are dead. It was QT2.1 in 1995.
QuickTime is media compression framework. IMHO it does not rely a lot on the Macintosh Toolbox, its more the reverse: the Macintosh Toolbox (QuickDraw most notably) relies on the QuickTime framework.
Nope, you've got it backwards. QuickTime on OS9 was an extension, which you could readily disable and remove, and as such no part of the standard MacOS toolbox relied upon it. (QT on OSX is a little more integrated but the historical separation remains, QT is built on top of the toolbox, not vice versa.)
QuickTime uses the Mac toolbox fairly heavily -- it's not about media compression, it's about time-based playback of media. Compressing and decompressing is just something you -sometimes- need to do as part of this. A lot of the code is getting it from the uncompressed format to the screen/speakers in a timely manner. It uses windows, threads, events, timers, component manager, resource manager, file manager, sound manager, just to name a few. As some other folks said, they basically ported a good chunk of the MacOS Toolbox to Windows to make it work.
Apple never ported QuickTime to Linux because they never had a reason to. Basically Apple gets money when either somebody uses or licenses QuickTime for their application or when somebody buys a Mac.
I won't argue too much with that one. I should point out that one of the reasons they didn't port it was because as big as it might seem to some young'uns:-) Linux is really relatively a recent phenomenon, and until really very recently the only way to release software for it was to open-source it and let people compile it themselves. Binary distributions are still hellish. Open-sourcing QuickTime is not an option due to the tangle of copyrights and licensing (Sorenson, etc) underneath much of its technology, plus the fact that they'd be giving away their crown jewels.
This does not mean that porting QuickTime for Linux would be difficult. They basically ported it to BSD (Darwin) - the only significant difference would be the frame-buffer interface.
They ported the Mac toolbox to Darwin first - aka Carbon. Then, and only then, they brought over QuickTime, building it on top of Carbon. You'd have to port a large part of Carbon to Linux. Mind you, it would be possible, but there probably isn't a large perceived ROI for the time involved.
I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind extending their media-player dominance to another consumer desktop platform, but Linux (and *BSD) are not consumer desktop platforms yet. When binary distributions become more feasible and the userbase grows, that's when you might see QT for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it's kinda funny that it's Microsoft saying the little plastic disc is dead. Since they rushed the 360 to market it doesn't have a built-in next-gen drive of any sort. So I suppose all their games are going to be limited to at most 9GB for now ... which is a little more reasonable to download than 50GB. (Still not that reasonable.)
Of course, will 9GB will be sufficient for game designers? Or to cram in more features and HD graphics and 5.1 sound will they start putting content onto HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and thus force Xbox 360 owners to buy yet another external accessory? Call me a cynic, but my bet's on the latter.
Plastic discs still have several big advantages for a game machine:
Downloading is great, and we'll see more of it over time. In the long-term future it may even manage to kill off the little plastic disc. But so far plastic disc technology is keeping pace with improvements in bandwidth. And its advantages -- including the ability to sell to people with slow or nonexistent net connections -- will keep it around for a long time.
By that logic every restaurant that failed in the 70's has a chance to sue McDonald's.
1. Some guy comes up with idea for restaurant, opens one location, starts to develop it, wants to open a second location
2. Need money, so make publicity, attract investors
3. McDonalds opens a restaurant in town
4. Investors think: why should I invest in this guy, when McDonalds' is so much cheaper and they have that fun playground for the kids?
5. Without money, restaurant folds
6. McDonalds' food gets steadily crappier
7. Culinary arts stop for years, the world is set back in this field by about 5 years
I think the whole thing is fallacious. With a good product and the right connections you can attract venture money even in a crowded market. That was as true back then as it is now.
Microsoft's mere existence did not squash Go, nor did the field of handwriting recognition get set back by 5 years when Go folded. MS does some illegal and questionable stuff at times, but as far as I can see this suit is not about that -- it's just a guy getting in line for some free money.
Speaking of the "Apple makes their money on hardware" thing... I'm curious about whether that is true any more. I have not heard recent data (even in the plural of anecdotes) that says that hardware is still where Apple makes its money.
.Mac, iTMS, OSX, iLife, iWork, Final Cut, Logic, etc ... is it really true any more?
