If Apple used a custom Intel chip, they'd risk ending up in the same situation they're in now with IBM.
Intel could cut off Apple's supply without doing itself any harm. Apple wouldn't be a big enough part of Intel's business to have any leverage - the same problem it had with IBM (and Motorola, for that matter).
Further, if Apple requires a special x86 CPU, then that would interfere with the ability to switch to AMD or VIA if necessary. Apple would have to wait for the other company to have a similar custom chip ready in quantity.
So, no, I don't see Apple using anything but a stock CPU.
i am sure they also like powering what is considered the cutting edge personal computer company. for their market share, Apple gets a LOT of headlines and that can only help Intel's public profile.
And it makes sense to support Apple on Intel.
Up until now, Intel has had to rely on their periodic festival of dreck, where they feature some cloners' ideas of cool computer designs, which usually suck (PC ottomans?), and generally include something that looks an awful lot like something Apple recently shipped.
It doesn't help that nobody is really betting their company on those designs succeeding.
Now with Apple, Intel doesn't need to rely on second rate designers or whimsical-but-useless designs produced without any concern for marketability.
And on top of physical attributes, these showpiece machines will be running OS X, which makes the Apple machines more distinctive. Otherwise, Intel has to say "It's an ottoman! That runs Windows! Isn't that... great?! Huh? Huh? Pretty cool, huh? Comfy, too! Haven't you wished your laptop was an ottoman sometimes? No? Oh. But, wait, you can get it with a Green Bay Packers logo on it!" (yawn)
They won't want to break the rules on, say, an existing interface standard. But they would want to introduce a new, better interface standard. Which they can do without breaking the old rules.
For example, USB doesn't break the standards for parallel ports, but takes their place.
Microsoft's problem is that their process is zeroing out the Most Significant Bits.
No wonder they're going to the different-endian PowerPC for the XBox. They must hope that, in their process, the Most Significant Bits will then be preserved, and they'll only lose the least significant bits.
It seems like every chapter is written to explain that the x86 architecure contains pitfall after pitfall that will make an app crash where I wouldn't on a PPC box.
I used to work on trading systems at a big Chicago bank. On OPENSTEP, on Intel. This was the late 90s after the Apple/NeXT merger, so this was as close as you could get to Cocoa development at the time.
No special extra-cautious error-handling code was required. Crashes weren't a problem. Debugging was no more onerous than when I worked on NeXTSTEP on a 86k. Or, for that matter, on OS X. In all my time using NeXTSTEP or OpenStep on Intel, crashes were never any more frequent than they've been on OS X. And they were no more likely to bring the machine down than is the case on OS X.
If the document sounds scary, it's probably to notify programmers who might be playing fast & loose with their code, or being messy, relying on the PowerPC's characteristics in non-portable ways.
Most programmers aren't going to be relying on such tricks in their code. Apple's just being thorough, and telling the tricksy programmers to knock it off, or they'll be sorry.
One nice thing about moving to Intel is that there are far more low-level optimization tips available for Intel, than there are for PowerPC.
Apple's profiler, Shark, does a great job, and provides hints on how you can improve performance of your PowerPC code. But it could be handy to be able to use the Intel-oriented resources that are widely available at bookstores and online.
Speaking of optimization, I'm curious how it's going to be on Intel, especially with Intel talking about providing their compilers and optimization tools for Mac.
Up to now, it's been pretty much all GNU stuff and Apple stuff.
Will Shark work with Intel executables as well as it does with PPC executables? Will the Intel tools be free? How will they integrate with Apple's performance tuning tools? For that matter, how will Intel's compiler integrate with GCC and XCode?
What might be really useful would be big interactive fiction text adventures, custom developed to use a person's life and location as game data for settings and puzzles.
They almost certainly won't do this, but it'd be interesting if they built Macs with an x86 as the main CPU, and one of those 3GHz PowerPC-based processors from the XBox360 as a graphics coprocessor.
Ah, right. I guess we should never do any business with any Russian company at all.
Might not be a bad idea, especially when you're talking about mere luxury items like music MP3s which are available from sources that are less encumbered by such morally repugnant people.
Hell, downloading from filetrading networks is preferable to using AllOfMP3.
Ah yes, all Russians are murderers, thugs, and slave runner-pimps.
No, just the well-known widespread and powerful criminal element. Most Russians are merely victimized by those people.
Unless you're saying you have some specific indication that there's some problem with this company.
I think it's quite likely that the Russian mob would want a piece of a company like AllofMp3, and the likelihood of this happening increases as the site becomes more successful. They pay nothing for the products they sell, after all, and the business brings in hard currency from outside Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that organised crime is still controlling large parts of the country's economy - and not enough is being done to combat it.
