OpenPlay is still used, by Bungie, Freeverse and by a number of small shareware developers, myself included. Apple has not abandoned it, they have made it open source. It has not been widely adopted by game companies because most of them already used DirectPlay or homegrown stuff. Support for Rendezvous was recently added to it by the Open Source community.
My experience with Open Source code in general is that it is not well commented, so your condemnation hits a lot of other projects besides ones Apple has provided.
An I think Apple's contributions to gcc are very significant, since it's a tool critical to most Open Source projects. Precompiled header support was a huge addition, a feature notibly missing from gcc before Apple worked on it.
They're tying products together artificially, that's normally a pretty good sign [that Apple is a monopoly].
Which products? iTunes and iPod? They work well together but I use iTunes but don't own an iPod. And I have several friends with iPods who don't use iTunes.
We saw how Apple treated the clone system builders, and BeOS for that matter.
Apple decided that being driven out of business by clone manufactures wasn't in their best interests, and wisely decided to stop the licensing that was allowing that to happen. You'll have to elaborate on what they did to BeOS, other than not buy them.
[Apple is] a corporation, and frankly I'm not surprised in the slightest at their attempts to monopolise music downloads and attack their own fans' websites. Maybe Wozniak wasn't all about making money, but Jobs and the others left steering the ship certainly are.
You are equating profit motive with attempt to monopolize. All corporations want profit; that's why they exist. If they don't they are called "non-profit organizations", not corporations. There's nothing wrong with being a non-profit, but that's not what Apple is, and I'm sure their shareholders are very happy about that.
Apple may have the largest market share of the music downloads, but there is no evidence to support that they are a monopoly or are doing anything particular to try to become one. Oh, right, they make a good product that lot's of people want to use! Worse still, they advertise to help their product seem hip!!! That must be illegal!
Have you noticed that, althought Apple's own operating system owes a lot to the open source movement, and the thousands of developers whose code they use for free, you and I still cannot run iTunes on our Linux desktop to sync an iPod? No money in it for them...
How do you know they aren't working on a Linux version of iTunes right now? And are you saying they should do it even if they loose money?
Since you've clearly forgotten, Apple has contributed enormously to the Open Source movement. They were the first large corportation to publicly embrace Open Source. Apple has contributed huge amounts of work to Open Source projects such as gcc, OpenPlay, and others. The Linux community benefited from their porting Linux to PowerPC (MkLinux).
It's time some people took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that Apple is just another wannabe monopolist who've (luckily for us) simply been curtailed by an unfortunate event perpetrated by the current software monopolist.
It's about time the parent took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that there's nothing wrong with a corporation pursuing profit by producing and advertising good products. There is no comparison between that and attempt established monopolies to squeeze others out of the market by stealing their technology (ie: Stacker), conspiring to divide up the market (ie: Quicktime), and deliberately making competing products stop working with your monopoly products (DrDOS).
I'd like to know what the moderators who modded the parent up were thinking.
From what I've seen, it will be rather low horsepower compared to the current G5s, since it will be lacking deep pipelines, caches and other bits that give the G5 much of it's speed. That's not to say that it's not really a G5, it sounds like it will support the full G5 instruction set (including Altivec) and be a true 64 bit processor core, just not a particularly fast one.
The role of the G5 cores seems to be to handle higher order logic that prepares and parses out tasks to the very fast vector units (SPEs).
So it probably does make more sense to have it as a coprocessor in a Mac, at least until compilers and software writers routinely target the cell's SPEs -- if that day ever comes. More likely specialized code will need to be written, and particular subtasks pulled out.
I suspect things like physics libraries, sound & video processing libraries, plus apps like SETI@home would be quickly written to use the SPEs, but most other software wouldn't be.
So let me get this straight. They protest that the US government is hypocritical because it doesn't support human rights and you offer as defense that something about American nuclear policy?
How about this:
Bush in his State of the Union address said that it was the goal of the US to promote freedom thoughout the world, for all people everywhere.
Meanwhile, he appointed one of the masterminds of the American human rights abuses in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib as the chief law enforcement officer in the US.
