Problems:

1. You can't just suprise the market with a new OS. You need to give developers time to port and update their applications. You need to give OEMs a chance to build and test new systems, as well as get their tech support staff trained. You've got to educate the selling channel.
2. An x86 Mac OS X wouldn't have any binaries (other than whatever Apple ported) since no one would be ready for it. This would be confusing in the market as consumers wonder which version of iWork they need.

Some of the problems could be taken care of with Fat binaries (one file that contains PowerPC and x86 executables) and / or emulation... Apple has done both in the past.

I guess as they move more into the consumer electronics market, this might be an approach. I still don't think that it will happen anytime soon.

Anyway, my Powerbook has really, really nice hardware compared to my old Toshiba laptop, and I'm not talking CPU speeds. Things like keyboard feel, solidness of construction, screen quality... all the little things add up. It's the same reason that TabletPCs look like crap: PC makers compete on price and feature lists, whereas Apple tends to spare no expense to provide overall quality. This is why their machines are expensive, and need to be compared against IBM ThinkPads, not HPs, Dells or Toshibas.

Yeah that guy is smoking something. But it is fun to think about.

Hmm another related tidbit, Paul Thurrott from Windows Super Site posts today in his blog from day two of WinHEC 2005, that he heard the following at lunch today and I quote: "This one's bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. Yeah, seriously."

Good, detailed review from ArsTechica.

I'm going to buy it through Amazon since they have $35 off (and no sales tax).

Yeah I saw that review, it was pretty detailed.

John, did you see the quicktime player has variable speed pitch compensated playback?

Despite all the coolness in Mac OS X, they charge you $30 for QuickTime? I really don't understand that. How not to get your video player to become the default option: put up nag upgrade screens everytime the player launches.

I don't have a problem with paying for the Tiger upgrade even though I'm cheaping out and getting the Amazon or Fry's deal. I feel that by voting with my dollars, I'm doing my little bit to help keep alternative choices alive (I also paid for box versions of Red Hat 7-9). I still like, use and write code for Windows, but I'd love to be able to play with a new version of BeOS, for example. Choice is good, otherwise you end up with the IE disaster.

Yeah I also find that quick time thing very very strange. It seems pretty mean to try and get 30 more dollars from the loyal Mac users. I can understand them doing it to us PC types.

Yeah George I saw that. Pretty cool. Media player does that though so I guess they are just copying, 'he he'. Oh and media player will go full screen without charging you 30.00.

Forgot to add that the cost of shipping and handling is $12.00 USD.

So Apple refuses to do any kind of pro-rated discount for Tiger, but XP 64 comes out at $12. Sweet! De-facto cost leader rocks.

The stupid upgrade form wants a COA or ProductID. I don't have either of these since I built my own machine. I entered part of the activation key and it let me go on, but "We are unable to process your request at this time. Please try again. If you continue to experience difficulty please email customer service at xxx@productorder.com". Seems like a generic error, not sure if it's related to the product key I typed.

Why don't they just take my $12, ship the CD and let me worry about finding a legal activation key. Isn't that what the activation process is for anyway? Frustrating.

And what's with Microsoft farming out credit card processing? All of a sudden I'm entering credit card info on "productorder.com". I check the certificate, and sure enough, it's signed by verisign. But that only means that I'm really talking to productorder.com - how do I know who they are? MS doesn't appear to try very hard at preventing phishing when their own policies have you switching domains to enter your credit card info!

John - as for your quote, I think they're referring to the actual ACT OF PURCHASING this upgrade as what's frustrating. LOL!

Quote from news.com.com:
The clearest impact of 64-bit computing is the ability to deal with more than 4GB of physical memory. However, only the most sophisticated applications and databases are bumping up against this limit today. Down the road, though, Allchin said whole new ways of computing will open up. Imagine, how fast searching might be if all of one's e-mail, for example, were loaded into memory.
Idiots. They just don't get it. How can this be the clearest impact when most user PCs have 1GB or less. It's about the ALU and register sizes you marketing fools!

I know the addressable space is a sore subject with you. At least they listed performance as #1 on the windows site:

Top Reasons to Get Win64


"more data per clock cycle, making them run faster"

I'm sure that WinXP-64 is teh l33t, but I'm worried that my apps or hardware may or may not work completely.

