There are rare earths all over the place... they're not actually rare.
One problem is finding enough concentration of a particular material to make mining it economically sound. The USA, Australia, Canada, and a few others were, until relatively recently, the top suppliers of rare earth materials. Then China started selling them cheap... so cheap, most other companies went out of business.
So we have some decades of ignoring the problem. Can't do that anymore, it would seem. With the prices on many of these compounds having doubled in the last 18 months, it's reasonable to assume that someone could make a profit now, where before, China undercut any possible domestic production. But if most of those companies are really defunct, this means new concerns have to get into this business. So it's a slow process.
And of course, Western countries have environmental issues that, just perhaps, are not considered issues in China. This certainly adds to the cost of production, though it's also possible better mining technology could some into play.
As far as tech goes, there are alternatives. Another recent story here was about Toyota working on licensing Tesla Motors's electric car technology for a new version of the RAV4-EV. Now, as the world's largest manufacturer of electric road cars (albeit hybrid electrics), you'd think Toyota wouldn't need this. Only... Toyota's motors are all three-phase permanent magnet motors -- they need rare earths like neodymium... each Prius needs about a kilogram of neodymium for its two neodymium-iron-boron magnet-based motors.
Tesla uses polyphase AC induction motors with no permanent magnets... that's actually why their use of the name "Tesla" is fairly legit -- Nikola Tesla invented this kind of motor back in the late 19th century. Those in the Tesla Roadster use copper for the coils, aircraft aluminum for the structure, ceramic bearings, some special plastics, etc. But none of these rare earths.
Kin was a guaranteed failure that had nothing to do with how cool, or not, the actual phone was. The simple fact was that the carriers were charging the $30/month smart phone fee for what was absolutely nothing but a feature phone. And one for kids. No kid wants that phone. If they have a parent willing to shell out smart phone money, they're getting an iPhone, or maybe an Android phone. If the parents are not paying that kind of money, Kin's off the table anyway.
The fact that Microsoft had no concept of this upon launch does not bode well for their decisions on Windows 7 Phone. Hopefully, they have better people on the latter. I think competition is good for customers... with Apple, Google, and Microsoft actually putting up a good fight, we get better device.
10% drop in about a year -- 50% of the global smartphone market in 2009, 41% now, and the year's not over yet. Define "slow".
Now sure, for Nokia, it's about the same percentage loss as Microsoft does (they've been dropping a point or two share every month or two), but Nokia actually needs it. Smart phones are the most profitable segment of the phone business, and Nokia's poor performance isn't helped here. Apple's making more phone industry profit, as of last quarter anyway, than Nokia, Samsung, and a couple others... combined. From a much smaller share of the market.
Part of Nokia's problem is that, while they had some smart phone capabilities, they became such a lowest common denominator that many if not most SymbianOS phone users think they have "feature" phones, not smart phones. They're unaware they can buy apps, and in fact, not helped by the fact that Nokia didn't have the Ovi Store app until last year, and it's still not included on most SymbianOS phones. So in point, while they technically have a huge volume of smart phone, functionally, they're behind RIM, maybe even Android, in the actual use of their phones in "smart mode".
And like RIM, they're behind in technology. Both RIM and Nokia's new flagship phones look like something that would have been hot back in 2008... ARM11 processors, not Cortex A8 or A9, sub 1GHz clocks, lower resolution screens, lack of expansion cards, etc. So you can find any number of mid-range Android phones with better features than Nokia's top-of-the-line. That's not a good plan, regardless of the OS.
Assuming, of course, you don't have to replace a $30,000-$40,000 battery pack every 3-5 years. The problem with the Roadster is that the laptop batteries they're using (or at least used initially... not sure if they've fixed this yet) only support about 300-500 charge/discharge cycles before they're seriously failing.
Hybrids, including the Volt, solve this problem by short-cycling the batteries. On my 2003 Prius, they only run 40% of battery capacity, so after 130,000 miles, it's virtually good as new. They extended this to 60% starting in the 2004 model year (they also cut down on the number of cells, so the capacity is the same). These are both NiMh, but the same seems to be true of Lithium based technologies.
The Volt is supposed to have a newly engineered cell that supports more cycling, more like 5,000 charge-discharge cycles (at least, that was their goal). That gets you about 200,000 miles on a battery, if you believe the 40 mile range as a useful average. And yet, at least in the original design, they weren't going to charge the battery on-the-road, as a hybrid does... you'd run it down, then the ICE takes over until you recharge it at home.
Basically, they've switched around the positions of the two motor/generators and the ICE in this design, versus the Prius. It looks like, while technically the ICE is providing power to the same system as the main drive motor, its intended purpose is to run the generator. Much as the Prius's smaller motor/generator drives to change the effective gear ratio between the big motor and the ICE, you could claim it's proving some motive power, since technically it's adding power to the system, but that's a tiny side-effect of its real function.
... could be that Motorola is after cross licensing with Apple. There's a pretty good chance Apple has at least some fundamental patents on good Smart Phone GUI stuff, despite the evil nature of software patents. Probably nowhere near the stuff Palm has, or even some of the MS stuff, but if Motorola sees a war coming, why not shore up the defenses.
Apple was the last major phone manufacturer in business to actually start marking phones. There's a real fine chance they've stepped on all kinds of phone tech patents, and knowing the typical Apple hubris, they didn't bother to license them. So if a cross licensing is the goal, Apple may be forced to cooperate with Motorola, perhaps giving Motorola more ammunition against Microsoft.
At least until Apple and Microsoft sue each other over smart phones...
Or maybe Apple's been so blatent, Motorola figures they can get Apple to pay for their licensing deal with Microsoft. Microsoft, curiously, doesn't need to worry about cross licensing so much. They're just the software, not the hardware, so none of the phone mechanism stuff is their worry, but that of the OEMs... most of whom already have phone tech licensing agreements with each other.
In addition, the weird way they allowed software patents in the USA pretty much means you have an easier time suing a hardware company. Software isn't a machine, it's a document... patents are about machines. The loophole that allowed the flood of software patents in the 1980s, was the case of Diamond v. Diehr, which held that the inclusion of software in an otherwise hardware-based process wasn't enough to prevent patentability. In short, it's not the software violating your patent, it's that software running on hardware that violates the patent. So, most software patent cases are filed against some use of software on a hardware device.
Or that whole "Android is just better than iPhone" thing... some people will appreciate that, too. That's why I have an Android phone. I evaluated iPhone, and found is sorely wanting.
LTE is like EvDO -- it's IP-only. Verizon could easily support voice and data on 3G today, they'd just have to support it using VoIP, rather than some built-in 3G voice protocol as they offer in UMTS (GSM's 3G, which also includes HSPA/HSPA+). Any old smart phone of today can do VoIP... as the Skype application clearly demonstrates.
They'll have the same question to answer for LTE. So will AT&T.
Actually, we're not losing pixels, we're growing screen size. No one wants a 17" or 20" monitor, particularly when you can buy a 22"-24" monitor at 1920x1080 or better for $150 these days. Well, almost no one... there is the Asus VW198T (1680x1050) at 19". At 20", 1680x1050 is very popular. Of course, it's stupid comparing these anyway... a 20 or 21" LCD monitor is going to take up way less space than a 19" or even most 17" CRTs. So whining about having to buy an ever-so-slightly larger screen is a specious argument. And really, you're going to have to hunt a little to find ANY current computer monitor much under 19"... they do exist, but they're on the fringe now.