Yeah, that's pretty amusing. Kind of makes you think the moderators don't always read things very carefully (or occasionally click on the wrong buttons).
My point exactly. The Bush Administration claims North Korea won't negotiate with them, and the North Korean's can say the same about the Bush Administration.
I was deliberately being vague, to emphasize the point that the most Americans will assume I'm taking the American government's point of view, whereas the exact same point of view would be quite reasonable for the North Koreans as well.
Most people didn't seem to read the post carefully. I hope that the "Insightful" modifiers were from people who did.
So why is it you feel the US must be aggressive and continue it's hostility against nations simply based upon the ideal that the US can be the only "big stick" on the block?
Actually that's exactly the opposite of how I feel. What made you think otherwise?
t'd be real easy to resolve. Let the fuckers nuke each other. The U.S. can take out Asia, the Krazy Koreans can take out the western seaboard. If they can hit Texas, an awful lot of problems would be resolved.
I'm afraid the real problem is in Washington, and I live a bit too close to there to feel comfortable with that "solution".
Hmm... a government hostile to ours with nuclear weapons is a real threat to us. They won't negotiate with us and they certainly won't give up their nuclear weapons. We'd better make it clear that any hostile action can be met with nuclear response. Especially since they have expressed a desire to remake the world in their image, and have used military force to do so in the past -- I'm sure that's what the North Koreans are thinking when they look at the US. And of course that's what the US is thinking as is looks at North Korea. I doubt this will be an easy one to resolve.
... the guy who says "if I paid for the season I would expect a part in it, but since that would happen I won't pay".
I'm pretty sure if he ponied up the $35 million US to pay for a season he would indeed get a part.
But for $12 US to pay 1/3,000,000 th of the cost, best he can hope for is to be an extra in a group shot, after paying for his own transportation and costume.
A little research shows I was wrong on 2 points: First, the Mayans were already gone by the time the Spanish encountered the Incas. It was the Aztecs and Incas who were decimated by smallpox.
Passive solar doesn't mean much except in temperate areas where little fossil fuel is used today for heating homes.
I suppose you could consider Virginia a temperate climate, but nevertheless the gas bill for my modest house built in the 50s is $120/mo during the winter. Meanwhile they were opening the windows in my sister's passive solar house (about 10 miles away from mine) they day before yesterday (when the temperature was 19 degrees F) because it was 85 inside, without her backup heating sistem running. She expects her gas bill will be a few dollars a month.
You need to stop adding alcohol to fuel to keep farmers producing grain - when the grain production uses more diesel fuel than is saved by the alcohol.
During WWII, many farmers switched to alcohol to fuel their farm equipment, because gasoline was rationed for the war, expensive, and they could produce the alcohol themselves out of the waste products from grain production.
Since alcohol can be made from agricultural waste products of food that is grown to be eaten, there is no reason that it has to be used as a way to subside farmers. That is a political decision, not a technical one.
I agree that changing the way electricity is generated is a good idea, and I'm all for promotion of public transportation.
The idea of moving heavy industry outside of the US doesn't make any sense to me - how would that reduce CO2 production? Will those industries just decide all of a sudden to stop using electricity generated by fossil fuels because they are now in Mexico or China?
Actually, I've done quite a bit of library research on the topic while in University. I have a number of friends who have done direct observational and modeling research on the topic.
In fact if you had even bothered to do a google search, you would come to the opposite conclusion:
...climate change happens and that's a fact of life. For example the downfall of the Egyptian empire was partially due to a massive warm spell that caused crops to fail and deserts to form. Ironically the article pointed out that there were no cars at that time.
Biological warfare happens and is a fact of life. The downfall of the Mayan and Incan Empires was partially due to a massive smallpox epidemic deliberately released by Europeans as a deliberate act of war. Ironically, there were no biological weapons factories hidden in Iraq then -- so clearly we should do nothing about the threat of biological warfare.