.Mac ($99) and iTMS (as much as you want to spend).
That was generally accepted to be true a decade ago, but with
Honestly it probably has to do with how you juggle the numbers. You get several hundred dollars worth of retail value software bundled with the computer now -- even my little Mac mini came with OSX ($129) and iLife '05 ($79), in addition to the non-Apple stuff (a few games, encyclopedia, whatever other crap there was that I didn't pay attention to). And OSX and iLife are in turn practically walking ads for
If you charged all the bundled Apple software against the cost of the hardware, even at a discount, I bet it'd be a lot more of a toss-up as to whether the software or hardware makes more money, particularly at the low end.
Apple might be perfectly happy to get out of the cutthroat low-end side of hardware business. I doubt they'd give up the high end market though.
I know what you're talking about ... I went through several cheap wireless controllers that drove me insane. Then I picked up the Logitech. Slightly more expensive but a beautiful controller, feels better than the standard controllers, and is completely lag-free (in my opinion, anyway, ymmv). Smart power-saving too; the crappier ones had a switch, but this one just powers itself off automatically after 5 minutes of idle time, and wakes up when the first button is punched. I have kids so that little detail is more important than you might think. :-)
:-)
Speaking of which, it's time for me to buy a new one. It lasted a good year under heavy use, but I abused it badly beating god mode in God of War. Between the button-mashing and the tension in my hands (oh shit, I can't get hit or I'll die AGAIN) the L1 button finally started sticking a little from overuse. Still, I'm quite happy with the investment.
I'd be amazed if the PS3 required Bluetooth controllers with no alternatives... I hope they will allow corded controllers if you really want them. For spectrum collisions if nothing else (it'd suck to be unable to play a game just because a neighbor is using their 802.11-enabled microwave while on their 2.4GHz phone).
If not, well, at least you can take solace in the fact that the games will be DESIGNED for wireless controllers and thus better able to handle whatever lag may result.
Once you're talking about wormholes big enough to send a stream of photons through, there are many other implications. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days is an interesting thought experiment in that direction.
... it breaks some interesting ground and is very thought provoking.
Basically they suggest that it opens up the possibility of wormhole cameras which can be used to view what's happening anywhere at any time without anyone's knowledge. Privacy is completely destroyed and civilization, um, takes a while to get over that fact. Later in the book other corollary results show up which are even more far out.
It's not a great book in terms of its plot, but it's classic SF
Oh come on. They will pick the one sold to them by the computer manufacturer or store ($200).
There IS a problem here, but it's not that. The real issue is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's not granny and grandpa, it's people who know enough to figure out where to find deals but aren't smart enough to discriminate. Mr. Pre-Teen Script Kiddie will have the problem, and granny and grandpa will only have the problem if Mr. PTSK buys unreliable RAM for them.
The real concerns come if you ever get a major supplier selling RAM with such a high failure rate and not putting a big warning label on it. I doubt that most computer manufacturers would do it without at least putting the RAM through their own test facilities, but I wouldn't put it past Fry's, CompUSA, Best Buy, etc nor would I put it past the IT departments of some shoddy corporations.
Something similar started happening a few years ago with CD-R media, and even before that with floppies. Basically the quality dropped off sharply because there was severe competitive pressure to create the cheapest product possible and a flood of generics entered the market.
With floppies, this led directly to the perception that floppies were unreliable and went bad all the time. (That never used to be true, but is a lot truer these days.)
With CD-R media, the generic spools of 100 that started popping up a few years ago would sometimes have failure rates of as high as 1 in 3 depending on the drive used. This caused pressure on support and engineering -- from the software perspective, I can't even tell you how many failure reports we had that were solved by switching from super-generic to name-brand media. Overall it naturally raised costs to the end user.
I'm out of that field now, so I can't tell you whether CD-R has gotten any better since then... my impression from my friends is that it has, at least a little bit. If so it's probably due to a combination of forces: (1) complaints against the low-quality stuff, (2) name-brands catching up to the price point without sacrificing quite as much quality, (3) hardware manufacturers creating drives with tolerances adjusted to deal better with super-crappy media, (4) consumer education ("I've had problems with generic media before, so let's avoid it"). So if there is fallout from this RAM it'll probably only last a few years before market forces take care of it.