Laptops are an exception... it's pretty easy to find a 17" laptop with 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 resolution. You're unlikely to find that in a 15" model, since most people would take that resolution as being too high for a 15" screen (of course, it's entirely dependent on your viewing distance, but consumer sales are all about perceptions, not calculations). Well, almost... there's the Panasonic Toughbook 52, the HP EliteBook 8530w, one build of the Dell Studio 15, maybe a few others with full HD or better in a 15" screen. But generally, not that popular.
There are full HD monitors made at lower sizes, but they're specialty items, not regular consumer things. You buy them for camcorder monitors, that kind of thing.
Just buy a real monitor. And buy smart. If you need a certain vertical pixel count, buy that monitor. I went from 1600x1200 19" CRTs to 1920x1200 24" LCDs. That was a win-win... wide-screen is a good thing, as long as I don't have to compromise.
The problem is that people want it all. The cheaper monitors at 1920x1080 are using HDTV panels, not LCD panels intended for monitors. They're made in larger volumes, so sure, you can get 'em cheaper. They're also cheap TN displays, rather than the superior IPS or MVA type. This is because you want a 24" screen for $200, not because you can't get a better screen.
The PC industry fought with the film industry over the aspect ratio for HDTV... 16:9 was actually the compromise; the PC industry wanted 16:10, the film industry wanted 2:1 (16:8). Naturally, the PC industry went right ahead and made everything 16:10 anyway, at least at first. It's kind of ironic so many are moving to 16:9 now anyway, just 'cause it's been made cheaper by the massive power of TV.
Actually, not so much, IF you're using Wifi. The amount of processing of voice is tiny... smartphones do this in software on the application processor these days anyway.
The real power drain during a call is the wireless link. A handset can put out up to a watt of RF power, as instructed by the cell tower. This is why your call time can vary wildly by location; when you're close to the a cell, the power is much reduced.
Wifi is held to 100mW or less. So a call over Wifi is going to use much less power... if you're close enough to a Wifi hot spot to make the call. If you did it over Bluetooth, even better... most cell phones implement class 3 Bluetooth, which has a maximum output of 1mW. This is why playing audio from your phone over Bluetooth uses far less power than playing via an analog output.
It's curious how the various Skype implementations work. I've had Skype on my Droid for quite some time. It works over the cellular network, but NOT over Wifi, for no good reason I can figure. But it's the special Verizon version, so when I make a cellular call over Skype, it will go via the Verizon network if it's local, the Skype network if it's phone-to-computer or overseas.
The new Skype for Android also has issues -- some bugs reported, and it doesn't support video. Great technology, but the implementations are still lacking.
Well, some of that could really be about volume, but it's more about averages. In a real TV show, you have dynamics... it's mid-range, people are talking, etc. Then it gets really quiet, as Col. Jack O'Neill, Samantha Carter, and T'ealk are sneaking down the hallway, trying not to be seen. Almost too quiet. Then it gets really loud, as the Replicators spring into action and everyone's shooting them to pieces... or was it a bunch of Goa'uld up to their old tricks.
Anyway... dynamics. There's a range, ideally something like 90dB or so, between quiet and loud.
Then an ad comes on. That ad has been processed through a compressor, which puts the quiet parts at 85dB, the midrange at 90dB, and the very loud parts at full range 96dB (this is assuming a 16-bit audio sample, which is what you have in most digital TV systems using AC-3 or MPEG Layer 2 audio). Now of course, they've taken that nice 16-bit potential and dropped it down to about two or three effective bits of resolution, but they don't care, long as it's as loud as your explosions ever get.
You can tell if the originator really dials down the show volume. That's really unlikely -- for one, you'd be getting huge variations in volume from channel to channel, which I've never seen. But in normal audio, the average is probably around -20dB from peak, and your loud ads with their compression probably average out at -10 to -5dB from peak... in other words, they can actually be 2x-3x louder in practice than the television show, even without playing any evil games with your show's normal volume. And if they did that, they'd really be cheating you, because the show's audio would have to be compressed, or you'd simply miss part of it.
If there are ads that really show up a VU meter louder than the loudest explosion peak, that's proof they're really messing with the overall show's volume. But I don't believe that's necessary.
In fact, popular music has already been though a loudness war. Years back, with the advent of cheap audio gear and more bands getting more involved with the technical side of their own work, music started getting louder. This was also new for the digital era -- you simply couldn't make an LP that loud, the mechanics of it were against you. But enter CD, and the issue of "too compressed" goes away, at least if you don't care about dynamics. Again, not really louder in peak, but louder over all -- more compressed, so the effect is louder. Here's the ever-present Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war. And here's a short article about it as well: http://georgegraham.com/compress.html. Same principles as the loudness escalations on TV.
Well, not so much. Yes, AGC is a form of dynamic compression. No so much intentionally, since it's uncontrollable. It's really chaining an average volume input level as negative feeback to your whole volume output control, which isn't exactly what a compressor does. Same basic idea though.
But in pro audio, you rarely chain your compressor's trigger to an average of input audio over time... maybe if you're setting it up as a limiter for ducking (eg, automatically drop background music when the voiceover kicks in). Usually, you set the compression start and amount at fixed points: 6:1 compression from -10dB, etc. And you want the compression to be based on instant (or near-instant, in the case of soft-knees and soft limiters) response to the input levels, not an average thereof.
And that would make it work reasonably well for television... better still if you made a softer knee. You'd still get peaks for the explosions on your action shows, but sustained loudness would be cut.
Another thing that's pretty easy with pro-class gear (or pretty much any freeware compression plug-in) is setting a limiter. If you KNOW that your television station is really dropping the volume of the program versus the ads, hook up a level meter and find the actual peaks they're permitting during the program. Set that as your limit, and nothing louder gets past the limiter.
Local stations get the "big blank " block from the satellite feed. That's where they put their commercials. There may of course be other indicators, but none of the behind-the-scenes stuff is broadcast. If you have a C-band satellite dish, you may find network to local downlinks still available. That's where you can see this stuff.
And of course, they're not sending it out live anyway... even for a "live" show, there's enough delay for the locals to add whatever they need to add intermixed with the national feeds.
Commercials aren't actually louder -- you set your peaks with the volume knob, the commercial can't exceed whatever they are.
But you're expecting some dynamics on a show, particularly an action drama show like 24 was... quiet whispering, then a loud explosion.
And then on comes your add, compressed to the point where it's "all explosion", no whisper. They may both have 95dBa limits, but the TV show may run between 20dBa and 95dBa, while the ad runs from 90 to 95dBa.
Actually, I know a hardware company that was sued into oblivion thanks to software patents: Aureal Semiconductor. Aureal had some very cool audio chips, back in the 1990s, as well as the best 3D audio API for gaming, and some other great stuff. Now, Creative Labs took it was a given that they were the only company allowed to work on consumer audio for PCs... particularly when so many other companies did it better. Sometimes they just bought the company, as they did with Ensoniq back when Ensoniq had the nerve to sell a $20 PCI-based audio card (AudioPCI) that was better that just about anything Creative Labs made on the ISA bus at any price.
