<p>I think he is getting confused, remembering that the Apple standard drivers don't always want to install onto unrecognized hardware (Apple's way of protecting themselves from being held responsible for hardware/driver interactions that they don't test for).</p>
<p>I have run into more situations where I had to use a mac to rescue a drive that a PC had 'trashed'. In more than a few cases I was able to get a mac to read data off a problematic or virus infected PC hard drive. Didn't even have to worry about any sort of virus infecting my work computer. Even had a case where the power failed on an NT box in the middle of a low-level format and NT wouldn't touch the drive. Apple's disk tool looked at it, told me it was 'unreadable' and then offered to format it. A couple of hours later (low level format + zero all data), the NT box was happy with it's reformatted drive.</p>
I posted a similar response above, but... the reason that scrolling works in some apps and not others is that some are Coccoa apps (scrolling works automaticlly as it is a part of the development frameworks, you have to turn it off if you don't want it in the appropriate widgets), and that the others are Carbon apps. In Carbon you have to build in this functionality, just like you have to in MacOS 9 or Windows, and that part of the I/O API was a little slow in comming out (understandable, other things were more important). This just points out how nice a development environment Coccoa/ProjectBuilder/InterfaceBuilder is!
MacOS X PB supports both scroll wheels and two button mice right now. I can be absolutely sure because I am using a Kensington 4 button mouse with a scroll wheel right now on my MacOS X PB system, and both work beautifully in all my coccoa apps (Coccoa apps inherit scrolling behavior from the Appkit frameworks, Carbon Apps have to build it themselves, or inherit it from some other framework) There has been a push on the Darwin side to include a third, or more, mousebutton events system-wide.. and this will automatically be folded into the MacOS X project.
Your guess is wrong.. here is a small list of WebObjects customers... remembering that most of these were onboard when a single deployment easily ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. For those of you who do not want to click over, the list includes AT&T, Toyota, and the BBC among many others. These are people who are still using NeXT's enterprise group (renamed Apple Enterprise, now becoming iServices).
Not transparency (either there, or not there), but translucency (in aqua's case 256 levels). For instance, the browser window that I am typing in on mt MacOS X box cast's a shadow on the window below, but I can still read the text in the bottom window that is in this shadow.
Every pixel of every window has a translucency value associated with it (Classic and Carbon Apps just get every pixel defaulted to 100% opaque). This does slow down the rendering, but Apple has been working overtime to improve this (DP4 to PB was a big step, and I expect even more for the next round), and they have been working to get ATI to use some of the 3d rendering hardware to pick up these calculations, so that the CPU can do other things (and there has also been a lot of Altivec'ing of this code.. watch things on a G3 vs on a G4, the difference is astounding).
Putting this into X11 would be a lot of work, and would require a big increase in the amount of data flowing around. This is one of the reasons Apple has not been talking about remote displaying of Aqua, but has been talking up (in developer info) the use of remote methods to create client-server'ish apps....
Sadly (?), you will not be able to, the whole PowerPC family is notorious for being much cooler than their Intel brethren... If you want something to burn your toast on, or cook an egg on, try a P3/P4 sans cooling system.. or switch to industrial grade, go with an UltraSparc (shared an office with a E420 for a month, nearly went deaf...)
Re:9.1 to be released at MacWorld Tokyo in *Februa
on
New G4s Coming Our Way
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· Score: 1
<sarcasm>Ooh!! a definitive source!!</sarcasm> I do regularly read macorsurmors, but after having watched them for a long time, they rarely are barking up the right tree... sometimes they get it right, but this is a one man operation, without any real solid sources. Interesting, but nothing to base real decisions on.
but... you keep forgetting that the dimensions of the monoliths were 1x4x9 by 16! 16 of course being the temporal measurement/dimension. I guess you had to read all the books (I am not sure that this was in 2001 or in 2061, it was not in the movie though...)
Small Comment: Japanese is inflected, not tonal. The bi-tonal "sing-song" quality is a convention, not a necessity. You can sucessfully speak Japanese in a Monotone, it just sounds silly.
Just because one is less arrogant than 99% of the other smurfs does not mean that one is not arrogant.
