Apple's success is based on Apple controlling all aspects of its business. Can you imagine a company that doesn't allow clones of its computers allowing people to judge their newest/coolest gadget by the quality of signal that someone gets from some anonymous tower?!?
Think about it...
When the average user gets crappy reception during a phone call, do they curse the towers? No, they get mad at their phone (sometimes tossing it across the car or shutting it violently or something)!
Apple will not make a product that is judged by the quality of something outside of Apple's control.
If this is a phone, it will be a new set of features for Motorola, not an iPhone. Since Nextel uses Motorola and Sprint just bought Nextel, here is what I think will happen:
Nextel/Sprint will offer 2 lines of phones:
Powerbook line:
Enhanced versions of what Nextel uses now
(black, invulnerable, geeky, GPS, etc.)
iBook line:
iTMS (iTunes Music Service) enhanced versions of Sprint
(Sprint "pin-drop" clarity with cool music downloads)
Think of this more along the lines of the HP iPod, Apple is going to allow others to license their service. Apple will not make their own phone. If Apple is really doing anything with Motorola specifically on chips, it would be trying to get a lower heat/power-consumption G5 so Apple can get them into new Powerbooks.
If I remember right, when Jobs came back to Apple, a big deal was made about him (or was it his daughter) using a ThinkPad.
When asked about this, he said something like, "Once Apple builds a better machine, I will buy it."
Other rumors like this had Jobs booting up OpenStep and using Omniweb instead of MacOS 8-9.x.
I tend to believe these rumors. Jobs has always been the idea man. Holding to an ideal as a challenge for his engineers to outdo him seem right.
Anyway, earlier posts saying that contracting with IBM so that Big Blue can sell machines using its own PowerPC chips instead of Intel/AMD stuff does make sense in a way. Maybe such a deal would be contingent on IBM increasing PPC production, who knows.
IBM could ship servers running some *Nix variant (maybe even based on Darwin [yes, now I am dreaming]) that is optimized for interplay with MacOS on the desktop. End users, get Photoshop and MS Office on their Macs, IT guys get *Nix security, IBM sells its chips, I don't see a loser here.
Have you ever noticed that Regeneration episodes are among the best episodes of Doctor Who?
It's interesting that we all say, "No! Only Harrison can ever be Indy!" but people have no problem with Tom Baker being replaced by Peter Davison, then Colin, then Sylvester, etc...
I think more Indy movies will fail (though this one may pull an audience like Connery did in Never Say Never Again) not due to anything having to do with Mr. Ford.
When Spielberg made the Indy movies, he was reviving the Saturday serials of distant movie lore. He had a sense of nostalgia and a sense of love for the project. After seeing some recent Speilberg work, I don't think he is capable of the innocent fervor needed to cut a successful Indy movie together.
Fastmail has been giving away IMAP and charging for POP for a while. I only see ads if I ever need to login via the web. It's reliable and that means that people like me that use it reccommend it to other people. They also have some very cool domains.
My account is at @nospammail.net
Maybe Google is looking at providing a quality service instead of a bait and switch? Who knows?
Hmmm... Microsloth starting its own search engine because they are jealous of someone else's success?
Well, most of you are probably thinking Netscape right now, but I am thinking eWorld...
Apple started eWorld to get a piece of the AOL pie (now shrinking - thank the deity of your choice). Apple had no previous investment in online Community. They thought their brand name would be all that was needed.
You would figure Gates & Co. would have learned this lesson with MSN (their attempt to steal bits of the AOL pie). But no, now they are going up against Google, Yahoo, et al.
If M$ really wanted to make a go of the search engine market, they would buy one of the past giants and take it in house and add some MS only features to it. Something like Lycos, Altavista, Magellan!
After all, this is how they tried to bury Netscape. They based Internet Exploiter on Mosaic code and just added features at first.
Back when OSX was in beta, I listened to a lot of this x86 port speculation. It was a lot more believeable back then. You see OpenStep (the predecessor to OSX beta) was already cross platform. They had even made a version of Rhapsody that installed as a layer into windows.
Apple has a long history of writing (or collaborating on) uber-cool System Software and abandoning it (anyone else remember PINK? or how about OpenDoc?).
It looks a bit different with Darwin for x86 though. As long as Apple keeps to its word and publishes changes to Darwin, the x86 version will track the cnages made to the PPC version (even if it is a bit behind sometimes).