While I completely agree with the parent's statements, they imply that we should do nothing. What's more, they overlook several important factors:
1) There is a general scientific consensus that human activity is increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that a runaway greenhouse effect will result from too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
2) There is a general scientific consensus that long before that point climate change will have disastrous impacts on the humanity and other species as well.
3) There are many changes we can make to reduce CO2 production that wouldn't wreck our economy, such as using alcohol as a fuel and passive solar construction for new homes.
Bottom line is a wider variety of Open Source applications available to all consumers will only help the Open Source movement.
Why? Because as users are exposed to high quality Open Source apps, they will be more accepting of Open Source in general. They will contribute to those projects, if only by finding bugs during use. Once Open Source apps are what their business runs on, then they are free to switch OSes.
Sure, there are factors (such as IT departments ignorant of everything but Windows) that will make this harder. But in the end, a business running on Open Source apps will quickly ask itself "why should I pay the MS tax for my computers? I don't use the OS, I just run these apps. Why not run them on Linux/BSD/ReactOS?" This will be doubly true if some alternate platform, such as PowerPC or cell processors, starts to really outperform Intel hardware.
I was thinking about software emulation of instructions that are not implemented on the cell processor. I vaguely recall that the PowerPC had a trap system for unimplemented hardware instructions, which could then be used by the OS to perform that function in software and return from the trap. Of course there's a considerable performance penalty, but if the only instructions not implemented were not commonly used, it may not matter. Anyway, the idea is compatibility with exisiting software right from the start, rather than having to port or even recompile for a new processor.
As a game developer working on a Windows product that needs to be portable to XBOX, I can assure you that XBOX != Windows.
First, the XBOX supports only supports APIs, such as DirectX, widely used in games. It doesn't even come close to supporting a majority of Windows API calls. And it doesn't support DirectX quite like Windows does. It suppots a superset of DirectX 8, but not everything in DirectX 9.
Graphics apps are the most likely of all non-game apps to use DirectX, but they are likely to use many of the other API calls as well.
In addition, even if a particular app you want to run is fully supported by XBOX (in terms of API calls), the hardware and those calls are aimed at and optimized for games (ie: expect game controllers, not mouse and keyboard).
So I think Microsoft would have a fair amount of work ahead of them if they were to try to bring the full blown Windows OS to a new platform with a cell CPU. How hard depends on how much they've maintained the CPU portability they had with Window NT.
This seems like an excellent opportunity for Apple to license Mac OS X.
I'm assuming the intruction set for the cell processor is a superset of the existing PowerPC processors, or that the missing instructions could easily be emulated. If so that would make this is a graphics workstation that could run Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Shake, and other top notch professional software immediately. The existing user base wouldn't have to buy new versions -- their old versions would run.
As discussed many times on slashdot and elsewhere, Apple won't license their OS unless they believe they can do it without cannibalizing their existing user base. Doubtless there would be some cannibalization of the high end, but if it makes OS X the clear platform for high-end graphics workstations it could still be an overall boost to Apple. I don't really know how the current high-end graphics market sees OS X. My impression is that a surprising amount of it is on Windows, and that Apple is just holding on to its market share in this area.
Anyone with more current knowledge of the high-end graphics market care to comment?
I think you are incorrect here. Intelligent liars are not people who just lie. Intelligent liars create stories around their situation. To an intelligent liar the lie is the truth, and hence they are not lying. This means if an unexpected question arises then the question will be unexpected like a person who is not lying. There will be no difference in reaction.
It is not possible to catch intelligent liars using machine detection. This is the crux of my problem with the use of technology to catch criminals.
This seems like the sort of statement that would be best served with some references to studies to back it up.
Otherwise, how can we tell if this is really insightful or just the work of an intelligent liar.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenPlay is still used, by Bungie, Freeverse and by a number of small shareware developers, myself included. Apple has not abandoned it, they have made it open source. It has not been widely adopted by game companies because most of them already used DirectPlay or homegrown stuff. Support for Rendezvous was recently added to it by the Open Source community.
My experience with Open Source code in general is that it is not well commented, so your condemnation hits a lot of other projects besides ones Apple has provided.