I'm just not up to reinstalling everything just to test it, since I have no need for 64 bit anything right now. I don't want to repeat the 64 bit Fedora Core 3 fun I had a while back.

We'll just see how long you last once J and I start posting on our coolness. (Being hopeful here.) As for my box, The only thing I put on it was HL2. I couldn't bring myself to migrate over to it since I 'thought' XP64 was due out any day.

Ok I give up. I don't know what sort of voodoo is required to make that upgrade form happy. How sad is it that I actualy work there and I can't figure out how to get a copy of XP 64.

Geez that was a pain. After trolling on forums all day I got a 'hit'. Turns out that the 'product ID' is not the product key, but is the number that is returned when you get the properties for My Computer on the installed system. It's the unlabled number that appears just under the name XP is registered to. Ok that was obvious.


Got mine ordered now.

If this article is correct, and you can't go back to regular XP after installing XP64, I'm definitely not going to do it:

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1795/

You won't do it because?? Consider it this way, you bought 64 bits and are only use 32. Yes that is the price you pay for being an early adopter. Here is what you do, get an MS 'friend' to gift you another copy of XP32, then consider the $12.00 plus your original cost as the price of 64bit. Intall them both as dual boot.

Sigh, I hate feeling the need to defend MS against articles like this. (The comments on the article are even worse.) It just makes me sound like I'm spitting out the company line. Heavy sigh. I guess much of it is MS's fault for not getting the message out. As usual, here are some of my favorite quotes:

"product that’s been delayed by almost two years and features nothing new but for 64-bit support." - Well those two years were spent doing much more than just 64bit. Most of that work was in XP sp2 and Server Sp1. XP64 includes all of these fixes / enhancements plus a new version of the kernel, 5.2 - same as Server.

"...this upgrade program is only valid for PCs that came shipped with Windows XP preinstalled so most enthusiasts are out of luck." - Um, lie. I was able to order a CD from a retail pro version.

Here is the bottom line, no BS or petty zealotry:

Major platform shifts are hard. People resist change, but change is inevitable. It is always a chicken or the egg problem. Can't build 64 bit apps or drivers without a 64 bit OS, can't have a 64bit OS without a 64bit chip. Why make a 64bit chip if there is no OS? I have to give full credit to this current x86 platform shift to AMD. They went out on a limb here and eventually we will all benefit.

The biggest challenge to Window 64bit adoption is drivers. MS does not write all the drivers, the vendors do. The main reason XP64 has been delayed so long was lack of driver support. In the end MS has not been very successful in motivating hardware vendors to write 64bit drivers. But what motivation to the vendors have? Chicken and the egg again. The only real motivation will be when the consumers demand for the drivers either directly or by purchasing products from competitors that have them. That's the way the economy works. So MS has no choice but to do a targeted XP64 release (OEM and enthusiast) with limited driver support.

If you do 64bit now are you taking some risks - sure. But somebody has to do it. That's what early adopters are for. I'll keep you posted on how my experience goes. I have very mainstream hardware so I'm not expecting any bumps.

Oh and before someone brings up Tiger lets set some things straight. Tiger is not a full 64bit OS (it has 64bit extensions and support for 64bit non-GUI apps). The kernel and GUI subsytem are 32 bit. The Apply recommended implementation approach for apps that need both is to write a 64 bit background process to do the 'heavy lifting' and communicate with a 32bit GUI process via IPC or shared memory. - Not quite as easy as "recompile your app."

Reference:
Tiger: Developing 64-bit Applications

I think it's my confusion about what the policy is. I'd love to run XP64, but I'm worried that if something goes wrong (graphics drivers, etc) I won't be able to revert. At least, that was what the article was stating, not that they are the authority or anything.

Changing platforms is definitely hard, no question, I just want to be able to go back to 32-bit-werld if I have to revert.

I hear you. The policy seems pretty clear, unfortunatly, your 32bit OS becomes unlicensed. That's a drag. I wonder how this will be handled in Longhorn. Longhorn will ship with 32 and 64 bit versions in the same box, so maybe you'll be able to choose which one to install. (I'm not holding back, I honestly don't know).