If you head over to http://www.gnustep.org/ you will then find out about a very active GNU project to duplicate OpenStep 4.4 (the last version before the purchase by Apple). It is almost complete, and if you look through their roadmap, you will see that they plan to track the cnages forst to Rhapsody and then work toward the OSX changes.
What does all this really mean?
Well, right now, it is possible to load up Darwin (or linux) and make sure you have all the GNUstep libraries installed, then you would be able to head over to http://www.omnigroup.com/ or http://www.stone.com/ and grab the old versions of OmniWeb and Create for OpenStep x86 and you can compile them yourselves!
If you are interested in recreating the NeXT experience, why not go whole hog and load up the linux distro called Simply GNUstep (which only includes GNUstep tools and GUI stuffs wherever possible).
What would all this really give you?
Right now, all you would get is outdated versions of OpenStep applications (most/.ers would not be happy with that).
If Apple did a port of its own, you would probably be able to run all Cocoa apps but not apps that are Classic or Carbon (because those depend upon parts of Old MacOS.
In fact, that was the reason why I believed the x86 rumors back in the days of beta. Most apps were Carbon and Classic. An x86 version back then would have servered as an advertizement and not a complete threat to Apple's hardware business.
I would look to Apple playing with other more exotic chipsets and not x86. They need low power consumption, faster chips, not x86 compatibility. It's too bad that AMD Hammer Macs or SPARC Macs never materialized.
Something like them may happen (especially since projects like PearPC have gotten better at emulating the PPC chipset) but look to Apple to move up the food chain toward Workstation Hardware and across the chain toward advanced Embedded Chips (maybe adding Cell Phone or some such function to its iPod) and not down.
The eMac or something like it will continue to be the bottom of its line. At $699 including a well-built monitor, its a pretty good value actually.
The other fork from b2/cafelog, b2evolution has had this ability for a long time. They also have a simple migration utility for people who want to migrate from WordPress.
The full uClinux distribution contains many basic tools (including Busybox) already patched for use with uClinux.
MAD is a MP3 player that does not require a FPU.
Tremor is an OGG player that does not require a FPU.
SoX is an audio processing application capable of playing a variety of music formats (.WAV is probably the most interesting here).
Intel's IPP package and IPP MP3 Sample program. Intel's IPP is a highly optimised set of libraries that includes MP3 processing. The sample program seems to work fine under uClinux.
Re:Any hypercard replacements out there?
on
HyperCard Gone for Good
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What is Squeak?
Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.
Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include
real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk
extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling
network access support that allows simple construction of servers and other useful facilities
it runs bit-identical on many platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, and others)
a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object
a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers
efficient bulk-mutation of objects
Squeak is available for free via the Internet, at this and other sites. Each release includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and network access, with complete source code. Originally developed on the Macintosh, members of its user community have since ported it to numerous other platforms including Windows 95 and NT, Windows CE (it runs on the Cassiopeia and the HP320LX), all common flavors of UNIX, Acorn RiscOS, and a bare chip (the Mitsubishi M32R/D).
What it is not
The Squeak Smalltalk system bears no relation to the "Squeak" language designed by Rob Pike and Luca Cardelli in 1985, nor to its successor, "Newsqueak".
What is Cool about Squeak
To quote from Dwight Hughes, a frequent contributor to the Squeak mailing list, "How is Squeak important? Squeak extends the fundamental Smalltalk philosophy of complete openness -- where everything is available to see, understand, modify, and extend for whatever purpose -- to include even the VM. It is a genuine, complete, compact, efficient Smalltalk-80 environment (*not* a toy). It is not specialized for any particular hardware/OS platform. Porting is easy -- you are not fighting entrenched platform/OS dependencies to move to a new system or configuration. It has essentially been put into the public domain - greatly broadening potential interest, and potential applications. The core team behind Squeak includes Dan Ingalls, Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, and Scott Wallace. All of this has attracted many of the best and most experienced Smalltalk programmers and implementers in the world."
Squeak stands alone as a practical Smalltalk in which a researcher, professor, or motivated student can examine source code for every part of the system, including graphics primitives and the virtual machine itself. One can make changes immediately and without needing to see or deal with any language other than Smalltalk. Squeak runs bit-identical images across its entire portability base, greatly facilitating collaboration in diverse environments. The system, together with an adherance, for better or for worse, to the image model (the entire state of Squeak is manifest in an image file), has yielded a system of extreme portability and sharability. Any image file will run on any interpreter even if it was saved on completely different hardware, with a completely different OS (or no OS at all!).
