Solipsism Gradient

Nivardo Cavalcante wrote:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html

Intel buying Apple? Not very likely in my opinion, unless they ask Steve Jobs to become CEO of Intel too… even more unlikely is the other acquisition rumor I read, of Apple buying FreeScale. No, a collaboration makes more sense for both companies.

Posted by Nivardo Cavalcante:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html

Ibis Itiberê S Luzia wrote:

So what about CELL? Did you hear something related in WWDC?

Nothing… too soon, I think.

Posted by Ibis Itiberê S Luzia:
Rainer:

So what about CELL? Did you hear something related in WWDC?

I don’t want really to conduct a long discussion here, but…

Ibis Itiberê S Luzia wrote:

“The soul of the Mac is the CPU”. What is the meanning of the therm “Mac”? If I’m not wrong a “Mac” is a computer and not a software. The software is called “Operational System” which in this case can be System 7,8,9 or X. And at least what differentiated a Mac from an ordinary PC? Was the CPU, wasn’t? We were able to get experiences that ordinary PC users didn’t accomplished. We were able to run programs that they could’nt. The great difference was that Apple had a CPU that it helped to develop together with IBM and Motorola. They had the “difference” and this maked Apple so different.

I think that may have been more applicable in the past. In 1984 I bought my first Mac. The Macintosh was the user experience, the Mac operating system, the 68K CPU, the SCSI interface, the NuBus boards, the ADB Keyboard and mouse, the 3.5″ floppies. All these components enabled something extra in the user experience.

This is quantum physics in that it really needs someone operating the computer to have the “experience”. All of the components I’ve listed above have been changed: the operating system is now Unix and NeXT based, the CPU migrated to the PowerPC, SCSI, NuBus, ADB and floppies were replaced by new technologies. But people agree, when they sit down at an iMac G5, that it’s still a Mac – although a completely different Mac from the 1984 Mac 128K.

So, I’m actually writing this at an Intel Mac. It’s still a Mac. Everybody here at WWDC agrees with me, as far as I can tell. The user experience has evolved, but the essence has remained. It’s faster for some things, it’s slower for other things. This is irrelevant; it’s a different model, that’s all. It uses other chips inside. That’s irrelevant too.

Let’s move on. There’s tons of new stuff to do and write about.

Posted by Ibis Itiberê S Luzia:
Reiner:

God knows the respect I have for your words but I can’t be convinced that Apple done what was right thing to do.

People make great confusions all the time. Who said “Think different”? Was I? No. Was Apple and Steve Jobs. Who said: “Switch”. Was I? No. Was Apple and Steve Jobs. Who said “Gigahertz is a myth”. Was I? No. Now they are “thinking evenly” , switching and accepting the fact that “gigahertz was the matter”. They lied? I think so. They lied and betrayed. Why think different if Apple says one thing and do other completely different? “Do what I say you to do not what I do” And if I’m not wrong “Think different” is not a single ad campaign but Apple’s Company main rule ! They’re stepping over the companie’s main theme and still asking us to accept that !? A processor is much more than a “graphics board” or a “mouse” or an “ethernet board”. A processor is the computer brain. And a change in a processor takes “years” to be accomplished contrary to other components that can be changed and “voila” you have your computer running the same way as you correctly stated below.

“The soul of the Mac is the CPU”. What is the meanning of the therm “Mac”? If I’m not wrong a “Mac” is a computer and not a software. The software is called “Operational System” which in this case can be System 7,8,9 or X. And at least what differentiated a Mac from an ordinary PC? Was the CPU, wasn’t? We were able to get experiences that ordinary PC users didn’t accomplished. We were able to run programs that they could’nt. The great difference was that Apple had a CPU that it helped to develop together with IBM and Motorola. They had the “difference” and this maked Apple so different. Now Apple is an ordinary PC (luxury PCs actually) like any other brand. With few modifications we will be able to run Mac OS X on a grey PC maden in Taiwan or Hong Kong like Windows and Linux. Is this “thinking different”? What makes Apple different now? Mac OS X is a Unix, like Linux. It’s not so different. We are only “one else” now, we are PC users, not Mac users anymore. Thanks Steve.

Yesterday I spent some time at one of the prototype Macs with a Pentium inside. There was one of them with the cover removed. The most remarkable thing was – and, now that photos have leaked, I don’t think I violate any NDA by saying this – that there was nothing remarkable about the box (a standard cheese-grater PowerMac) or about the motherboard (a standard Intel motherboard). There was nothing remarkable about it usage-wise either; unless you looked at the “About This Mac” window, or at the System Profiler Report, or at the Processor preference panel, there was no way of telling what CPU was inside. It ran some unreleased build of Tiger, and there was this huge conspicuous security cable on it for some reason .

But it walked like a Mac, it quacked like a Mac, it was a Mac to all intents and purposes. I downloaded a dozen of random software packages off the Internet, they all just worked – under the Rosetta translator, which I had to see working to really believe in. The perceptual speed was, perhaps, a little faster than my 1GHz PowerBook; quite usable. I suppose this will get faster after a year of tweaking; another word in everybody’s mouth these past days.

Ah, and a bit of news which also leaked out today: Steve Job’s machine was not a souped-up quad processor monster, just the same box I had been using, but with some extra RAM. So, Rosetta is one cool app. I talked to one of the guys on the Rosetta team and he confirmed what I saw happening at the keynote: when you launch an app the second time, it uses the cached translated binary, so it launches much faster.

I looked at the installed libraries, drivers and applications: of course they were all “fat” binaries. The entire system is fat. Oops, sorry, “universal binary” is the politically correct version now. It’s not quite double the size of the standard Tiger installation, but who cares in these days of 100+GB disk drives?

I checked out some of my own projects on the new Xcode 2.1. Nearly all standard Cocoa stuff just compiled and ran with no modifications, no matter what combination of architectures I compiled it for. You can even step-debug PowerPC binaries on this thing, they somehow made gdb Rosetta-aware, so that the translated executable is back-linked to your PowerPC source code; very cool. This is probably a bonus of the Mach-O executable format, like the universal binary format itself. The old Carbon CFM format will run under Rosetta, but not natively; CFM is the new Classic, it seems. The old Classic appears to be dead at last; I suppose getting the Classic compatibility layer running under Rosetta would be a huge pain.

I don’t have any straight Carbon projects to test. I do have one new project that twiddles bytes that flow to and from the disk at a lot of places, because it uses a legacy format (one dating from 1984, by the way). I got most of it converted in less than an hour by scanning for certain source code patterns and putting byte swap function calls around the pertinent expressions. Now, the publicly available Guidelines list dozens of exceptions, where porting takes some extra work: if you use custom resource formats or Apple Events, if you use bitfields, if you want to divide by zero, and so forth. I think the biggest headache will be for whoever has invested time in writing great gobs of code in PowerPC assembly or Altivec; fortunately I never did this myself.

One place where I later lost another hour of work was in a somewhat obscure open source module which made unwarranted assumptions about the order local variables were allocated on the stack. Now, this is something which certainly works for one-off applications, but to actually publish such a thing without calling attention to it, is somewhat foolhardy. This is where many of the conversion failures will come from, I believe; sloppy coding and unwarranted assumptions.

Nivardo Cavalcante wrote:

Infelizmente não temos um tradutor instaneo no forum.

Nivardo, traduções ou resumos do meu raciocínio vão sair no site da Macmania. Talvez com alguns dias de diferença, mas fique de olho lá.