An I think Apple's contributions to gcc are very significant, since it's a tool critical to most Open Source projects. Precompiled header support was a huge addition, a feature notibly missing from gcc before Apple worked on it.
They're tying products together artificially, that's normally a pretty good sign [that Apple is a monopoly].
Which products? iTunes and iPod? They work well together but I use iTunes but don't own an iPod. And I have several friends with iPods who don't use iTunes.
And here's the page of Open Source projects at Apple, which includes OpenPlay, Darwin, and Rendezvous among many others.
We saw how Apple treated the clone system builders, and BeOS for that matter.
Apple decided that being driven out of business by clone manufactures wasn't in their best interests, and wisely decided to stop the licensing that was allowing that to happen. You'll have to elaborate on what they did to BeOS, other than not buy them.
[Apple is] a corporation, and frankly I'm not surprised in the slightest at their attempts to monopolise music downloads and attack their own fans' websites. Maybe Wozniak wasn't all about making money, but Jobs and the others left steering the ship certainly are.
You are equating profit motive with attempt to monopolize. All corporations want profit; that's why they exist. If they don't they are called "non-profit organizations", not corporations. There's nothing wrong with being a non-profit, but that's not what Apple is, and I'm sure their shareholders are very happy about that.
Apple may have the largest market share of the music downloads, but there is no evidence to support that they are a monopoly or are doing anything particular to try to become one. Oh, right, they make a good product that lot's of people want to use! Worse still, they advertise to help their product seem hip!!! That must be illegal!
Have you noticed that, althought Apple's own operating system owes a lot to the open source movement, and the thousands of developers whose code they use for free, you and I still cannot run iTunes on our Linux desktop to sync an iPod? No money in it for them...
How do you know they aren't working on a Linux version of iTunes right now? And are you saying they should do it even if they loose money?
Since you've clearly forgotten, Apple has contributed enormously to the Open Source movement. They were the first large corportation to publicly embrace Open Source. Apple has contributed huge amounts of work to Open Source projects such as gcc, OpenPlay, and others. The Linux community benefited from their porting Linux to PowerPC (MkLinux).
It's time some people took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that Apple is just another wannabe monopolist who've (luckily for us) simply been curtailed by an unfortunate event perpetrated by the current software monopolist.
It's about time the parent took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that there's nothing wrong with a corporation pursuing profit by producing and advertising good products. There is no comparison between that and attempt established monopolies to squeeze others out of the market by stealing their technology (ie: Stacker), conspiring to divide up the market (ie: Quicktime), and deliberately making competing products stop working with your monopoly products (DrDOS).
I'd like to know what the moderators who modded the parent up were thinking.
I do C/C++ cross compilation from Mac OS X to Win32 all the time, but haven't done it with assembly code.
I use both gcc and CodeWarrior, and generally haven't had any problems with either.
I have OS X binaries for Win32 gcc 3.3.2 compilation (using mingw32) available here as a torrent
From what I've seen, it will be rather low horsepower compared to the current G5s, since it will be lacking deep pipelines, caches and other bits that give the G5 much of it's speed. That's not to say that it's not really a G5, it sounds like it will support the full G5 instruction set (including Altivec) and be a true 64 bit processor core, just not a particularly fast one.
The role of the G5 cores seems to be to handle higher order logic that prepares and parses out tasks to the very fast vector units (SPEs).
So it probably does make more sense to have it as a coprocessor in a Mac, at least until compilers and software writers routinely target the cell's SPEs -- if that day ever comes. More likely specialized code will need to be written, and particular subtasks pulled out.
I suspect things like physics libraries, sound & video processing libraries, plus apps like SETI@home would be quickly written to use the SPEs, but most other software wouldn't be.
Stop reading propaganda
I can't help it, it's just so juicy, I'm afraid I'm addicted.
more propaganda
So let me get this straight. They protest that the US government is hypocritical because it doesn't support human rights and you offer as defense that something about American nuclear policy?
How about this:
Bush in his State of the Union address said that it was the goal of the US to promote freedom thoughout the world, for all people everywhere.