I heard on one of the WinHEC blogs that Longhorn would have both 32 and 64 bit installs on the same disk, and that you choose at install time. That would be sweet!

Can you make sure that Visual Studio and Longhorn ship on DVD? I really hate the "Please insert CD n to continue" messages.

[H]ard|OCP has an overview of gaming on Windows x64. In summary, there's no real performance downfall on cards with supported drivers, but there's no performance boost until games are compiled specifically for the processor. A glitch is noted is that Steam refused to install into the default 32 bit Program files directory becuase it contains parentheses. Those are valid, but I wonder how many other apps will have this problem? Why not keep the 32 bit directory "Program Files" and make the 64 bit directory "Program Files (x64)"?

The trade-offs on the Wow64 implementation are numerous. Maybe I'll try and do a summary someday. Yes it is going to be a bit strange for a while.

I think my first target 64bit app will video encoding. I think that with all the hard drive space I have I'd like to try and keep a collection of movies on rotation for use with the home theater. I'll probably use Divx or Xvid with AC3 audio. I know there are 64bit versions of Xvid and VirtualDub floating around. I've seen perf benchmarks of 64bit Divx somewhere but I can't figure out how to download the encoder. As I recall there was a 20 - 30% encoding boost with Divx on 64 bit. I've been away from mpeg 4 encoding for a couple of years though so I'll have to startup a research project to catch up.

Order status still says 'pending'. Rumor is 4-6 weeks to ship. Lame. OEM orders are starting to get filled now.

Ok it's been 6 weeks and my xp64 trade-up order still says pending. There is no excuse for this.

Status update: It's been 2 months and now my status says: "Order has been received. You will be charged at the time of order shipment."

Did I mention there is no excuse for this?

Why don't you tell Scoble? All you have to do is mention that your order status doesn't have RSS feeds, blogs or podcasts, and he'll get medieval on their asses.

MS is showing a mini-tablet proto type. It is a couple of years away, but I think the form factor is right.

Read about it here

I just have to mention that it should have been obvious to them that Wi-fi is ill suited for roaming cell phone calls. If you could wake-on-lan over Wi-Fi, maybe incoming rings could work, but with current PDA power requirements, it's just not that practical unless it's charging at your desk most of the day.

In the last 3 years PDA, especially industrial PDAs have advanced in leaps in regards to battery life. Industrial PDAs from outfits like Sharp, Intermec, and Symbol were tested and would yeild battery life up to 6 hours with an active call going over WiFi.

Problem is that market is not mature enough to really get a revenue stream just yet and the devices in question are $2k a pop (like for a Symbol 9000 hand scanner)

But the PDA issue overshadows the true worth of the product , that is being a VOIP soultion for the mobile office. You could take a laptop w/ wifi and make/receive wifi phone calls at any wifi equipped location in the world. THE WORLD! and it worked GREAT!

Nobody but Telesym could do that reliably and maintain toll quality for the call and thats still the case.

I appreciate the response. I'm sure the tech was good and some of the people were cool. My point is that it's such a standard .com story - develop cool technology and have VC's push for broke to get in some market that's just not going to happen any time soon. Public Wi-Fi is still really sporadic, and windows media devices suck too much power (or are too expensive, as you mentioned).

Cell phone companies have already solved tower handoffs, billing, QOS, etc. And it's not that expensive. Mobile VoIP is still a ways off.

Why not do as you said - market a product for the PC/Laptop and prove the tech before people take it mobile? I suppose Skype would be competition now, but it wouldn't have been several years ago.

BTW, the new CEO's comments are so transparent. DISCLAIMER: I have no internal knowlege - this is pure speculation.

"We purposely did not try to run this into the wall," said Hart, who joined the company last summer. "We did not want to leave creditors hanging. We wanted to shut down in a professional fashion."
Translation: I get a bigger bonus the more money I get back to the investors.

"The underlying technology just wasn't up to the task," Hart said. "It 'demos' well, but in a full-scale deployment, it doesn't hold up."
Translation: The technical crew probably did build way too much technology before going to market, but this is usually a product management/vision failure. Where was the board for all this? How do you let a funded company run for 5 years without market validation?