His comments follow a spate of apparent contract killings of businessmen, including the shooting last week of one of Russia's top advertising executives, Vladimir Kanevsky.
"So about the only 'catch' is that the artists get paid essentially nothing because of a bug in Russian law. "
Well, yeah, and there's also the catch that they probably have mafia ties, either intentional, or through a "protection racket". (Nice download service you've got here, it'd be a shame if something happened to it.)
So instead of your money going to the artists, it goes to murderers, and thugs, people who enslave women into prostitution.
"There's a market opportunity for someone here, probably to get bought up when Apple drops Carbon QuickDraw support in X.x and they run and panic looking for a solution."
Apple has already started with Pages, which is a Cocoa app. It doesn't have the features of pro DTP apps, of course, but it's a start.
Let Gates and McNealy put their money where their mouths are. If they really want foreign workers, let them pay for them through an auction of H1B visas.
But keep the cap.
An auction would help make H1B workers unattractive as cheap labor. But if you just gotta have them Indian and Israeli programmers, then it'd be worth your while to cough up a good chunk of dough, possibly more than their annual salary.
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If Apple used a custom Intel chip, they'd risk ending up in the same situation they're in now with IBM.
Intel could cut off Apple's supply without doing itself any harm. Apple wouldn't be a big enough part of Intel's business to have any leverage - the same problem it had with IBM (and Motorola, for that matter).
Further, if Apple requires a special x86 CPU, then that would interfere with the ability to switch to AMD or VIA if necessary. Apple would have to wait for the other company to have a similar custom chip ready in quantity.
So, no, I don't see Apple using anything but a stock CPU.
i am sure they also like powering what is considered the cutting edge personal computer company. for their market share, Apple gets a LOT of headlines and that can only help Intel's public profile.
And it makes sense to support Apple on Intel.
Up until now, Intel has had to rely on their periodic festival of dreck, where they feature some cloners' ideas of cool computer designs, which usually suck (PC ottomans?), and generally include something that looks an awful lot like something Apple recently shipped.
It doesn't help that nobody is really betting their company on those designs succeeding.
Now with Apple, Intel doesn't need to rely on second rate designers or whimsical-but-useless designs produced without any concern for marketability.
And on top of physical attributes, these showpiece machines will be running OS X, which makes the Apple machines more distinctive. Otherwise, Intel has to say "It's an ottoman! That runs Windows! Isn't that... great?! Huh? Huh? Pretty cool, huh? Comfy, too! Haven't you wished your laptop was an ottoman sometimes? No? Oh. But, wait, you can get it with a Green Bay Packers logo on it!" (yawn)
But Intel *is* interested in new rules.
They won't want to break the rules on, say, an existing interface standard. But they would want to introduce a new, better interface standard. Which they can do without breaking the old rules.
For example, USB doesn't break the standards for parallel ports, but takes their place.
Microsoft's problem is that their process is zeroing out the Most Significant Bits.
No wonder they're going to the different-endian PowerPC for the XBox. They must hope that, in their process, the Most Significant Bits will then be preserved, and they'll only lose the least significant bits.
The following technologies will not be in Longhorn:
- the new shell
- the word "My"
- the color blue
But, hey, getting rid of the color blue will reduce required graphics bandwidth by 1/3.
That said, monitor makers won't be happy about having to retool their plants to handle RG phosphors...
"allofmp3.com will happily sell you music in a variety of formats, mp3 included."
Yeah, and they'll probably give some of your money to Russian mobsters who are into human trafficking and other unpleasant things.
I can't imagine they'd let AllOfMP3's management remain breathing if the mob isn't getting a cut.
Is Microsoft offering to convert the iTunes songs you *own* into songs that will stop working if you cancel your subscription?
Um, no thanks!
That can't be it, can it?
So the question on everyone's minds at this point is: What *will* Longhorn actually have in it?
The suck.
Microsoft never ships anything without the suck.
Always has. There's plenty of documentation of this in the Usenet archives, especially of the comp.sys.next hierarchy.
An Intel Apple: Mac programmer, meet divide-by-zero errors.
Um, yeah? So?
If you can't write code that doesn't get divide-by-zero errors, you probably should be looking for a new line of work.
And frankly, it's still better than being stuck on a dead-end processor.
on NeXTSTEP on a 86k
Oops, I mean "on NeXTSTEP on a 68k", as in Motorola, here.
It seems like every chapter is written to explain that the x86 architecure contains pitfall after pitfall that will make an app crash where I wouldn't on a PPC box.