As an American who worked long and hard for his not-quite-american accent in German, I found that quite a few Europeans totally unwilling to accept that I was anything but a tourist. I got very tired of the inferiority/superiority complex that I ran into there. I reallize that we Americans have our own brand of it, but that is no excuse to categorically say that we are all Ego-Cultureally-Centricly bound.
P.S. In the Oslo Vicking museum I found the description of the Vicking raids on (what is now) Nothern Great Brittian as "Cultural and Economic Exchanges" rather humerous.
The Czecks and the Hungarians... I spent more than a few hours of my stays in Budapest and Prauge just sitting oustide a cafe enjoying the mobile scenery, and I really did enjoy the company in the cities I did spend more time in. Didn't have enough time to realy get to know anyone, but met pleanty of women I would have liked the chance to get to know (they guys were fun to...).
<p>As someone with three semmesters of Japanese behind my belt, I can speak to this a little bit. Modern Japaneeese is written either left-to-right (top-to-bottom) or top-to-bottom (left-to-right), depending almost on taste. This is not the biggest issue in learning Japanese, the biggest difficulty for us Gaijin (roughly "Western Devils", or "foreigners" with some heavy overtones), is that Japanese is a "culturally pregnet" language, that is you have to understand the culture to truely understand the langugage.</p>
<p>Of course, having three alphabets (Hirigana - 56 letters, Katakana - 56 letters, and Kangi - tens of thousands of letters) all mixed in with eachother all the time does not help. Keybording is a real art in Aisian languages, and takes some time to get used to (typically they type in the romanized, Romanji, versions of the words and use a small input program to help them indicate what they were aiming for).</p>
<p>I have got to say that I did enjoy the challenge of learning Japanese, and hope one day to go there to truely learn the language, but I liked the chalenge (ok.. I am nuts...). If you are not up to that, I would recomend one of the "easier" langugaes for Westerners, German (my favorite), Spanish, or French. I am not saying they are easy, only easier for Westerners. I am fluent in German, so I am speaking from experience here... and if you want a truely beutiful, challenging western langugae, try Hungarian, my current target language!</p>
This is exactly like saying that Linux is a pretty small and stable OS. The darwin project is a complete OS, and can include an X11 server. It's big claim to fame is that is is arcitecturally based on MacOS X, so it includes NetInfo, Packages (a big deal), a (heavily modified) Mac 3.0 Kernal, dual (or more) binaries, and all the other Apple/NeXT inovations.
It does not get a lot of press outside it's circles because it is geek OS that has a non-geek OS for a big brother.
And how big an audience would that reach? I am not only refering to the size of the Linux market, but the fact that there are so many binary forms of Linux out there, that Apple would be forced to pick just one version on one platform (for example RedHat 7 on Intel) to support. And what would everyone do then, scream at them for not suporting their effort to get Linux on a Toaster running... And where would this benifit Apple, who is a company after all, and would probably have to pay all those Codec writers another fee to add another platform to the contract (because the orriginal contracts never included Linux.. only MacOS and Windows). They are already having enough problems getting third party drivers added into MacOS X because the third parties want more money for the right to re-compile these drivers, and this is even a bigger issue on the Darwin side.
hmmm... you say you want digital video out with color matching? hmmm... where have I seen a solution for that.. oh ya... Apple's ADC (Apple Display Connector) hooked up to a Apple Cinnema Display 22" Flatpannel. All digital connection, great picture, and Apple's ColorSync making sure that what you see is what you print. If you don't like the cost, well you can always go with the 15" flatpannel.
This is exactly where Apple is the domminent force, and has been since the orriginal LaserWriter
I to am a FileMakerPro Developer. Actually I am just wrapping up my first commercial solution with it right now (within the next two hours), but for the question at hand, where I usually work in is more importatnt: WebObjects!
For the project I am finnishing up right now, FP5 is the right platform, but I did find myself a little constrained by the close association between tables (called databases in FP5), and reports/views/layouts. I would up having to create a lot of extra calculation fields to get the exact behavior that the cutomer wanted. Not a huge problem as the datatbase is only 5K records big (counting centeral records), but somethign the WO Developer in me shuddered at.