"We determined that we had to completely rewrite the technology from the ground up," he said. And in the end, Hart said, the board decided it was not worth the expense.
Translation: Ahh... true visionary leadership. A rewrite is NEVER the option at this phase. It shouldn't even have been considered for discussion. It's not the developer's fault. New management was brought in to get creative with market targeting and refactoring the company - not the technology.

Anyhow, I'm sure there were some very contentious internal issues and I don't mean or care to delve into them. As I said - it's such a common mistake and these comments are more generic than specific.

Cool - there's also a new "episode" of Half Life 2 coming out called Aftermath.

There is also another expansion planned called "Lost Coast" which is targeted only at the very high end computers / graphics cards.

Two new free Halo maps are available now. Don't forget to pull them down before Xbox night. There are also 2 new 'pay' maps available.

Hmm... I need to take a look into some of these podcasts to see if I can synch with my car mp3 player. Do you know of an interface that would somehow subscribe to the RSS feeds and automatically download the mp3 file as it's released?

Does it work with skype on your pocketpc?

I've always though it would be cool to have some sort of intercom system that allowed people to use these kinds of headsets in a car. I always find it annoying that people in the back of a car, and especially a van, have a hard time hearing the people in the front. How cool would it be to have a little box that could allow passengers in the back to easily talk to the passengers and driver in the front. Then you could even direct GPS directions, cell phone calls and all that just to the driver's head set.

Hmm, I expect that it won't be too long before they just shrink a cell phone down to this size. You would use voice commands to control it. You would be 'connected' all the time.

Looks like Google is adding RSS aggregation to your Gmail account. BTW, Slashdot has 4 articles on Google on the front page today. At least Google fanboys have a majority of the market, unlike Apple or Linux.

Yeah, but I couldn't care less what "the majority of the market" is doing when I'm using garageband on my powerbook, or writing code on my linux workstation. I hear a lot of people eat at McDonald's...

You are such a rebel.

Yeah, yeah, but I mean that for some things, you just shouldn't worry about what others are doing.

For the first time I really appreciate what potential wireless technology holds. I am sitting at Gordys restaurant in North Bend having breakfast with Anna and they have access. It was so easy to connect and browse.
gotta run though Breakfast is here

Ahh, now you are catching on. Being connected has a lot of advantages. I've been pretty surprised to find coverage in places I wouldn't expect.

I still think it's silly that people go out and buy a mini and expect to upgrade it. It's a $500 computer... disposable. And of course the graphic goodness won't be there for the same reason.

I also think that Tiger is more than an upgrade. Going 64 bit is more than a simple thing, not to mention all the other new features. Apple really screwed themselves with the whole "X" thing. Are they going to go to "11" next? Or "XI"? So now they are in a position to have to call major releases 10.3, 10.4, etc, so the perceived value is less.

Will Windows XP 64 bit be a free upgrade for XP users?

For starters they are not messaging the 64 bit thing at all. It is buried on a back page of their site:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/64bit/
I guess the is probably due to the non-technical nature of their market base. I'm curious to know how they implemented their 32bit / 64bit compatibility, now that I'm familiar with Wow64 in the Windows world. They did take a different approach than MS though by using fat binaries.
I agree with the "X" thing. I always hear people talking about having to pay $130 for a 'point' release. Not all of these 'point' releases have had equal value.
Good question on XP 64. I've been trying to find the answer to that myself. Don't laugh, MS is a big place, and most of the time I learn things from the outside before I hear about them internally.

But reasonably, I'd expect to pay something for 64-bit XP... that's not a small amount of work with all the compatibility testing, etc.

I'm not sure if this site covers the 32/64 bit issues, but KernelThread has a bunch of cool Mac OS X programming articles.

The author of KernelThread is also writing an interesting book, it looks like.

No real sympathy from me for the pre-April 12th buyers. The value decision is made at the time of purchase. The release of a new s/w version doesn't make an existing system less functional so the original vaulue proposition hasn't changed.

Yeah, but almost everywhere people were publicly hoping (wishful thinking) that since the mini launch was so close to tiger's release, Apple would cut them a deal. Oh well. It's the same all over.

Mac OS X Liger -

Lucky!