Aureal, however, did an even greater crime -- they made system level APIs, and better than Creative Labs or Microsoft's at the time. Creative sued them... and eventually lost on all counts. By then, though, Aureal had spent big bucks on legal defense, and their backers were scared away by the lawsuit. They failed... and of course, Creative Labs was there to buy up the Aureal remains, at fire-sale prices.
You should examine how many patents are actually created. You couldn't be more wrong.
I was a technical adviser during a multi-year patent suit between IBM and Commodore, back in the 1980s. They had thrown a stack of patents our way, going after patent licensing on the Amiga computers, as they had gone after Apple, Atari, the IBM Cloners, and pretty much everyone else. They were also pursing cross licensing -- they were very concerned about getting caught using someone's patent without knowing before hand.
Anyway, the IBM patent office, at least at the time, was a huge building in Boca Raton, Florida. They had some hundreds of legal beagles pouring over every work IBM did, looking for things that might be patentable. They were experts at gaming the system. For example, IBM had a patent on cut and paste between text buffers, granted in 1984. I would wager anyone here who was programming before 1984 used this feature in their programmer's text editor -- I had personally used it in TECO Emacs back at CMU in 1979. But no matter... the patent office didn't even have software engineers in those days, so they didn't have a clue about "obvious to one skilled in the art". In fact, all software patents granted before they had software-based examiners ought to be tossed out, just on general principle.
And the PTO, then or now, don't routinely look beyond the patent database for prior art, even obvious prior art. A patent is NOT supposed to be granted if there's prior art. And of course, anyone submitting the patent is supposed to list all of the related prior art they know as part of the application, but they also know where the PTO looks and where they don't.
So much of this stuff is a crock. And you would think, hey, IBM is a real technology company, not just a patent troll looking to buy patents for pennies on the dollar from the remains of failing tech companies (which is what most of them do -- they're not seeking out inventors to help, they're picking the bone clean from the carcasses of failed ventures). And they're gaming the system for all they're worth... and they can. IBM's patent department is a major profit center for them.
Anyone can legally copy ideas. Ideas are not supposed to be patentable, not in the least. Patents are entirely about implementations, or at least, they're supposed to be. They are supposed to read on specific inventions, which may incorporate many ideas. But they don't give the patentee a 20 year monopoly on the idea, only on the very specific implementation.
Much of the problem of software patents, and the even worse business method patents, is that they often do effectively patent ideas -- which is not legal in the USA or more other countries.
Ok, Steve, settle down and stop spreading FUD. People will still buy your devices even after Android has permanently secured the #1 spot for handheld devices.
Yup. I think the problem is only that this one may be flawed -- it may not actually speed up the system.
Intel has to price their CPUs according to an increasingly artificial tier system -- lower CPUs cost less, otherwise OEMs would buy the better CPU for the same price. They have such a demand, the actual cost of production is rarely if ever a real factor in CPU pricing these days.
Intel did well, and really loved, the days of old, when people routinely bought FPUs and CPU upgrades in retail boxes, at retail prices. So much more per-unit profit for them. Given that, for most people doing most things, any old CPU is fast enough, this trend has largely shrunk to hobbyists making their own PCs.
I thought this was wrong and stupid and evil and all kinds of dirty, nasty things when I first read about it. But think from the Intel perspective, and not just on this chip, but in general. Intel's not getting the upgrade market they used to, and yet, actual cost vs. retail or wholesales is more decoupled than ever. That's why people overclock -- Intel may sell 2.0GHz, 2.5GHz, and 3.0GHz versions of the same CPU, but if the process pretty much guarantees 100% yield at 3GHz, the lower levels are there just to keep the price of the 3GHz chip high -- they're making all they need to on the 2GHz chip.
So, given that, how about Intel makes a new chip, with a bunch of features turned off. It does the same thing the $50 OEM priced chip did last month, the OEM sells it exactly the same way, and everyone's just as happy as they were last month. Only now, the consumer drops $50 retail on that chip, and it goes faster -- Intel's back in the retail upgrade business, for essentially zero cost to them. And it's a no-brainer impulse buy -- no need to crack open that 6-month-old PC and do frightening things.
I'm not suggesting this is a Good Thing, or not evil, or implying any goodness... only that I can see how Intel might have thought of this as a good thing, and might be confused about its nearly inevitable market rejection. The real reason for that is simple: they have so many performance tiers already, they can't really offer much of an upgrade unless EVERY chip in the line has the same performance boost option. And the more of these that exist, the greater the near inevitability that it gets cracked, and everyone runs it. And that's probably not even illegal -- virtually none of the media protection laws written for content, software, etc. apply to hardware. For example, it's perfectly legal to reverse engineer your PC's motherboard and publish the resulting schematics (Sams Photofacts actually had that as a business model -- was a time you could walk down to your local radio/electronics shop and order up a schematic for just about any consumer device). I can't see DCMA or other things, as written, applying to a few magic codes dropped into an undocumented CPU register.
Ok, so Intel's reserving hyper-threading and 1MB of L2 cache as the unlocked "upgrade". Let's get past the other issues -- does the unlock get buried deep into the motherboard/CPU, or do we have to re-buy per OS, stuff like that. Intel's FAQ suggests its a Windows 7 thing...
My simple question: hyper-threading, while cheap, doesn't always improve performance. Sometimes it hurts performance. The scenario is simple: you're running multiple threads on the same L1 and L2 caches, so the caches are missing more often than before. That's of course why the 1MB of extra cache is part of the deal.
This was a quirk before this move: if hyper-threading didn't work for you, you'd turn it off, if it did, you'd turn it on; no harm, no foul. But now, they're asking for extra money for a performance boost. If I pay that, and don't get the performance boost (or worse yet, cache thrashing has me losing performance), I think there's every chance for a big old class action suit against Intel. Even if they're setting aside 1MB L2 cache on a 2MB L2 cache system, the performance could be worse, due to thrashing of the L1 cache.
Yup.. Hypercard was really kind of cool. But that was a completely different Apple, before Steve Jobs got so paranoid. Now, don't get me wrong -- paranoia has been a great business model for many different businesses, and it's hard to claim that the Apple of the 70s and 80s was doing better than the Apple of today. In fact, it might as well be a different company.
Apple in the 70s was the Apple of Wozniak... the one many of us in the hardware business were inspired by. When I want on to design computers at Commodore for 11.5 years, I took along the lessons of the Apple ][. I'm sure I'm not alone -- that was the Apple everyone liked. You didn't need the Macfaithful or iPhonies to show up and defend Apple at every turn of the corporate policy. There were a fundamental good.
The Apple of the early Macintosh was different. That was the Apple of cool software. Their hardware SUCKED, unlike the Apple ][ days, but their software had all kinds of cool, at least at the top layer. And by then, most users weren't well versed in hardware design, so they didn't understand how crufty the early Macs were. It wasn't my kind of revolution as a hardware guy (I was designing Amiga systems in that era, doing hardware correctly, so I didn't really care all that much how crappy Apple's hardware was), but they did usher in the GUI revolution. Theirs was slow, but they had quite a few very advanced ideas.
Today, it's the Apple of the closed Appliance. That's not a surprise to long-time Apple followers -- Jobs always claimed the personal computer ought to be an appliance. It's just that, before the various technologies of today, it wasn't practical. Now it is, and Jobs is running with it. That's find for some people, but the Computing Appliance idea is the polar opposite of what many of us at the start of personal computing believed our work to be. The Amiga, for example, was our best shot at enabling creativity in its users. This was a machine on which to create new things, perhaps as much as any new platform had been. Mac moved the publishing house to the desktop -- we wanted to move the production studio there too.