Well, my point here was that with WebObjects now in the $800 range, it is suddenly closer to the range yoiu are looking at, and it does come with the lite version of OpenBase (no seurity, but if you have LAN firewalling, you can deal with this untill you get management to pop for the full version, or another DataBase... no MySQL is not a good idea for WO Development, EOF does not play nice with it yet).It is my sicere hope that the FileMaker and WebObjects teams can be slowly brought together on MacOS X. I have no real evidence for this, but if you look at the directons that the two teams are moving it is not totally out of the question (WebObjects new easy to use "Direct to Web" and "Direct to Java Client" assistants, and FileMaker Pro's XML moves).
Then go get involved on the Darwin project, specifialy in the Intel port section. Do not be confused in thinking that ANY of the GUI functionality, or the Classic environment, or a number of other parts of MacOS X are there, those are all decidely PPC, and decidely closed source. Simply replacing the Kernal is not going to change that fact (no more than having WinNT on Alpha meant that you could run MS Office on your DEC server).
And since Apple get the vast majority of its revenue from Hardware sales, if would not necicarily make sence to do what you are talking about.
Since Steve Jobs said that 1.3 would be in the final release durring his Keynote speech at May's World Wide Developers confernce, my guess would be yes. The other main clue is to go through the Java materials, and discover that it is actually a miscmash of Java 1.2 and 1.3... and the percentage of 1.3 has been steadily growing allong the way (DP3, DP4, PostDP4, Beta, etc).
Well, you are right, and you are wrong. Imaging (pictures, infared, sidescan radar, etc) is one very good use for this sort of aircraft, and worth the high development costs to both for inteligence gathering and scientific studies (the kind that go into studying the enviornment and wind up helping US agriculture to see paterns that bring more food to your table for example). But that is only the cash cow that is going to get the research done.
The big deal with this sort of system is the ability to selectively "park" it at high altitude over one spot for extended periods of time (the current holy grail is in the two month range), and serve as a communications platform. In simpler terms they want to replace low orbit sateites (*cough* *Iridium* *cough*).
Putting something in orbit cost a lot per pound, and if you make a mistake on something in building the "payload", or something unforseen happens, or if Murphey's Law just rears it fickel head, then you are stuck with what is in orbit. There is just not enough money to go out there and fix satelites in orbit in most cases (Hubbel being a major exception). But if something were to go wrong with a payload on one of these birds all you would have to do is tell it to land, and then fix/replace the payload, and since this costs soo much less than orbiting a satelite, you probably can afford to have a backup waiting on the runway to replace the whole thing.
Now as to the question of baloons/dirigibles, they simply do not have the staying power that this mission calls for. It is hard (impossible) to construct an envelope (the bag that holds the gas) that does not leak, meaning that missions longer than a few days are simply not possible. Add to that the fact that the winds at the altitudes called for in these projects tend to be faster than lighter-than-air-craft have posted in the past, makes them simply the wrong horse to bet on in this race.
It is not about weight, it is about the ability to do the mission at hand.
IEEE 1394 is a standard, but I think the word open is a bit misleading. There are quite a number of patents held in relationship to FireWire (Apple's name for the technology). These patents have been placed in a holding company by the name of <a href="http://www.1394la.com/">1394 LA's Patent Portfolio License organization</a>, by a number of companies who hold them (yes Apple is a major member of this patent pool). Any company that is going to put FireWire devices bus buys the right to use the technology from this holding comany for $.25 a device, regardles of number ports(actually use the patents behind the technology).
I belive Apple's only requirement for the use of FireWire is that it have a Driver avalible for MacOS, and that that driver and device follow the specifications (have a valid ID, vendor, etc...), and be registered (simple process).
There was a bru-ha-ha when Apple proposed a higher, per port, fee, but that never came to pass, and the change was never reported on Slashdot (*ahem*).