A Brief History of Squeak
Squeak began, very simply, with the needs of a research group at Apple. We wanted a system as expressive and immediate as Smalltalk to pursue various application goals (prototypical educational software, user interface experiments and (let''s be honest) another run at the Dynabook fence). As you can read in the OOPSLA paper ("Back to the Future") we hit on the idea of writing a Smalltalk interpreter in a subset of Smalltalk, together with a translator from that subset to C.
Philosophy
The current Squeak interpreter combines a classical ST-80 interpreter with a simple yet efficient 32-bit dir
I was traveling in Costa Rica. When I was in a small town on the West Coast, there were little stores with Satelite Internet hook-ups.
The only time they went down was when a Rainy Season downpour was in full force.
So, unless you are talking about truly extreme weather, I wouldn't worry about SateliteTV, since, I would imagine, the Internet Connection would probably be more sensative to outages.
Well, you'll love this. They were using my trainings to dupe other people into paying a training fee.
So, I got tricked out of my wages and other people got duped out of $100 a pop in training fees for non-existant classes.
Learning Strategies theoretically hired me to train other people to teach classes using The Interwise Platform to K-12 students. They promised me a salary of $45k. I have filed the proper papers with the Attorney General for failure to pay an employee. Also, my case was reviewed by a labor lawyer who says it looks good, but since it is a government case, it will take some time.
Why am I posting this here? Well, the other day, someone else that Learning Strategies failed to pay sent me the following. This came from the FBI:
THIS IS NOT AN AUTOMATED REPLY
Thank you for your submission of information via
the FBI.Gov Web site. In as much as the FBI
receives reports of this type of activity on a
regular basis there is no need to forward any such
additional emails to the FBI.
You indicate that you are aware that these
solicitations are fraudulent, so I will not
caution you against responding to them. However,
I have included our standard caution to the public
simply because it contains information of which
you may not be aware.
____________________
A review of the information you provided revealed
that you are being approached over the Internet to
participate in one of many variations of an
advance fee scheme being perpetrated by
individuals from various West African nations,
particularly Nigeria. Victims have lost
substantial funds in the past and all requests for
travel to foreign locations should be ignored.
The United States Secret Service (USSS) has
developed an excellent, detailed description of
this fraud scheme, which can be accessed at
http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml. If
you have been victimized by one of these schemes,
please forward appropriate written documentation
to the USSS, Financial Crimes Division, 950 H
Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20223, or telephone
(202) 406-5850. We encourage you to share this Web
page with family and friends.
Your continued cooperation in this and other matters is greatly
appreciated.
It is not always clear that one is being scammed. In my case, I had been paid a nominal amount for classes I taught as an independant contractor ($435) before they offered me fulltime work. Learning Strategies owes me $4375. But, who knows if I will ever see it.
If anyone has any sugestions on how to get the ball really moving on this I would greatly appreciate it. As would all of the other people who were promised salaries that never got them.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's success is based on Apple controlling all aspects of its business. Can you imagine a company that doesn't allow clones of its computers allowing people to judge their newest/coolest gadget by the quality of signal that someone gets from some anonymous tower?!?
Think about it...
When the average user gets crappy reception during a phone call, do they curse the towers? No, they get mad at their phone (sometimes tossing it across the car or shutting it violently or something)!
Apple will not make a product that is judged by the quality of something outside of Apple's control.
If this is a phone, it will be a new set of features for Motorola, not an iPhone. Since Nextel uses Motorola and Sprint just bought Nextel, here is what I think will happen:
Nextel/Sprint will offer 2 lines of phones:
Powerbook line:
Enhanced versions of what Nextel uses now
(black, invulnerable, geeky, GPS, etc.)
iBook line:
iTMS (iTunes Music Service) enhanced versions of Sprint
(Sprint "pin-drop" clarity with cool music downloads)
Think of this more along the lines of the HP iPod, Apple is going to allow others to license their service. Apple will not make their own phone. If Apple is really doing anything with Motorola specifically on chips, it would be trying to get a lower heat/power-consumption G5 so Apple can get them into new Powerbooks.
http://www.sagefire.org/index.php/2004/11/07/macos _classic_sound_pack_v1_4
Clink-Klank, Quack, and Boing are there too.
When asked about this, he said something like, "Once Apple builds a better machine, I will buy it."
Other rumors like this had Jobs booting up OpenStep and using Omniweb instead of MacOS 8-9.x.
I tend to believe these rumors. Jobs has always been the idea man. Holding to an ideal as a challenge for his engineers to outdo him seem right.