The Appliance is about viewing things, not creating things. And they go the extra mile to ensure you can't use it as a creative tool. No real multitasking, no keyboard models, finger-input-only, etc. They've optimized the consumption device, but killed it for useful creation. And so, no big surprise there's nothing like Hypercard.
But you can't keep that idea down. Check out Google's answer: App Inventor. Whether or not App Inventor really emerges as a Hypercard for the new era or not (or something even better), it's going to make it dramatically easier for "regular folks": students, teachers, artists, webmasters, etc. to crank out their own apps, reliable apps too, without the need to spend 5 years learning to write great Java or C-code.
Sure helps that Microsoft has been, well, slumping on their own. They learned a lesson with Vista, and perhaps another with Kin. It's not as if they're going away or anything, but some markets are driven largely by "cool product"... and these seem to the the places Apple's seeing success. That's questionably sustainable, but they've also been fairly good at converting "cool product" to "useful product". Certainly with the original iPod (first legal music, then video, then it became a PDA) and the iPhone. iPad remains largely a toy for most, but we'll see.
Microsoft, meanwhile, seems to be floundering at doing most anything that's outside of their PC-centric world. And it's not for bad products: the Zune HD is a nice PMP. But maybe lack of innovation coupled with lack of understanding. Just copying the iPod and being Microsoft doesn't make anyone think you have the right idea. And Kin... that was such an obvious train wreck, I'm amazed no one told the bosses at Microsoft. And yet, they did have some good ideas buried in there, but most of those were PC-centric, in an era when smartphones are actually smart (Kin cost as much per month as a smartphone, it just wasn't smart) and increasingly run just fine never docking with a PC.
Tablets are another areas of interest, and Apple is the first company to have a big seller of a non-PC tablet. But the PC tablets never sold well -- they were like the old-skool "tiny laptops", very expensive and very low-end for the money. Even a new crop of netbook-based tablets are going to have some trouble, at least if Windows is your OS answer? Why?
Simple... it's the "SE" factor. When you get a cheap software app, you can probably chose between the lesser known offerings, or the "SE" versions of well known apps. And some of those are just dandy, for a little while. But before long, you wonder why your can only load four video tracks on that video editor, or whatever. Get the lesser known thing, and they may not have the features of the $1000 competition, but they have no incentive for artificial limits, either. But also no upgrade path. The netbook and any other netbook-level Windows machine is the "SE PC"... it's so scaled down, versus the de-facto world of Windows, everything is going to seem slow and limited on it. But you can also go bigger.
Meanwhile, while the iPad only runs iPod/iPhone apps (a few slightly improved for the iPad screen), you have the bad-ass of the iPod/iPhone family there.... bigger and slightly faster than other Apple devices. So it seems better... the software you run is much better suited to it, even if you can't get some kinds of software at all, and the kinds you can get are otherwise limited.
Apple still fails in that iPad and iPhone still need PC docking for full functionality... Android has fixed that for the rest of us. But they've definitely moved past the "one size fits all" approach Microsoft has taken, so far. Maybe the new Windows 7 Phone is a fix -- rather than Windows API on a phone, they're seemingly leveraging their web tech for that. Palm's WebOS did this very successfully (tech-wise... business-wise, it was a bit late for Palm to continue as-was), so who knows. But again... where's Microsoft doing something first, versus just fitting someone else's good idea into a MS-shaped template?
USB took over because Apple wanted retarded license fees for using firewire and USB is more or less free. Apple basically wanted $20/device for anything that used firewire. Its really hard to sell a $10 web cam when you have to pay $20 for the connector.
There, fixed that for you. Adaptec may have sold some Firewire cards, but they had nothing to do with the creation of Firewire. It was primarily Apple, though the IEEE1394 working group also included TI, Sony, DEC, SGS Thompson, and IBM.
Apple was demanding $1.00 per port, while Intel had spun USB off to a SIG, which was licensing USB for free. That's around the time they started cooking up USB 2.0, as at least a partial answer for saying "no" to Firewire as a PC industry standard. Apple's always been greedy, Intel's always understood how to introduce an industry standard: largely, you make it free, and grant any patents on it licensed under compliant implementations automatically. As with PCI, as with PCI Express, etc.
Thing is, they were never really competitors. USB started out as an answer to the "ports problem"... serial, parallel, no autoconfiguration, no way to deal with additional low-speed expansion. Firewire started out as a replacement for SCSI, from Apple's point of view, better suited to multiple ports thanks to the small serial connector. When Sony got on board, it became the answer to digital video... USB doesn't work with digital tape, because you need the camera to be bus master.
It was only the video industry that saved Firewire from total obscurity, but even that's fading. It never caught on well as a consumer video interface, though you'll find it on some high-end televisions. Camcorders are going tapeless, rapidly, and won't bother with Firewire, since USB does just as well if the medium is computer-like, rather than videotape.
It didn't help Firewire that Microsoft gave such poor support for it in Windows. Yeah, Windows XP and even Windows 2000 will recognize a Firewire port. But unless you have XP SP3, you're locked at 100Mb/s without doing some registry hacking. So it's good for cameras, and that's about it.
Having recognized the flaws in the Win2K/XP/Vista drivers, MS released a new driver for Windows 7 -- which offered abysmal performance. I actually have a RAID that can run via FW800 or USB 2.0. Under XP, there was no question -- pretty much no force of nature could get a FW800 device going at 800Mb/s, and MS's drivers ran FW400 slower than USB 2.0 with this device.
When I upgraded to Windows 7, I had hopes... but no. The new drivers dropped FW performance to about 1/10th the norm, 2MB/s reads vs. 20MB/s over FW or 25MB/s over USB. They did provide the legacy driver, but it was no better than it had been.
I finally discovered the Unibrain drivers, which, along with only certain Firewire chips, actually support 800Mb/s over Firewire under Windows without crashing. So today, I get 45MB/s from the RAID, though I had to buy a new FW card to get it (Unibrain just BSODed with the PCIe FW card I had been using, but it's stable with a certain 32-bit PCI card).
Next time, SATA or GigE... both faster, both just work. Firewire was nice for awhile, but it needs to die. Of my five HD camcorders (two pro models), only the old ones still bother with Firewire -- both tape-based, HDV models. Even many new consumer HD camcorders (like the Panny TM700 or the Sony CV550) outperform just about any HDV unit, pro or otherwise, from a few years ago.
Firewire is dying in the pro-video world as well... it's lingering only in the world of tape, which is pretty quickly vanishing. Looking for a new tape-based camcorder introduction these days is kind of like looking for a new film-based camera introduction was a few years back -- it's still possible, but the sport is getting rather unrewarding.
And of course, Firewire was never used on high-end pro-gear. It began with the lower-end stuff, DV cameras, and moved only so far upscale. If you're not using a DV (IEC 61834) or MPEG-2 CODEC (or the spinoffs: DVCam, DVCPro, DVCPro50, DVCPro HD, HDV, etc). For any of the more advanced HD formats, it's going to be SDI, not Firewire, for transfers (DigiBeta, HDCam, D5-HD, etc).
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There are rare earths all over the place... they're not actually rare.