On a related note, this standard is no more open than USB. There are very few makers of the USB controller silicon (*cough* *Intel* *cough*), and the maker of that standard makes it's mony by controlling the patents behind the implimentation of the standard. Sure you are free to make your own implimentation, but it is going to be damm difficult, and expensive, to do so without infringing on Intel patents... the 1394 consortium is just a bit more open/honest about it.
I disagree, to extend your metaphore, this is like your optomologist playing a song on different stero systems and perscribing your diopter based on your reactions to the sound. What is being measured here is an absolute difference in the sound, but the value in lossy compression (both in audio and visual realms, and others?!?) is that you can loose data size without losing the important data.
This test is valueless, as it does not take the human ear into account. The quality of the compression is completely a subjective thing, it will always be so. There will never, ever, be a worthwile mathematical test for lossy compression.
Ok.. I am going to try and set this strait... ObjectiveC is not going away in at all in MacOS X development! But it has been officially declared dead in the next version of WebObjects (officially it will be called WebObjects 5 for Java). The reasoning for this is that Apple wants the iServices division to kick ass in the WebApplications marketpplace, and they need to make sure that the deployment environment will run on all the big hardware. By converging on Java they can make make the Java Runtime Developers do all the work of porting WebObjects Deploment Server to all that wonderful hardware. And just do the work of creating the development enviornment (which is mostly written in ObjC) to the selected few OS's (MacOS, WinNT/2000, Linux, Solarix, etc). This is why WebObjects is moving away from ObjectiveC.
Now there has been a lot of fuss over this move from the ObjectiveC community, because it is mostly made up of WebObjects developers who have a lot of time and legacy code invested in ObjectiveC, and Apple has now told them that they have to find a new way of doing things (my bet is that they will form the backbone of a lot of firm's Cocco development efforts). To these people Apple has stepped back from supporting ObjC where they need it, and this has been percieved by many as an abandonment of ObjC in general. Apple has also been hyping Java2 as a big win (which it is), and this has also fueled their fears. But there is no real sign that apple is abandoning ObjC in MacOS X... none at all (in fact most of the apps that were ported to Java for early DP's were moved back to ObjC for DP4 and beyond...)
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<p>I think he is getting confused, remembering that the Apple standard drivers don't always want to install onto unrecognized hardware (Apple's way of protecting themselves from being held responsible for hardware/driver interactions that they don't test for).</p>
<p>I have run into more situations where I had to use a mac to rescue a drive that a PC had 'trashed'. In more than a few cases I was able to get a mac to read data off a problematic or virus infected PC hard drive. Didn't even have to worry about any sort of virus infecting my work computer. Even had a case where the power failed on an NT box in the middle of a low-level format and NT wouldn't touch the drive. Apple's disk tool looked at it, told me it was 'unreadable' and then offered to format it. A couple of hours later (low level format + zero all data), the NT box was happy with it's reformatted drive.</p>
I posted a similar response above, but... the reason that scrolling works in some apps and not others is that some are Coccoa apps (scrolling works automaticlly as it is a part of the development frameworks, you have to turn it off if you don't want it in the appropriate widgets), and that the others are Carbon apps. In Carbon you have to build in this functionality, just like you have to in MacOS 9 or Windows, and that part of the I/O API was a little slow in comming out (understandable, other things were more important). This just points out how nice a development environment Coccoa/ProjectBuilder/InterfaceBuilder is!
MacOS X PB supports both scroll wheels and two button mice right now. I can be absolutely sure because I am using a Kensington 4 button mouse with a scroll wheel right now on my MacOS X PB system, and both work beautifully in all my coccoa apps (Coccoa apps inherit scrolling behavior from the Appkit frameworks, Carbon Apps have to build it themselves, or inherit it from some other framework) There has been a push on the Darwin side to include a third, or more, mousebutton events system-wide.. and this will automatically be folded into the MacOS X project.
Your guess is wrong.. here is a small list of WebObjects customers... remembering that most of these were onboard when a single deployment easily ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. For those of you who do not want to click over, the list includes AT&T, Toyota, and the BBC among many others. These are people who are still using NeXT's enterprise group (renamed Apple Enterprise, now becoming iServices).
umm.. you can put the doc on the side of your screen... try over at MacOS X Hints, they had a not about that a couple of days ago...