I bought Napoleon Dynamite today... couldn't resist any further. Next up is "The Office" series.

So the first place I naturally check out is where I live. The next place is where I grew up. I'm guessing most of you did the same. This dude however went straight in and checked out Area 51. Now why didn't I think of that?

The first thing I did was drive, by a lot of clicking and dragging, from Seattle to San Francisco. Then back with the satellite images on.

I just want to say thank you for taking the time & effort for put this web page together! Visit my sites, please:

I just want to say thank you for taking the time & effort for put this web page together! Visit my sites, please:

No, thank you Steve, for taking the time and effort to fill our humble site with spam. Without the efforts of you and your associates I would have more time on my hands. Time I would have to either devote to work or my family. Please, keep up the good work.

I don't think they'll ever get used to protected memory or compilers that work.

I find the quotes from this article very strange. Something about mice and dwarves? Linux and GPL really has companies with their backs to the wall and they just don't seem to know how to respond.

Paul, Come on how many compiler bugs, scheduling bugs, select bugs did we actually run into?

J, Yeah that article has a funny feel.

I haven't followed the embedded market for a while. I wonder how the Lynx, oh I mean Lynuxworks guys are doing. They were the first I remember to really embrace that model.

John: More than one, which is more than we should have... ;)

I think Wind River followed AE with VxWorks 6.0. The quote I remember hearing from someone at WindRiver was "6.0 is AE done right".

My favorite quote from the article "You can't do control-alt-delete on a pacemaker".

Hmm, I would like to see a comparison chart between AE and 6.0. I'm wondering what the difference is. From the 6.0 features list I see features like, MMU-based memory protection,
Process-based user-mode application execution environment... Sounds like some similar features. Although no full protection domains.

Actually a more interesting story would be the here about the 'internal' development of the two products. I'm guessing that there were two competing camps.

What do you think the developers thought of this: "Klein, 45, is relaxed and optimistic, saying he has banned cynicism and negativity at the company." Not only does this mean that there is cynicism and negativity, but can you imagine what happened to negativism when they BANNED it? Ha ha ha. It's like throwing fuel on the fire!

Maybe they are like the borg: with no memory protection, they can all read each other's thoughts... imagine that at GoAhead circa 2002... scary!

I saw this on news.com.com.com.com a couple days ago, but yeah, I haven't had time to sit down and watch it. I've been meaning to set up UWTV on TiVo. Not sure what channel it's on.

Back in the day, nerds would be forced to use Windows at work, and they'd come home to hack on linux in their free time. I'm the opposite, although I use both Mac OS X and Windows at home. I just got tired of all the never ending tweaking that is required to maintain a linux box.

When I actively used linux at home, I used the Red Hat Professional distribution (9.0 was the last one I used) combined with the Ximian desktop. That provided the "slickest" UI, but not the most stable or light-weight. This was okay, but then a couple of things happened:

- Red Hat discontinued their non-enterprise versions
- Ximian was aquired by Suse (no more Red Hat packages)

This means all the years of getting to know the quirks of Red Hat distros is gone. Fedora doesn't seem as well thought out or supported.

Another sore point is the complete lack of a decent music or dvd player. I've tried xtunes (now defunct) and rhythmbox (doesn't work) and I've given up. If you want to do something as simple as "play an mp3", you have to install a freaking media platform like gstreamer or xine. Oh, and the Ximian gstreamer package can't be upgraded to a newer regular gstreamer without breaking god knows what other Ximian bloat.

I recently installed Fedora core 3 (i386) and it came with all that stuff built in. I tried using rhythmbox to play an mp3: "sorry, you have to install a plug-in to get mp3 playback". Something to do with patents or some such. I try to play a .ogg file: rhythmbox locks up hard. This, from a pre-packaged install. Now what? The choice is: spend the entire weekend searching forums and whatnot hoping that someone with the same problem as me actually solved it, or just boot up a proper consumer OS.

The saying, "Linux is only free if your time has no value" is dead accurate.

Maybe if Red Hat got back into the home distro market, I'd change my mind, but I already spend most of my day using linux at work... I just don't need that headache at home too.

Oops, I meant that Ximian and Suse were aquired by Novell.