One problem is finding enough concentration of a particular material to make mining it economically sound. The USA, Australia, Canada, and a few others were, until relatively recently, the top suppliers of rare earth materials. Then China started selling them cheap... so cheap, most other companies went out of business.
So we have some decades of ignoring the problem. Can't do that anymore, it would seem. With the prices on many of these compounds having doubled in the last 18 months, it's reasonable to assume that someone could make a profit now, where before, China undercut any possible domestic production. But if most of those companies are really defunct, this means new concerns have to get into this business. So it's a slow process.
And of course, Western countries have environmental issues that, just perhaps, are not considered issues in China. This certainly adds to the cost of production, though it's also possible better mining technology could some into play.
As far as tech goes, there are alternatives. Another recent story here was about Toyota working on licensing Tesla Motors's electric car technology for a new version of the RAV4-EV. Now, as the world's largest manufacturer of electric road cars (albeit hybrid electrics), you'd think Toyota wouldn't need this. Only... Toyota's motors are all three-phase permanent magnet motors -- they need rare earths like neodymium... each Prius needs about a kilogram of neodymium for its two neodymium-iron-boron magnet-based motors.
Tesla uses polyphase AC induction motors with no permanent magnets... that's actually why their use of the name "Tesla" is fairly legit -- Nikola Tesla invented this kind of motor back in the late 19th century. Those in the Tesla Roadster use copper for the coils, aircraft aluminum for the structure, ceramic bearings, some special plastics, etc. But none of these rare earths.
Kin was a guaranteed failure that had nothing to do with how cool, or not, the actual phone was. The simple fact was that the carriers were charging the $30/month smart phone fee for what was absolutely nothing but a feature phone. And one for kids. No kid wants that phone. If they have a parent willing to shell out smart phone money, they're getting an iPhone, or maybe an Android phone. If the parents are not paying that kind of money, Kin's off the table anyway.
The fact that Microsoft had no concept of this upon launch does not bode well for their decisions on Windows 7 Phone. Hopefully, they have better people on the latter. I think competition is good for customers... with Apple, Google, and Microsoft actually putting up a good fight, we get better device.
10% drop in about a year -- 50% of the global smartphone market in 2009, 41% now, and the year's not over yet. Define "slow".
Now sure, for Nokia, it's about the same percentage loss as Microsoft does (they've been dropping a point or two share every month or two), but Nokia actually needs it. Smart phones are the most profitable segment of the phone business, and Nokia's poor performance isn't helped here. Apple's making more phone industry profit, as of last quarter anyway, than Nokia, Samsung, and a couple others... combined. From a much smaller share of the market.
Part of Nokia's problem is that, while they had some smart phone capabilities, they became such a lowest common denominator that many if not most SymbianOS phone users think they have "feature" phones, not smart phones. They're unaware they can buy apps, and in fact, not helped by the fact that Nokia didn't have the Ovi Store app until last year, and it's still not included on most SymbianOS phones. So in point, while they technically have a huge volume of smart phone, functionally, they're behind RIM, maybe even Android, in the actual use of their phones in "smart mode".
And like RIM, they're behind in technology. Both RIM and Nokia's new flagship phones look like something that would have been hot back in 2008... ARM11 processors, not Cortex A8 or A9, sub 1GHz clocks, lower resolution screens, lack of expansion cards, etc. So you can find any number of mid-range Android phones with better features than Nokia's top-of-the-line. That's not a good plan, regardless of the OS.
Assuming, of course, you don't have to replace a $30,000-$40,000 battery pack every 3-5 years. The problem with the Roadster is that the laptop batteries they're using (or at least used initially... not sure if they've fixed this yet) only support about 300-500 charge/discharge cycles before they're seriously failing.
Hybrids, including the Volt, solve this problem by short-cycling the batteries. On my 2003 Prius, they only run 40% of battery capacity, so after 130,000 miles, it's virtually good as new. They extended this to 60% starting in the 2004 model year (they also cut down on the number of cells, so the capacity is the same). These are both NiMh, but the same seems to be true of Lithium based technologies.
The Volt is supposed to have a newly engineered cell that supports more cycling, more like 5,000 charge-discharge cycles (at least, that was their goal). That gets you about 200,000 miles on a battery, if you believe the 40 mile range as a useful average. And yet, at least in the original design, they weren't going to charge the battery on-the-road, as a hybrid does ... you'd run it down, then the ICE takes over until you recharge it at home.
It sounds like they fixed this, at least, and the generator is actually charging the batteries in-flight. The writeup I read is here: http://gm-volt.com/2010/10/11/motor-trend-explains-the-volts-powertrain/
Basically, they've switched around the positions of the two motor/generators and the ICE in this design, versus the Prius. It looks like, while technically the ICE is providing power to the same system as the main drive motor, its intended purpose is to run the generator. Much as the Prius's smaller motor/generator drives to change the effective gear ratio between the big motor and the ICE, you could claim it's proving some motive power, since technically it's adding power to the system, but that's a tiny side-effect of its real function.
... could be that Motorola is after cross licensing with Apple. There's a pretty good chance Apple has at least some fundamental patents on good Smart Phone GUI stuff, despite the evil nature of software patents. Probably nowhere near the stuff Palm has, or even some of the MS stuff, but if Motorola sees a war coming, why not shore up the defenses.
Apple was the last major phone manufacturer in business to actually start marking phones. There's a real fine chance they've stepped on all kinds of phone tech patents, and knowing the typical Apple hubris, they didn't bother to license them. So if a cross licensing is the goal, Apple may be forced to cooperate with Motorola, perhaps giving Motorola more ammunition against Microsoft.
At least until Apple and Microsoft sue each other over smart phones...
Or maybe Apple's been so blatent, Motorola figures they can get Apple to pay for their licensing deal with Microsoft. Microsoft, curiously, doesn't need to worry about cross licensing so much. They're just the software, not the hardware, so none of the phone mechanism stuff is their worry, but that of the OEMs... most of whom already have phone tech licensing agreements with each other.
In addition, the weird way they allowed software patents in the USA pretty much means you have an easier time suing a hardware company. Software isn't a machine, it's a document... patents are about machines. The loophole that allowed the flood of software patents in the 1980s, was the case of Diamond v. Diehr, which held that the inclusion of software in an otherwise hardware-based process wasn't enough to prevent patentability. In short, it's not the software violating your patent, it's that software running on hardware that violates the patent. So, most software patent cases are filed against some use of software on a hardware device.
Or that whole "Android is just better than iPhone" thing... some people will appreciate that, too. That's why I have an Android phone. I evaluated iPhone, and found is sorely wanting.
LTE is like EvDO -- it's IP-only. Verizon could easily support voice and data on 3G today, they'd just have to support it using VoIP, rather than some built-in 3G voice protocol as they offer in UMTS (GSM's 3G, which also includes HSPA/HSPA+). Any old smart phone of today can do VoIP... as the Skype application clearly demonstrates.
They'll have the same question to answer for LTE. So will AT&T.
Actually, we're not losing pixels, we're growing screen size. No one wants a 17" or 20" monitor, particularly when you can buy a 22"-24" monitor at 1920x1080 or better for $150 these days. Well, almost no one ... there is the Asus VW198T (1680x1050) at 19". At 20", 1680x1050 is very popular. Of course, it's stupid comparing these anyway... a 20 or 21" LCD monitor is going to take up way less space than a 19" or even most 17" CRTs. So whining about having to buy an ever-so-slightly larger screen is a specious argument. And really, you're going to have to hunt a little to find ANY current computer monitor much under 19"... they do exist, but they're on the fringe now.