Not transparency (either there, or not there), but translucency (in aqua's case 256 levels). For instance, the browser window that I am typing in on mt MacOS X box cast's a shadow on the window below, but I can still read the text in the bottom window that is in this shadow.
Every pixel of every window has a translucency value associated with it (Classic and Carbon Apps just get every pixel defaulted to 100% opaque). This does slow down the rendering, but Apple has been working overtime to improve this (DP4 to PB was a big step, and I expect even more for the next round), and they have been working to get ATI to use some of the 3d rendering hardware to pick up these calculations, so that the CPU can do other things (and there has also been a lot of Altivec'ing of this code.. watch things on a G3 vs on a G4, the difference is astounding).
Putting this into X11 would be a lot of work, and would require a big increase in the amount of data flowing around. This is one of the reasons Apple has not been talking about remote displaying of Aqua, but has been talking up (in developer info) the use of remote methods to create client-server'ish apps....
Sadly (?), you will not be able to, the whole PowerPC family is notorious for being much cooler than their Intel brethren... If you want something to burn your toast on, or cook an egg on, try a P3/P4 sans cooling system.. or switch to industrial grade, go with an UltraSparc (shared an office with a E420 for a month, nearly went deaf...)
<sarcasm>Ooh!! a definitive source!!</sarcasm> I do regularly read macorsurmors, but after having watched them for a long time, they rarely are barking up the right tree... sometimes they get it right, but this is a one man operation, without any real solid sources. Interesting, but nothing to base real decisions on.
If we are going to throw out the idea of "bring this to the masses" then I think the nod would have to go to NeXT...
but... you keep forgetting that the dimensions of the monoliths were 1x4x9 by 16! 16 of course being the temporal measurement/dimension. I guess you had to read all the books (I am not sure that this was in 2001 or in 2061, it was not in the movie though...)
Small Comment: Japanese is inflected, not tonal. The bi-tonal "sing-song" quality is a convention, not a necessity. You can sucessfully speak Japanese in a Monotone, it just sounds silly.
As an American who worked long and hard for his not-quite-american accent in German, I found that quite a few Europeans totally unwilling to accept that I was anything but a tourist. I got very tired of the inferiority/superiority complex that I ran into there. I reallize that we Americans have our own brand of it, but that is no excuse to categorically say that we are all Ego-Cultureally-Centricly bound.
P.S. In the Oslo Vicking museum I found the description of the Vicking raids on (what is now) Nothern Great Brittian as "Cultural and Economic Exchanges" rather humerous.
The Czecks and the Hungarians... I spent more than a few hours of my stays in Budapest and Prauge just sitting oustide a cafe enjoying the mobile scenery, and I really did enjoy the company in the cities I did spend more time in. Didn't have enough time to realy get to know anyone, but met pleanty of women I would have liked the chance to get to know (they guys were fun to...).
<p>As someone with three semmesters of Japanese behind my belt, I can speak to this a little bit. Modern Japaneeese is written either left-to-right (top-to-bottom) or top-to-bottom (left-to-right), depending almost on taste. This is not the biggest issue in learning Japanese, the biggest difficulty for us Gaijin (roughly "Western Devils", or "foreigners" with some heavy overtones), is that Japanese is a "culturally pregnet" language, that is you have to understand the culture to truely understand the langugage.</p>
<p>Of course, having three alphabets (Hirigana - 56 letters, Katakana - 56 letters, and Kangi - tens of thousands of letters) all mixed in with eachother all the time does not help. Keybording is a real art in Aisian languages, and takes some time to get used to (typically they type in the romanized, Romanji, versions of the words and use a small input program to help them indicate what they were aiming for).</p>
<p>I have got to say that I did enjoy the challenge of learning Japanese, and hope one day to go there to truely learn the language, but I liked the chalenge (ok.. I am nuts...). If you are not up to that, I would recomend one of the "easier" langugaes for Westerners, German (my favorite), Spanish, or French. I am not saying they are easy, only easier for Westerners. I am fluent in German, so I am speaking from experience here... and if you want a truely beutiful, challenging western langugae, try Hungarian, my current target language!</p>
err...ummm.. NO!!!!