Could be a long few years for those of you who have to deal with it, though.
CEOs of public companies get proper compensation even when they take a $1 salary... the idea is that they are working to increase the value of the stock and/or options that they hold or may be granted. Which is usually a whole lot.
In other cases I know of (Apple, Chrysler) taking a $1 salary has been a partly symbolic move used to indicate that the CEO isn't a robber baron squeezing ridiculous amounts of money from the corporation. It demonstrates that the CEO has incentive to increase the value of the stock, and thinks he/she can do so effectively.
A series of smart initiatives from a Google founder over the course of a year will increase his overall net worth by much more than any piddling salary.
Duh. Imagine for a moment that you are an IT worker who does this type of recovery work (you may be already). Which sounds better?
:-)
- your employer buys 10 USB drives for the IT group
- your employer buys 10 iPods for the IT group
Yes, exactly. That's why.
Sounds like a great concept for a movie! Can't wait to download that one.
It's a quantitative measure of the effect, rather than the qualitative and unsupported statement "obviously if you run an unpatched box you'll get crap installed".
Even when you know something is not optimal, there is worth in having some measure of how bad it is.
However, if you rip in AAC but want to burn in MP3, you can manually convert a non-protected AAC file (.m4a) to MP3. For obvious reasons you can't do it with a protected AAC file (.m4p).
To do it, select MP3 in your import preferences, then select one or more AAC files and select Advanced -> Convert selection to MP3.
You can prove this in about 2 seconds on OSX by running this command: otool -Lv
That's a technical delineation but in short it means that it's based on C/C++ (not Objective-C) and the Carbon / CoreFoundation family of APIs.
The term Yellow Box is normally used to refer to Objective-C / Cocoa / Foundation, which is an entirely different API and implementation that provides generally the same services.
Carbon and Cocoa share some of the lowest-level code in OSX, but for the most part they are entirely separate. Actually separate but equal is another way to say it -- you can do anything in one that you can do with the other.
Yes, having two native application frameworks built into the OS is wasteful, but remember that both Carbon and Cocoa have had long lives independent of each other before they came together in OSX. Rewriting one in terms of the other would be a lot of work and a compatibility nightmare
Apple has had a framework to let it deliver software on Windows for a while now. It's called QuickTime, and it's got a large chunk of Carbon already ported to Win32 APIs. A lot of the other stuff that might be used by applications (CoreFoundation, for example) is already x86-savvy thanks to Darwin.
So iTunes was ported, but almost certainly not through what is normally referred to as the Yellow Box. Unless of course they're re-using the term deliberately to confuse everyone.
I believe the iTMS content view in iTunes might be rendered with HTML, though I'm not sure. So maybe they ported their WebCore engine. Since that's based on KHTML it should also run nicely on x86 of course.
I suspect porting Safari or other apps is not so much a question of "is it technically possible" as "would it make economic sense?"
Remember, the only reason Apple's software is free is because they're trying to entice you to spend money in other ways, like on their hardware or their music store.
Which we all know was caused by UFOs. Have the utilities thoroughly considered the potential impact that aliens might be having on our power infrastructure?
I mean, without giggling?
OK, well let's assume Apple's going to eat their own dogfood.
Speaking of which, that's another rather nice way for Apple to ameliorate the cost. Since Apple develops its own RAID hardware and servers, they naturally spend money on testing the hardware to find bugs.
So using Apple hardware to serve everything would kill two birds with one stone... and the cost can be spread among the testing budget as well as the iTMS budget. The XServe and OSX Server teams get nice real-world testing data, and iTMS gets pretty much the best server support you could ask for, straight from the people who designed the hardware.
At least one site actually picked it up.
Of course nobody takes them seriously anyway. Except Apple that is.
Happily, the US government has indicated their interest in continuing the development of a continuous global war. Sources have even leaked a demo!
Flash demo of GULF WAR 2
Ok, it's obvious but I had to post it.
The Movie Archive of www.archive.org contains all sorts of fascinating, cool, and as far as I know redistributable movie files.