Laptops are an exception... it's pretty easy to find a 17" laptop with 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 resolution. You're unlikely to find that in a 15" model, since most people would take that resolution as being too high for a 15" screen (of course, it's entirely dependent on your viewing distance, but consumer sales are all about perceptions, not calculations). Well, almost... there's the Panasonic Toughbook 52, the HP EliteBook 8530w, one build of the Dell Studio 15, maybe a few others with full HD or better in a 15" screen. But generally, not that popular.
There are full HD monitors made at lower sizes, but they're specialty items, not regular consumer things. You buy them for camcorder monitors, that kind of thing.
Just buy a real monitor. And buy smart. If you need a certain vertical pixel count, buy that monitor. I went from 1600x1200 19" CRTs to 1920x1200 24" LCDs. That was a win-win... wide-screen is a good thing, as long as I don't have to compromise.
The problem is that people want it all. The cheaper monitors at 1920x1080 are using HDTV panels, not LCD panels intended for monitors. They're made in larger volumes, so sure, you can get 'em cheaper. They're also cheap TN displays, rather than the superior IPS or MVA type. This is because you want a 24" screen for $200, not because you can't get a better screen.
The PC industry fought with the film industry over the aspect ratio for HDTV... 16:9 was actually the compromise; the PC industry wanted 16:10, the film industry wanted 2:1 (16:8). Naturally, the PC industry went right ahead and made everything 16:10 anyway, at least at first. It's kind of ironic so many are moving to 16:9 now anyway, just 'cause it's been made cheaper by the massive power of TV.
Actually, not so much, IF you're using Wifi. The amount of processing of voice is tiny... smartphones do this in software on the application processor these days anyway.
The real power drain during a call is the wireless link. A handset can put out up to a watt of RF power, as instructed by the cell tower. This is why your call time can vary wildly by location; when you're close to the a cell, the power is much reduced.
Wifi is held to 100mW or less. So a call over Wifi is going to use much less power... if you're close enough to a Wifi hot spot to make the call. If you did it over Bluetooth, even better... most cell phones implement class 3 Bluetooth, which has a maximum output of 1mW. This is why playing audio from your phone over Bluetooth uses far less power than playing via an analog output.
It's curious how the various Skype implementations work. I've had Skype on my Droid for quite some time. It works over the cellular network, but NOT over Wifi, for no good reason I can figure. But it's the special Verizon version, so when I make a cellular call over Skype, it will go via the Verizon network if it's local, the Skype network if it's phone-to-computer or overseas.
The new Skype for Android also has issues -- some bugs reported, and it doesn't support video. Great technology, but the implementations are still lacking.
Well, some of that could really be about volume, but it's more about averages. In a real TV show, you have dynamics... it's mid-range, people are talking, etc. Then it gets really quiet, as Col. Jack O'Neill, Samantha Carter, and T'ealk are sneaking down the hallway, trying not to be seen. Almost too quiet. Then it gets really loud, as the Replicators spring into action and everyone's shooting them to pieces... or was it a bunch of Goa'uld up to their old tricks.
Anyway... dynamics. There's a range, ideally something like 90dB or so, between quiet and loud.
Then an ad comes on. That ad has been processed through a compressor, which puts the quiet parts at 85dB, the midrange at 90dB, and the very loud parts at full range 96dB (this is assuming a 16-bit audio sample, which is what you have in most digital TV systems using AC-3 or MPEG Layer 2 audio). Now of course, they've taken that nice 16-bit potential and dropped it down to about two or three effective bits of resolution, but they don't care, long as it's as loud as your explosions ever get.
You can tell if the originator really dials down the show volume. That's really unlikely -- for one, you'd be getting huge variations in volume from channel to channel, which I've never seen. But in normal audio, the average is probably around -20dB from peak, and your loud ads with their compression probably average out at -10 to -5dB from peak... in other words, they can actually be 2x-3x louder in practice than the television show, even without playing any evil games with your show's normal volume. And if they did that, they'd really be cheating you, because the show's audio would have to be compressed, or you'd simply miss part of it.
If there are ads that really show up a VU meter louder than the loudest explosion peak, that's proof they're really messing with the overall show's volume. But I don't believe that's necessary.
In fact, popular music has already been though a loudness war. Years back, with the advent of cheap audio gear and more bands getting more involved with the technical side of their own work, music started getting louder. This was also new for the digital era -- you simply couldn't make an LP that loud, the mechanics of it were against you. But enter CD, and the issue of "too compressed" goes away, at least if you don't care about dynamics. Again, not really louder in peak, but louder over all -- more compressed, so the effect is louder. Here's the ever-present Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war. And here's a short article about it as well: http://georgegraham.com/compress.html. Same principles as the loudness escalations on TV.
Well, not so much. Yes, AGC is a form of dynamic compression. No so much intentionally, since it's uncontrollable. It's really chaining an average volume input level as negative feeback to your whole volume output control, which isn't exactly what a compressor does. Same basic idea though.
But in pro audio, you rarely chain your compressor's trigger to an average of input audio over time... maybe if you're setting it up as a limiter for ducking (eg, automatically drop background music when the voiceover kicks in). Usually, you set the compression start and amount at fixed points: 6:1 compression from -10dB, etc. And you want the compression to be based on instant (or near-instant, in the case of soft-knees and soft limiters) response to the input levels, not an average thereof.
And that would make it work reasonably well for television... better still if you made a softer knee. You'd still get peaks for the explosions on your action shows, but sustained loudness would be cut.
Another thing that's pretty easy with pro-class gear (or pretty much any freeware compression plug-in) is setting a limiter. If you KNOW that your television station is really dropping the volume of the program versus the ads, hook up a level meter and find the actual peaks they're permitting during the program. Set that as your limit, and nothing louder gets past the limiter.
Local stations get the "big blank " block from the satellite feed. That's where they put their commercials. There may of course be other indicators, but none of the behind-the-scenes stuff is broadcast. If you have a C-band satellite dish, you may find network to local downlinks still available. That's where you can see this stuff. And of course, they're not sending it out live anyway... even for a "live" show, there's enough delay for the locals to add whatever they need to add intermixed with the national feeds.
Commercials aren't actually louder -- you set your peaks with the volume knob, the commercial can't exceed whatever they are. But you're expecting some dynamics on a show, particularly an action drama show like 24 was... quiet whispering, then a loud explosion. And then on comes your add, compressed to the point where it's "all explosion", no whisper. They may both have 95dBa limits, but the TV show may run between 20dBa and 95dBa, while the ad runs from 90 to 95dBa.
Actually, I know a hardware company that was sued into oblivion thanks to software patents: Aureal Semiconductor. Aureal had some very cool audio chips, back in the 1990s, as well as the best 3D audio API for gaming, and some other great stuff. Now, Creative Labs took it was a given that they were the only company allowed to work on consumer audio for PCs... particularly when so many other companies did it better. Sometimes they just bought the company, as they did with Ensoniq back when Ensoniq had the nerve to sell a $20 PCI-based audio card (AudioPCI) that was better that just about anything Creative Labs made on the ISA bus at any price. Aureal, however, did an even greater crime -- they made system level APIs, and better than Creative Labs or Microsoft's at the time. Creative sued them... and eventually lost on all counts. By then, though, Aureal had spent big bucks on legal defense, and their backers were scared away by the lawsuit. They failed... and of course, Creative Labs was there to buy up the Aureal remains, at fire-sale prices.