This is exactly like saying that Linux is a pretty small and stable OS. The darwin project is a complete OS, and can include an X11 server. It's big claim to fame is that is is arcitecturally based on MacOS X, so it includes NetInfo, Packages (a big deal), a (heavily modified) Mac 3.0 Kernal, dual (or more) binaries, and all the other Apple/NeXT inovations.
It does not get a lot of press outside it's circles because it is geek OS that has a non-geek OS for a big brother.
And how big an audience would that reach? I am not only refering to the size of the Linux market, but the fact that there are so many binary forms of Linux out there, that Apple would be forced to pick just one version on one platform (for example RedHat 7 on Intel) to support. And what would everyone do then, scream at them for not suporting their effort to get Linux on a Toaster running... And where would this benifit Apple, who is a company after all, and would probably have to pay all those Codec writers another fee to add another platform to the contract (because the orriginal contracts never included Linux.. only MacOS and Windows). They are already having enough problems getting third party drivers added into MacOS X because the third parties want more money for the right to re-compile these drivers, and this is even a bigger issue on the Darwin side.
hmmm... you say you want digital video out with color matching? hmmm... where have I seen a solution for that.. oh ya... Apple's ADC (Apple Display Connector) hooked up to a Apple Cinnema Display 22" Flatpannel. All digital connection, great picture, and Apple's ColorSync making sure that what you see is what you print. If you don't like the cost, well you can always go with the 15" flatpannel.
This is exactly where Apple is the domminent force, and has been since the orriginal LaserWriter
I to am a FileMakerPro Developer. Actually I am just wrapping up my first commercial solution with it right now (within the next two hours), but for the question at hand, where I usually work in is more importatnt: WebObjects!
For the project I am finnishing up right now, FP5 is the right platform, but I did find myself a little constrained by the close association between tables (called databases in FP5), and reports/views/layouts. I would up having to create a lot of extra calculation fields to get the exact behavior that the cutomer wanted. Not a huge problem as the datatbase is only 5K records big (counting centeral records), but somethign the WO Developer in me shuddered at.
Well, my point here was that with WebObjects now in the $800 range, it is suddenly closer to the range yoiu are looking at, and it does come with the lite version of OpenBase (no seurity, but if you have LAN firewalling, you can deal with this untill you get management to pop for the full version, or another DataBase... no MySQL is not a good idea for WO Development, EOF does not play nice with it yet).It is my sicere hope that the FileMaker and WebObjects teams can be slowly brought together on MacOS X. I have no real evidence for this, but if you look at the directons that the two teams are moving it is not totally out of the question (WebObjects new easy to use "Direct to Web" and "Direct to Java Client" assistants, and FileMaker Pro's XML moves).
My recomendation, start looking into WebObjects!
Then go get involved on the Darwin project, specifialy in the Intel port section. Do not be confused in thinking that ANY of the GUI functionality, or the Classic environment, or a number of other parts of MacOS X are there, those are all decidely PPC, and decidely closed source. Simply replacing the Kernal is not going to change that fact (no more than having WinNT on Alpha meant that you could run MS Office on your DEC server).
And since Apple get the vast majority of its revenue from Hardware sales, if would not necicarily make sence to do what you are talking about.
Since Steve Jobs said that 1.3 would be in the final release durring his Keynote speech at May's World Wide Developers confernce, my guess would be yes. The other main clue is to go through the Java materials, and discover that it is actually a miscmash of Java 1.2 and 1.3... and the percentage of 1.3 has been steadily growing allong the way (DP3, DP4, PostDP4, Beta, etc).
Moof!!!
Well, you are right, and you are wrong. Imaging (pictures, infared, sidescan radar, etc) is one very good use for this sort of aircraft, and worth the high development costs to both for inteligence gathering and scientific studies (the kind that go into studying the enviornment and wind up helping US agriculture to see paterns that bring more food to your table for example). But that is only the cash cow that is going to get the research done.