A tiny sample of a few that I've grabbed:
* "Duck and Cover" - the classic scary bomb-readiness film for schoolchildren
* "I like Ike" - Eisenhower political ad, animated
* "Are You Popular?" - bizarre and weird example of 1950's conformity and culture
The collection is just huge, and you can no doubt find some crazy cool stuff. Mirror the whole thing, and you'll probably start approaching 150GB very quickly, at the raw speed of your download pipe.
Here are some more details...
What's new about 1394b? [PDF]
What's new about 1394b? [HTML from Google]
I think the distance was the biggest factor. 1394b is designed to last and be functional as a local backbone. B is supposed to be capable of 2Gbps speeds over a 100m hop without a repeater. A could only get 400Mbps through at most a 5m hop (a 20m hop if you drop to 100Mbps). To get the extra signal fidelity and really open it up for fiber media, they needed to add a few pins. Here's another article about that.
Yes, I definitely agree it sucks, but sometimes you've just got to bend over and take it... standards are made by committees, so I guess it's not suprising they don't always get everything right the first time.
"I've been super impressed by OS X having used it as my primary laptop for the last couple weeks. It really is a great unix box- and this is one of the important missing puzzle pieces."
h tml
For the n'th time, OS X != UNIX!!!
Tell Apple that.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html
While you're at it, tell ESR too. BSD = "a family of Unix versions".
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/BSD.
Lame.
Once you've unmounted the volume and are poking around at the raw blocks, no amount of journaling in the filesystem is going to help you.
Preemptive threading has been available on Macs since MacOS 8.6. The marketing name for it back then was Multiprocessing Services 2.0. Yes, a real preemptive thread scheduler - read the technote. For compatibility's sake, most of the rest of the machine still ran as cooperative threads inside a single preemptive task, but the preemptive threading was available even on uniprocessor machines. The release date for that was May 10, 1999. So, not "for years", perhaps merely "three and a half years".
These features weren't marketed heavily, nor were they widely used before OS8/9 was abandoned
Right on! In point of fact, there are TONS of things their computers don't do. Just the other day I opened up the case of a friend's Mac, put in a roll of undeveloped film, and waited ... but nothing happened. I mean, isn't it marketed like it's supposed to make digital photography easier?
I'm sure that if I had shelled out the bucks for Windows XP, I would have had 5x7 prints spitting out of that little slot thingy in the front in no time!
(Or better yet, as the unknown author suggests, Windows XP Pro... I really didn't need that extra $110 anyway. Knowing me, I'd only spend it on hookers and booze.)
Nope, and they won't be. Apple's always made its money from hardware, not software. DSP and FCP have healthy price tags, but they both have excellent free equivalents
The kind of people who will pay $1000 each to buy the pro tools, and another $1000 for the effects pack, will happily expense another $3000 for a sexy new TiBook, no prob. Having people using Mac hardware is not only profitable, but increases mindshare (did I just use a dot-com word?) and sells more units.
Of course he means QuickTime 2, not Windows 2.0.
Nope, you've got it backwards. QuickTime on OS9 was an extension, which you could readily disable and remove, and as such no part of the standard MacOS toolbox relied upon it. (QT on OSX is a little more integrated but the historical separation remains, QT is built on top of the toolbox, not vice versa.)
QuickTime uses the Mac toolbox fairly heavily -- it's not about media compression, it's about time-based playback of media. Compressing and decompressing is just something you -sometimes- need to do as part of this. A lot of the code is getting it from the uncompressed format to the screen/speakers in a timely manner. It uses windows, threads, events, timers, component manager, resource manager, file manager, sound manager, just to name a few. As some other folks said, they basically ported a good chunk of the MacOS Toolbox to Windows to make it work.
I won't argue too much with that one. I should point out that one of the reasons they didn't port it was because as big as it might seem to some young'uns
They ported the Mac toolbox to Darwin first - aka Carbon. Then, and only then, they brought over QuickTime, building it on top of Carbon. You'd have to port a large part of Carbon to Linux. Mind you, it would be possible, but there probably isn't a large perceived ROI for the time involved.
I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind extending their media-player dominance to another consumer desktop platform, but Linux (and *BSD) are not consumer desktop platforms yet. When binary distributions become more feasible and the userbase grows, that's when you might see QT for Linux.
(former Apple engineer)