You should examine how many patents are actually created. You couldn't be more wrong.
I was a technical adviser during a multi-year patent suit between IBM and Commodore, back in the 1980s. They had thrown a stack of patents our way, going after patent licensing on the Amiga computers, as they had gone after Apple, Atari, the IBM Cloners, and pretty much everyone else. They were also pursing cross licensing -- they were very concerned about getting caught using someone's patent without knowing before hand.
Anyway, the IBM patent office, at least at the time, was a huge building in Boca Raton, Florida. They had some hundreds of legal beagles pouring over every work IBM did, looking for things that might be patentable. They were experts at gaming the system. For example, IBM had a patent on cut and paste between text buffers, granted in 1984. I would wager anyone here who was programming before 1984 used this feature in their programmer's text editor -- I had personally used it in TECO Emacs back at CMU in 1979. But no matter... the patent office didn't even have software engineers in those days, so they didn't have a clue about "obvious to one skilled in the art". In fact, all software patents granted before they had software-based examiners ought to be tossed out, just on general principle.
And the PTO, then or now, don't routinely look beyond the patent database for prior art, even obvious prior art. A patent is NOT supposed to be granted if there's prior art. And of course, anyone submitting the patent is supposed to list all of the related prior art they know as part of the application, but they also know where the PTO looks and where they don't.
So much of this stuff is a crock. And you would think, hey, IBM is a real technology company, not just a patent troll looking to buy patents for pennies on the dollar from the remains of failing tech companies (which is what most of them do -- they're not seeking out inventors to help, they're picking the bone clean from the carcasses of failed ventures). And they're gaming the system for all they're worth... and they can. IBM's patent department is a major profit center for them.
And that's a good thing. More power to them.
Anyone can legally copy ideas. Ideas are not supposed to be patentable, not in the least. Patents are entirely about implementations, or at least, they're supposed to be. They are supposed to read on specific inventions, which may incorporate many ideas. But they don't give the patentee a 20 year monopoly on the idea, only on the very specific implementation.
Much of the problem of software patents, and the even worse business method patents, is that they often do effectively patent ideas -- which is not legal in the USA or more other countries.
Ok, Steve, settle down and stop spreading FUD. People will still buy your devices even after Android has permanently secured the #1 spot for handheld devices.
Yup. I think the problem is only that this one may be flawed -- it may not actually speed up the system.
Intel has to price their CPUs according to an increasingly artificial tier system -- lower CPUs cost less, otherwise OEMs would buy the better CPU for the same price. They have such a demand, the actual cost of production is rarely if ever a real factor in CPU pricing these days.
Intel did well, and really loved, the days of old, when people routinely bought FPUs and CPU upgrades in retail boxes, at retail prices. So much more per-unit profit for them. Given that, for most people doing most things, any old CPU is fast enough, this trend has largely shrunk to hobbyists making their own PCs.
I thought this was wrong and stupid and evil and all kinds of dirty, nasty things when I first read about it. But think from the Intel perspective, and not just on this chip, but in general. Intel's not getting the upgrade market they used to, and yet, actual cost vs. retail or wholesales is more decoupled than ever. That's why people overclock -- Intel may sell 2.0GHz, 2.5GHz, and 3.0GHz versions of the same CPU, but if the process pretty much guarantees 100% yield at 3GHz, the lower levels are there just to keep the price of the 3GHz chip high -- they're making all they need to on the 2GHz chip.
So, given that, how about Intel makes a new chip, with a bunch of features turned off. It does the same thing the $50 OEM priced chip did last month, the OEM sells it exactly the same way, and everyone's just as happy as they were last month. Only now, the consumer drops $50 retail on that chip, and it goes faster -- Intel's back in the retail upgrade business, for essentially zero cost to them. And it's a no-brainer impulse buy -- no need to crack open that 6-month-old PC and do frightening things.
I'm not suggesting this is a Good Thing, or not evil, or implying any goodness... only that I can see how Intel might have thought of this as a good thing, and might be confused about its nearly inevitable market rejection. The real reason for that is simple: they have so many performance tiers already, they can't really offer much of an upgrade unless EVERY chip in the line has the same performance boost option. And the more of these that exist, the greater the near inevitability that it gets cracked, and everyone runs it. And that's probably not even illegal -- virtually none of the media protection laws written for content, software, etc. apply to hardware. For example, it's perfectly legal to reverse engineer your PC's motherboard and publish the resulting schematics (Sams Photofacts actually had that as a business model -- was a time you could walk down to your local radio/electronics shop and order up a schematic for just about any consumer device). I can't see DCMA or other things, as written, applying to a few magic codes dropped into an undocumented CPU register.
Ok, so Intel's reserving hyper-threading and 1MB of L2 cache as the unlocked "upgrade". Let's get past the other issues -- does the unlock get buried deep into the motherboard/CPU, or do we have to re-buy per OS, stuff like that. Intel's FAQ suggests its a Windows 7 thing...
My simple question: hyper-threading, while cheap, doesn't always improve performance. Sometimes it hurts performance. The scenario is simple: you're running multiple threads on the same L1 and L2 caches, so the caches are missing more often than before. That's of course why the 1MB of extra cache is part of the deal.
This was a quirk before this move: if hyper-threading didn't work for you, you'd turn it off, if it did, you'd turn it on; no harm, no foul. But now, they're asking for extra money for a performance boost. If I pay that, and don't get the performance boost (or worse yet, cache thrashing has me losing performance), I think there's every chance for a big old class action suit against Intel. Even if they're setting aside 1MB L2 cache on a 2MB L2 cache system, the performance could be worse, due to thrashing of the L1 cache.
Yup.. Hypercard was really kind of cool. But that was a completely different Apple, before Steve Jobs got so paranoid. Now, don't get me wrong -- paranoia has been a great business model for many different businesses, and it's hard to claim that the Apple of the 70s and 80s was doing better than the Apple of today. In fact, it might as well be a different company.
Apple in the 70s was the Apple of Wozniak... the one many of us in the hardware business were inspired by. When I want on to design computers at Commodore for 11.5 years, I took along the lessons of the Apple ][. I'm sure I'm not alone -- that was the Apple everyone liked. You didn't need the Macfaithful or iPhonies to show up and defend Apple at every turn of the corporate policy. There were a fundamental good.
The Apple of the early Macintosh was different. That was the Apple of cool software. Their hardware SUCKED, unlike the Apple ][ days, but their software had all kinds of cool, at least at the top layer. And by then, most users weren't well versed in hardware design, so they didn't understand how crufty the early Macs were. It wasn't my kind of revolution as a hardware guy (I was designing Amiga systems in that era, doing hardware correctly, so I didn't really care all that much how crappy Apple's hardware was), but they did usher in the GUI revolution. Theirs was slow, but they had quite a few very advanced ideas.
Today, it's the Apple of the closed Appliance. That's not a surprise to long-time Apple followers -- Jobs always claimed the personal computer ought to be an appliance. It's just that, before the various technologies of today, it wasn't practical. Now it is, and Jobs is running with it. That's find for some people, but the Computing Appliance idea is the polar opposite of what many of us at the start of personal computing believed our work to be. The Amiga, for example, was our best shot at enabling creativity in its users. This was a machine on which to create new things, perhaps as much as any new platform had been. Mac moved the publishing house to the desktop -- we wanted to move the production studio there too.