Meanwhile, he appointed one of the masterminds of the American human rights abuses in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib as the chief law enforcement officer in the US.
It sure doesn't sound like he's very sincere.
You misread my post.
I would rather we all gave up our nukes. And I don't trust the American government very much right now either.
I didn't get if you are american or korean???
:-)
Perfect! I'd rather just admit to being human. Enjoy the mystery!
Yeah, that's pretty amusing. Kind of makes you think the moderators don't always read things very carefully (or occasionally click on the wrong buttons).
My point exactly. The Bush Administration claims North Korea won't negotiate with them, and the North Korean's can say the same about the Bush Administration.
I was deliberately being vague, to emphasize the point that the most Americans will assume I'm taking the American government's point of view, whereas the exact same point of view would be quite reasonable for the North Koreans as well.
Most people didn't seem to read the post carefully. I hope that the "Insightful" modifiers were from people who did.
So why is it you feel the US must be aggressive and continue it's hostility against nations simply based upon the ideal that the US can be the only "big stick" on the block?
Actually that's exactly the opposite of how I feel. What made you think otherwise?
t'd be real easy to resolve. Let the fuckers nuke each other. The U.S. can take out Asia, the Krazy Koreans can take out the western seaboard. If they can hit Texas, an awful lot of problems would be resolved.
I'm afraid the real problem is in Washington, and I live a bit too close to there to feel comfortable with that "solution".
Hmm... a government hostile to ours with nuclear weapons is a real threat to us. They won't negotiate with us and they certainly won't give up their nuclear weapons. We'd better make it clear that any hostile action can be met with nuclear response. Especially since they have expressed a desire to remake the world in their image, and have used military force to do so in the past -- I'm sure that's what the North Koreans are thinking when they look at the US. And of course that's what the US is thinking as is looks at North Korea. I doubt this will be an easy one to resolve.
... the guy who says "if I paid for the season I would expect a part in it, but since that would happen I won't pay".
I'm pretty sure if he ponied up the $35 million US to pay for a season he would indeed get a part.
But for $12 US to pay 1/3,000,000 th of the cost, best he can hope for is to be an extra in a group shot, after paying for his own transportation and costume.
Oh well, takes all kinds...
A little research shows I was wrong on 2 points: First, the Mayans were already gone by the time the Spanish encountered the Incas. It was the Aztecs and Incas who were decimated by smallpox.
Second, historians agree that the Spanish spreading of smallpox to the Aztecs was accidental. I was confusing this with later events during the conquest of Native American tribes, for example as approved by General Amherst on July 16th, 1763.
I suppose you could consider Virginia a temperate climate, but nevertheless the gas bill for my modest house built in the 50s is $120/mo during the winter. Meanwhile they were opening the windows in my sister's passive solar house (about 10 miles away from mine) they day before yesterday (when the temperature was 19 degrees F) because it was 85 inside, without her backup heating sistem running. She expects her gas bill will be a few dollars a month.
As for more extreme climates, at least some Canadians would disagree with you: Canadian buildings group FAQ
During WWII, many farmers switched to alcohol to fuel their farm equipment, because gasoline was rationed for the war, expensive, and they could produce the alcohol themselves out of the waste products from grain production.
Since alcohol can be made from agricultural waste products of food that is grown to be eaten, there is no reason that it has to be used as a way to subside farmers. That is a political decision, not a technical one.
I agree that changing the way electricity is generated is a good idea, and I'm all for promotion of public transportation.
The idea of moving heavy industry outside of the US doesn't make any sense to me - how would that reduce CO2 production? Will those industries just decide all of a sudden to stop using electricity generated by fossil fuels because they are now in Mexico or China?
Actually, I've done quite a bit of library research on the topic while in University. I have a number of friends who have done direct observational and modeling research on the topic.
In fact if you had even bothered to do a google search, you would come to the opposite conclusion:
Top Scientists Conclude Human Activity Is Affecting Global Climate
Why don't you show me your research proving that it is not due to human activity?
