Rest in Peace, Jack
posted by Ben at 3:12 PM

JS/UIX - Terminal: "JS/UIX is an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a virtual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping."
posted by Ben at 2:31 PM

I talked to Andy and Tom about Apple's Switch to x86. Andy thinks that Apple is doing this because Intel has DRM technology. Tom points out that by making the switch, they can use the latest and greatest (tm) device drivers from, say, NVidia and ATI. While I'm not sure if Apple is doing this to get breadth in device driver support (that is, hardware support for the whole spectrum of devices), I would believe that they're doing this to get support for the most high end of devices.

Another thought-- I was asked if Apple is planning to enter the mobile handset market. It seems to me that that market is too commoditized for Apple, they seem to be the tgpe to enter an untapped market. I think what is much more likely would be an "iVid" device-- a hard disk based device which can plan full-length movies. Instead of the "5000 songs in your pocket" it will store 5-10 full length movies. With iTunes, Apple has a track record of succesfully distributing songs electronically and profitably, and they can take that track record to the studios and say "now let us distribute movies electronically.
posted by Ben at 8:41 AM

Hell froze over

I'm referring, of course, to Apple's announcement that they're going with x86 CPUs. I talked to James and Sulaiman about this yesterday, and some takeaways were:

1) its a testament to Apple employee loyalty that they can keep this secret for five years
2) moving to x86 would not only let them switch CPUs, but also motherboards and chipsets. Apple was rolling their own chipsets up till now.

3) Between the motherboard and the chipset, we're estimating that Apple can probably shave $100-$200 off the unit cost of a Mac, which would be a big chunk of the Mac-over-Dell premium, possibly enough to convince people to switch. But it is unlikely that Apple's making a switch this drastic for just incremental speed increase and $100-$200 off the unit cost. The move is most likely strategic.

Possible strategic advantages:
a) Apple now has its choice of vendors for chipset, motherboard, and CPU-- it will now be much easier to switch to AMD if they're not happy with Intel.
b) The Pentium, with its larger market share, has more money going into it, which means more money for Pentium R&D, which means a brighter future for the Pentium
c) There is the hypothesis the press mentioned: that this lets Apple build fast notebooks, there has been all this talk that Apple has not been able to put a G5 in a notebook for heat reasons. Personally, I believe a) and b) are more important

3) As for application vendors, James points out that Apple has successfully made a more drastic switch just a few years when they switched from OS9 on Motorola to OS/X on PowerPC. If any company has the know-how to make this switch, its Apple.

Also, companies like Adobe would only need to write their performance-critical assembly code once, which is a win.

4) I do not believe that this will lead to OS/X running on $200 generic computers or home built computers. Consumers will still be deciding whether to buy a Windows computer or a Mac. Putting an x86 in the Mac will not turn it into a Wintel computer.

John Siracusa points out that Apple can now gauge the size of the OS/X on generic x86 hardware by seeing how many people hack their non-Apple computers to run OS/X on it.

For my part, I'm going to put off my plans to Switch for a little while longer.
posted by Ben at 7:11 AM

Andy and I had an interesting excursion to Flushing today, I'll let him tell you all about it.

Meanwhile, I played around a bit with IIMF (international character input) when posting the comment to his story. At least for traditional Chinese, it seems like you need a special keyboard, because I couldn't decipher how the roman letters correspond to the Chinese radicals. It seems like hitting one key brings up a single character and hitting two keys brings up a menu from which you can select characters.
posted by Ben at 6:11 PM

How the ioccc spells David
posted by Ben at 9:01 AM

Kleptography is the photo gallery of Don Ellis. Now that I am getting more and more into photography, he is becoming my new hero.
posted by Ben at 8:38 AM

Google seems to have a way of being an API reference of sorts. I haven't found what else can be accessed in this way

posted by Ben at 6:37 PM