The Appliance is about viewing things, not creating things. And they go the extra mile to ensure you can't use it as a creative tool. No real multitasking, no keyboard models, finger-input-only, etc. They've optimized the consumption device, but killed it for useful creation. And so, no big surprise there's nothing like Hypercard.
But you can't keep that idea down. Check out Google's answer: App Inventor. Whether or not App Inventor really emerges as a Hypercard for the new era or not (or something even better), it's going to make it dramatically easier for "regular folks": students, teachers, artists, webmasters, etc. to crank out their own apps, reliable apps too, without the need to spend 5 years learning to write great Java or C-code.
Sure helps that Microsoft has been, well, slumping on their own. They learned a lesson with Vista, and perhaps another with Kin. It's not as if they're going away or anything, but some markets are driven largely by "cool product"... and these seem to the the places Apple's seeing success. That's questionably sustainable, but they've also been fairly good at converting "cool product" to "useful product". Certainly with the original iPod (first legal music, then video, then it became a PDA) and the iPhone. iPad remains largely a toy for most, but we'll see.
Microsoft, meanwhile, seems to be floundering at doing most anything that's outside of their PC-centric world. And it's not for bad products: the Zune HD is a nice PMP. But maybe lack of innovation coupled with lack of understanding. Just copying the iPod and being Microsoft doesn't make anyone think you have the right idea. And Kin ... that was such an obvious train wreck, I'm amazed no one told the bosses at Microsoft. And yet, they did have some good ideas buried in there, but most of those were PC-centric, in an era when smartphones are actually smart (Kin cost as much per month as a smartphone, it just wasn't smart) and increasingly run just fine never docking with a PC.
Tablets are another areas of interest, and Apple is the first company to have a big seller of a non-PC tablet. But the PC tablets never sold well -- they were like the old-skool "tiny laptops", very expensive and very low-end for the money. Even a new crop of netbook-based tablets are going to have some trouble, at least if Windows is your OS answer? Why?
Simple... it's the "SE" factor. When you get a cheap software app, you can probably chose between the lesser known offerings, or the "SE" versions of well known apps. And some of those are just dandy, for a little while. But before long, you wonder why your can only load four video tracks on that video editor, or whatever. Get the lesser known thing, and they may not have the features of the $1000 competition, but they have no incentive for artificial limits, either. But also no upgrade path. The netbook and any other netbook-level Windows machine is the "SE PC"... it's so scaled down, versus the de-facto world of Windows, everything is going to seem slow and limited on it. But you can also go bigger.
Meanwhile, while the iPad only runs iPod/iPhone apps (a few slightly improved for the iPad screen), you have the bad-ass of the iPod/iPhone family there.... bigger and slightly faster than other Apple devices. So it seems better... the software you run is much better suited to it, even if you can't get some kinds of software at all, and the kinds you can get are otherwise limited.
Apple still fails in that iPad and iPhone still need PC docking for full functionality... Android has fixed that for the rest of us. But they've definitely moved past the "one size fits all" approach Microsoft has taken, so far. Maybe the new Windows 7 Phone is a fix -- rather than Windows API on a phone, they're seemingly leveraging their web tech for that. Palm's WebOS did this very successfully (tech-wise... business-wise, it was a bit late for Palm to continue as-was), so who knows. But again... where's Microsoft doing something first, versus just fitting someone else's good idea into a MS-shaped template?
USB took over because Apple wanted retarded license fees for using firewire and USB is more or less free. Apple basically wanted $20/device for anything that used firewire. Its really hard to sell a $10 web cam when you have to pay $20 for the connector.
There, fixed that for you. Adaptec may have sold some Firewire cards, but they had nothing to do with the creation of Firewire. It was primarily Apple, though the IEEE1394 working group also included TI, Sony, DEC, SGS Thompson, and IBM.
Apple was demanding $1.00 per port, while Intel had spun USB off to a SIG, which was licensing USB for free. That's around the time they started cooking up USB 2.0, as at least a partial answer for saying "no" to Firewire as a PC industry standard. Apple's always been greedy, Intel's always understood how to introduce an industry standard: largely, you make it free, and grant any patents on it licensed under compliant implementations automatically. As with PCI, as with PCI Express, etc.
Thing is, they were never really competitors. USB started out as an answer to the "ports problem"... serial, parallel, no autoconfiguration, no way to deal with additional low-speed expansion. Firewire started out as a replacement for SCSI, from Apple's point of view, better suited to multiple ports thanks to the small serial connector. When Sony got on board, it became the answer to digital video... USB doesn't work with digital tape, because you need the camera to be bus master.
It was only the video industry that saved Firewire from total obscurity, but even that's fading. It never caught on well as a consumer video interface, though you'll find it on some high-end televisions. Camcorders are going tapeless, rapidly, and won't bother with Firewire, since USB does just as well if the medium is computer-like, rather than videotape.
It didn't help Firewire that Microsoft gave such poor support for it in Windows. Yeah, Windows XP and even Windows 2000 will recognize a Firewire port. But unless you have XP SP3, you're locked at 100Mb/s without doing some registry hacking. So it's good for cameras, and that's about it.
Having recognized the flaws in the Win2K/XP/Vista drivers, MS released a new driver for Windows 7 -- which offered abysmal performance. I actually have a RAID that can run via FW800 or USB 2.0. Under XP, there was no question -- pretty much no force of nature could get a FW800 device going at 800Mb/s, and MS's drivers ran FW400 slower than USB 2.0 with this device.
When I upgraded to Windows 7, I had hopes... but no. The new drivers dropped FW performance to about 1/10th the norm, 2MB/s reads vs. 20MB/s over FW or 25MB/s over USB. They did provide the legacy driver, but it was no better than it had been.
I finally discovered the Unibrain drivers, which, along with only certain Firewire chips, actually support 800Mb/s over Firewire under Windows without crashing. So today, I get 45MB/s from the RAID, though I had to buy a new FW card to get it (Unibrain just BSODed with the PCIe FW card I had been using, but it's stable with a certain 32-bit PCI card).
Next time, SATA or GigE... both faster, both just work. Firewire was nice for awhile, but it needs to die. Of my five HD camcorders (two pro models), only the old ones still bother with Firewire -- both tape-based, HDV models. Even many new consumer HD camcorders (like the Panny TM700 or the Sony CV550) outperform just about any HDV unit, pro or otherwise, from a few years ago.
Firewire is dying in the pro-video world as well... it's lingering only in the world of tape, which is pretty quickly vanishing. Looking for a new tape-based camcorder introduction these days is kind of like looking for a new film-based camera introduction was a few years back -- it's still possible, but the sport is getting rather unrewarding.
And of course, Firewire was never used on high-end pro-gear. It began with the lower-end stuff, DV cameras, and moved only so far upscale. If you're not using a DV (IEC 61834) or MPEG-2 CODEC (or the spinoffs: DVCam, DVCPro, DVCPro50, DVCPro HD, HDV, etc). For any of the more advanced HD formats, it's going to be SDI, not Firewire, for transfers (DigiBeta, HDCam, D5-HD, etc).