The big deal with this sort of system is the ability to selectively "park" it at high altitude over one spot for extended periods of time (the current holy grail is in the two month range), and serve as a communications platform. In simpler terms they want to replace low orbit sateites (*cough* *Iridium* *cough*).
Putting something in orbit cost a lot per pound, and if you make a mistake on something in building the "payload", or something unforseen happens, or if Murphey's Law just rears it fickel head, then you are stuck with what is in orbit. There is just not enough money to go out there and fix satelites in orbit in most cases (Hubbel being a major exception). But if something were to go wrong with a payload on one of these birds all you would have to do is tell it to land, and then fix/replace the payload, and since this costs soo much less than orbiting a satelite, you probably can afford to have a backup waiting on the runway to replace the whole thing.
Now as to the question of baloons/dirigibles, they simply do not have the staying power that this mission calls for. It is hard (impossible) to construct an envelope (the bag that holds the gas) that does not leak, meaning that missions longer than a few days are simply not possible. Add to that the fact that the winds at the altitudes called for in these projects tend to be faster than lighter-than-air-craft have posted in the past, makes them simply the wrong horse to bet on in this race.
It is not about weight, it is about the ability to do the mission at hand.
IEEE 1394 is a standard, but I think the word open is a bit misleading. There are quite a number of patents held in relationship to FireWire (Apple's name for the technology). These patents have been placed in a holding company by the name of <a href="http://www.1394la.com/">1394 LA's Patent Portfolio License organization</a>, by a number of companies who hold them (yes Apple is a major member of this patent pool). Any company that is going to put FireWire devices bus buys the right to use the technology from this holding comany for $.25 a device, regardles of number ports(actually use the patents behind the technology).
I belive Apple's only requirement for the use of FireWire is that it have a Driver avalible for MacOS, and that that driver and device follow the specifications (have a valid ID, vendor, etc...), and be registered (simple process).
There was a bru-ha-ha when Apple proposed a higher, per port, fee, but that never came to pass, and the change was never reported on Slashdot (*ahem*).
On a related note, this standard is no more open than USB. There are very few makers of the USB controller silicon (*cough* *Intel* *cough*), and the maker of that standard makes it's mony by controlling the patents behind the implimentation of the standard. Sure you are free to make your own implimentation, but it is going to be damm difficult, and expensive, to do so without infringing on Intel patents... the 1394 consortium is just a bit more open/honest about it.
I disagree, to extend your metaphore, this is like your optomologist playing a song on different stero systems and perscribing your diopter based on your reactions to the sound. What is being measured here is an absolute difference in the sound, but the value in lossy compression (both in audio and visual realms, and others?!?) is that you can loose data size without losing the important data.
This test is valueless, as it does not take the human ear into account. The quality of the compression is completely a subjective thing, it will always be so. There will never, ever, be a worthwile mathematical test for lossy compression.
Ok.. I am going to try and set this strait... ObjectiveC is not going away in at all in MacOS X development! But it has been officially declared dead in the next version of WebObjects (officially it will be called WebObjects 5 for Java). The reasoning for this is that Apple wants the iServices division to kick ass in the WebApplications marketpplace, and they need to make sure that the deployment environment will run on all the big hardware. By converging on Java they can make make the Java Runtime Developers do all the work of porting WebObjects Deploment Server to all that wonderful hardware. And just do the work of creating the development enviornment (which is mostly written in ObjC) to the selected few OS's (MacOS, WinNT/2000, Linux, Solarix, etc). This is why WebObjects is moving away from ObjectiveC.
Now there has been a lot of fuss over this move from the ObjectiveC community, because it is mostly made up of WebObjects developers who have a lot of time and legacy code invested in ObjectiveC, and Apple has now told them that they have to find a new way of doing things (my bet is that they will form the backbone of a lot of firm's Cocco development efforts). To these people Apple has stepped back from supporting ObjC where they need it, and this has been percieved by many as an abandonment of ObjC in general. Apple has also been hyping Java2 as a big win (which it is), and this has also fueled their fears. But there is no real sign that apple is abandoning ObjC in MacOS X... none at all (in fact most of the apps that were ported to Java for early DP's were moved back to ObjC for DP4 and beyond...)