Anyway, earlier posts saying that contracting with IBM so that Big Blue can sell machines using its own PowerPC chips instead of Intel/AMD stuff does make sense in a way. Maybe such a deal would be contingent on IBM increasing PPC production, who knows.
IBM could ship servers running some *Nix variant (maybe even based on Darwin [yes, now I am dreaming]) that is optimized for interplay with MacOS on the desktop. End users, get Photoshop and MS Office on their Macs, IT guys get *Nix security, IBM sells its chips, I don't see a loser here.
I agree. Indiana Jones is a composite of character's like Alan Quartermain http://imdb.com/title/tt0042646/ and Captain Blood http://imdb.com/title/tt0026174/.
It should be possible to roll another composite hero.
It's interesting that we all say, "No! Only Harrison can ever be Indy!" but people have no problem with Tom Baker being replaced by Peter Davison, then Colin, then Sylvester, etc...
I think more Indy movies will fail (though this one may pull an audience like Connery did in Never Say Never Again) not due to anything having to do with Mr. Ford.
When Spielberg made the Indy movies, he was reviving the Saturday serials of distant movie lore. He had a sense of nostalgia and a sense of love for the project. After seeing some recent Speilberg work, I don't think he is capable of the innocent fervor needed to cut a successful Indy movie together.
My account is at @nospammail.net
Maybe Google is looking at providing a quality service instead of a bait and switch? Who knows?
Well, most of you are probably thinking Netscape right now, but I am thinking eWorld...
Apple started eWorld to get a piece of the AOL pie (now shrinking - thank the deity of your choice). Apple had no previous investment in online Community. They thought their brand name would be all that was needed.
You would figure Gates & Co. would have learned this lesson with MSN (their attempt to steal bits of the AOL pie). But no, now they are going up against Google, Yahoo, et al.
If M$ really wanted to make a go of the search engine market, they would buy one of the past giants and take it in house and add some MS only features to it. Something like Lycos, Altavista, Magellan!
After all, this is how they tried to bury Netscape. They based Internet Exploiter on Mosaic code and just added features at first.
Apple has a long history of writing (or collaborating on) uber-cool System Software and abandoning it (anyone else remember PINK? or how about OpenDoc?).
It looks a bit different with Darwin for x86 though. As long as Apple keeps to its word and publishes changes to Darwin, the x86 version will track the cnages made to the PPC version (even if it is a bit behind sometimes).
If you head over to http://www.gnustep.org/ you will then find out about a very active GNU project to duplicate OpenStep 4.4 (the last version before the purchase by Apple). It is almost complete, and if you look through their roadmap, you will see that they plan to track the cnages forst to Rhapsody and then work toward the OSX changes.
What does all this really mean?
Well, right now, it is possible to load up Darwin (or linux) and make sure you have all the GNUstep libraries installed, then you would be able to head over to http://www.omnigroup.com/ or http://www.stone.com/ and grab the old versions of OmniWeb and Create for OpenStep x86 and you can compile them yourselves!
If you are interested in recreating the NeXT experience, why not go whole hog and load up the linux distro called Simply GNUstep (which only includes GNUstep tools and GUI stuffs wherever possible).
What would all this really give you?
Right now, all you would get is outdated versions of OpenStep applications (most /.ers would not be happy with that).
If Apple did a port of its own, you would probably be able to run all Cocoa apps but not apps that are Classic or Carbon (because those depend upon parts of Old MacOS.
In fact, that was the reason why I believed the x86 rumors back in the days of beta. Most apps were Carbon and Classic. An x86 version back then would have servered as an advertizement and not a complete threat to Apple's hardware business.
I would look to Apple playing with other more exotic chipsets and not x86. They need low power consumption, faster chips, not x86 compatibility. It's too bad that AMD Hammer Macs or SPARC Macs never materialized.
Something like them may happen (especially since projects like PearPC have gotten better at emulating the PPC chipset) but look to Apple to move up the food chain toward Workstation Hardware and across the chain toward advanced Embedded Chips (maybe adding Cell Phone or some such function to its iPod) and not down.
The eMac or something like it will continue to be the bottom of its line. At $699 including a well-built monitor, its a pretty good value actually.
The other fork from b2/cafelog, b2evolution has had this ability for a long time. They also have a simple migration utility for people who want to migrate from WordPress.
See you over in b2evo land!
http://www.nada.de/mac/camino/cep.html
Head on over to the above URL and do to Camino what most users do to Safari with PithHelmet!