Biological warfare happens and is a fact of life. The downfall of the Mayan and Incan Empires was partially due to a massive smallpox epidemic deliberately released by Europeans as a deliberate act of war. Ironically, there were no biological weapons factories hidden in Iraq then -- so clearly we should do nothing about the threat of biological warfare.
While I completely agree with the parent's statements, they imply that we should do nothing. What's more, they overlook several important factors:
1) There is a general scientific consensus that human activity is increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that a runaway greenhouse effect will result from too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
2) There is a general scientific consensus that long before that point climate change will have disastrous impacts on the humanity and other species as well.
3) There are many changes we can make to reduce CO2 production that wouldn't wreck our economy, such as using alcohol as a fuel and passive solar construction for new homes.
Bottom line is a wider variety of Open Source applications available to all consumers will only help the Open Source movement.
Why? Because as users are exposed to high quality Open Source apps, they will be more accepting of Open Source in general. They will contribute to those projects, if only by finding bugs during use. Once Open Source apps are what their business runs on, then they are free to switch OSes.
Sure, there are factors (such as IT departments ignorant of everything but Windows) that will make this harder. But in the end, a business running on Open Source apps will quickly ask itself "why should I pay the MS tax for my computers? I don't use the OS, I just run these apps. Why not run them on Linux/BSD/ReactOS?" This will be doubly true if some alternate platform, such as PowerPC or cell processors, starts to really outperform Intel hardware.
I was thinking about software emulation of instructions that are not implemented on the cell processor. I vaguely recall that the PowerPC had a trap system for unimplemented hardware instructions, which could then be used by the OS to perform that function in software and return from the trap. Of course there's a considerable performance penalty, but if the only instructions not implemented were not commonly used, it may not matter. Anyway, the idea is compatibility with exisiting software right from the start, rather than having to port or even recompile for a new processor.
As a game developer working on a Windows product that needs to be portable to XBOX, I can assure you that XBOX != Windows.
First, the XBOX supports only supports APIs, such as DirectX, widely used in games. It doesn't even come close to supporting a majority of Windows API calls. And it doesn't support DirectX quite like Windows does. It suppots a superset of DirectX 8, but not everything in DirectX 9.
Graphics apps are the most likely of all non-game apps to use DirectX, but they are likely to use many of the other API calls as well.
In addition, even if a particular app you want to run is fully supported by XBOX (in terms of API calls), the hardware and those calls are aimed at and optimized for games (ie: expect game controllers, not mouse and keyboard).
So I think Microsoft would have a fair amount of work ahead of them if they were to try to bring the full blown Windows OS to a new platform with a cell CPU. How hard depends on how much they've maintained the CPU portability they had with Window NT.
This seems like an excellent opportunity for Apple to license Mac OS X.
I'm assuming the intruction set for the cell processor is a superset of the existing PowerPC processors, or that the missing instructions could easily be emulated. If so that would make this is a graphics workstation that could run Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Shake, and other top notch professional software immediately. The existing user base wouldn't have to buy new versions -- their old versions would run.
As discussed many times on slashdot and elsewhere, Apple won't license their OS unless they believe they can do it without cannibalizing their existing user base. Doubtless there would be some cannibalization of the high end, but if it makes OS X the clear platform for high-end graphics workstations it could still be an overall boost to Apple. I don't really know how the current high-end graphics market sees OS X. My impression is that a surprising amount of it is on Windows, and that Apple is just holding on to its market share in this area.
Anyone with more current knowledge of the high-end graphics market care to comment?
I think you are incorrect here. Intelligent liars are not people who just lie. Intelligent liars create stories around their situation. To an intelligent liar the lie is the truth, and hence they are not lying. This means if an unexpected question arises then the question will be unexpected like a person who is not lying. There will be no difference in reaction.
It is not possible to catch intelligent liars using machine detection. This is the crux of my problem with the use of technology to catch criminals.
This seems like the sort of statement that would be best served with some references to studies to back it up.
Otherwise, how can we tell if this is really insightful or just the work of an intelligent liar.