I used to work on trading systems at a big Chicago bank. On OPENSTEP, on Intel. This was the late 90s after the Apple/NeXT merger, so this was as close as you could get to Cocoa development at the time.
No special extra-cautious error-handling code was required. Crashes weren't a problem. Debugging was no more onerous than when I worked on NeXTSTEP on a 86k. Or, for that matter, on OS X. In all my time using NeXTSTEP or OpenStep on Intel, crashes were never any more frequent than they've been on OS X. And they were no more likely to bring the machine down than is the case on OS X.
If the document sounds scary, it's probably to notify programmers who might be playing fast & loose with their code, or being messy, relying on the PowerPC's characteristics in non-portable ways.
Most programmers aren't going to be relying on such tricks in their code. Apple's just being thorough, and telling the tricksy programmers to knock it off, or they'll be sorry.
One nice thing about moving to Intel is that there are far more low-level optimization tips available for Intel, than there are for PowerPC.
Apple's profiler, Shark, does a great job, and provides hints on how you can improve performance of your PowerPC code. But it could be handy to be able to use the Intel-oriented resources that are widely available at bookstores and online.
Speaking of optimization, I'm curious how it's going to be on Intel, especially with Intel talking about providing their compilers and optimization tools for Mac.
Up to now, it's been pretty much all GNU stuff and Apple stuff.
Will Shark work with Intel executables as well as it does with PPC executables? Will the Intel tools be free? How will they integrate with Apple's performance tuning tools? For that matter, how will Intel's compiler integrate with GCC and XCode?
Questions, questions. But no show-stoppers.
Not necessarily.
Doesn't AMD use IBM's fabs to make their chips?
If that's still the case, then going to AMD wouldn't help Apple get away from IBM.
I believe the reference was to QuickTime.app, which is now a Cocoa app, not the QuickTime framework.
What might be really useful would be big interactive fiction text adventures, custom developed to use a person's life and location as game data for settings and puzzles.
They're getting two contractors to compete to see which constructor technology to buy when they make the real project, a Dyson sphere.
The contractor that whips up Death Star II really quickly is using Cocoa-based technology.
They almost certainly won't do this, but it'd be interesting if they built Macs with an x86 as the main CPU, and one of those 3GHz PowerPC-based processors from the XBox360 as a graphics coprocessor.
Can a Chinese company sell non-Chinese software if it's a Chinese subsidiary or partner of a non-Chinese company?
Could a Chinese company resell non-Chinese software?
Could a Chinese company sell pirated non-Chinese software?
Or do they just want all Chinese-developed software?
Ah, right. I guess we should never do any business with any Russian company at all.
Might not be a bad idea, especially when you're talking about mere luxury items like music MP3s which are available from sources that are less encumbered by such morally repugnant people.
Hell, downloading from filetrading networks is preferable to using AllOfMP3.
Ah yes, all Russians are murderers, thugs, and slave runner-pimps.
No, just the well-known widespread and powerful criminal element. Most Russians are merely victimized by those people.
Unless you're saying you have some specific indication that there's some problem with this company.
I think it's quite likely that the Russian mob would want a piece of a company like AllofMp3, and the likelihood of this happening increases as the site becomes more successful. They pay nothing for the products they sell, after all, and the business brings in hard currency from outside Russia.
Here's something from the BBC in 2002:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that organised crime is still controlling large parts of the country's economy - and not enough is being done to combat it.
His comments follow a spate of apparent contract killings of businessmen, including the shooting last week of one of Russia's top advertising executives, Vladimir Kanevsky.
"So about the only 'catch' is that the artists get paid essentially nothing because of a bug in Russian law. "
Well, yeah, and there's also the catch that they probably have mafia ties, either intentional, or through a "protection racket". (Nice download service you've got here, it'd be a shame if something happened to it.)
So instead of your money going to the artists, it goes to murderers, and thugs, people who enslave women into prostitution.
"The power music consumers will use allofmp3."
If they don't mind giving their money to Russian mobsters, who are probably also involved in human trafficking.
"There's a market opportunity for someone here, probably to get bought up when Apple drops Carbon QuickDraw support in X.x and they run and panic looking for a solution."
Apple has already started with Pages, which is a Cocoa app. It doesn't have the features of pro DTP apps, of course, but it's a start.
Let Gates and McNealy put their money where their mouths are. If they really want foreign workers, let them pay for them through an auction of H1B visas.
But keep the cap.
An auction would help make H1B workers unattractive as cheap labor. But if you just gotta have them Indian and Israeli programmers, then it'd be worth your while to cough up a good chunk of dough, possibly more than their annual salary.
"it is a layer on the file system that manages the files for the user."
And we all know how great things turn out when Microsoft software tries to manage things for the user.