Well then, Classic M$ = Modern Apple policy
Why has no one made a stink about Apple saying that Safari 2.0 will only work on MacOS 10.4 (Tiger).
New IE only in WinXP, new Safari only in Tiger. It sounds the same to me.
Maybe slashdot could add a Steve Jobs Borg to their list of possible icons?
User Tools
The full uClinux distribution contains many basic tools (including Busybox) already patched for use with uClinux.
MAD is a MP3 player that does not require a FPU.
Tremor is an OGG player that does not require a FPU.
SoX is an audio processing application capable of playing a variety of music formats (.WAV is probably the most interesting here).
Intel's IPP package and IPP MP3 Sample program. Intel's IPP is a highly optimised set of libraries that includes MP3 processing. The sample program seems to work fine under uClinux.
From their site:
What is Squeak? Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks. Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling network access support that allows simple construction of servers and other useful facilities it runs bit-identical on many platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, and others) a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers efficient bulk-mutation of objects Squeak is available for free via the Internet, at this and other sites. Each release includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and network access, with complete source code. Originally developed on the Macintosh, members of its user community have since ported it to numerous other platforms including Windows 95 and NT, Windows CE (it runs on the Cassiopeia and the HP320LX), all common flavors of UNIX, Acorn RiscOS, and a bare chip (the Mitsubishi M32R/D).
What it is not
The Squeak Smalltalk system bears no relation to the "Squeak" language designed by Rob Pike and Luca Cardelli in 1985, nor to its successor, "Newsqueak".
What is Cool about Squeak
To quote from Dwight Hughes, a frequent contributor to the Squeak mailing list, "How is Squeak important? Squeak extends the fundamental Smalltalk philosophy of complete openness -- where everything is available to see, understand, modify, and extend for whatever purpose -- to include even the VM. It is a genuine, complete, compact, efficient Smalltalk-80 environment (*not* a toy). It is not specialized for any particular hardware/OS platform. Porting is easy -- you are not fighting entrenched platform/OS dependencies to move to a new system or configuration. It has essentially been put into the public domain - greatly broadening potential interest, and potential applications. The core team behind Squeak includes Dan Ingalls, Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, and Scott Wallace. All of this has attracted many of the best and most experienced Smalltalk programmers and implementers in the world."
Squeak stands alone as a practical Smalltalk in which a researcher, professor, or motivated student can examine source code for every part of the system, including graphics primitives and the virtual machine itself. One can make changes immediately and without needing to see or deal with any language other than Smalltalk. Squeak runs bit-identical images across its entire portability base, greatly facilitating collaboration in diverse environments. The system, together with an adherance, for better or for worse, to the image model (the entire state of Squeak is manifest in an image file), has yielded a system of extreme portability and sharability. Any image file will run on any interpreter even if it was saved on completely different hardware, with a completely different OS (or no OS at all!).
A Brief History of Squeak
Squeak began, very simply, with the needs of a research group at Apple. We wanted a system as expressive and immediate as Smalltalk to pursue various application goals (prototypical educational software, user interface experiments and (let''s be honest) another run at the Dynabook fence). As you can read in the OOPSLA paper ("Back to the Future") we hit on the idea of writing a Smalltalk interpreter in a subset of Smalltalk, together with a translator from that subset to C.
Philosophy
The current Squeak interpreter combines a classical ST-80 interpreter with a simple yet efficient 32-bit dir
I was traveling in Costa Rica. When I was in a small town on the West Coast, there were little stores with Satelite Internet hook-ups. The only time they went down was when a Rainy Season downpour was in full force. So, unless you are talking about truly extreme weather, I wouldn't worry about SateliteTV, since, I would imagine, the Internet Connection would probably be more sensative to outages.
MYIE2 installs a front end for the IE engine that does all of this. It also allows tabbed browsing. It is definitely worth a look.
Where else could I write a 13 line word processor?
Well, you'll love this. They were using my trainings to dupe other people into paying a training fee. So, I got tricked out of my wages and other people got duped out of $100 a pop in training fees for non-existant classes.
Why am I posting this here? Well, the other day, someone else that Learning Strategies failed to pay sent me the following. This came from the FBI:
It is not always clear that one is being scammed. In my case, I had been paid a nominal amount for classes I taught as an independant contractor ($435) before they offered me fulltime work. Learning Strategies owes me $4375. But, who knows if I will ever see it.If anyone has any sugestions on how to get the ball really moving on this I would greatly appreciate it. As would all of the other people who were promised salaries that never got them.
Thank you.