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Comment Wrong assumption in the article (Score 5, Interesting) 83

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

Comment Re:Sold his stock (Score 5, Informative) 98

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Comment another way around internet blockage (Score 1) 123

Known VPN services have identifiable server addresses that can be blocked. Instead, you can set up a cheap raspberry pi (or other) at your home and use an encrypted SSH connection to that [raspberry pi] from far away. Then turn on your SOCKS proxy (part of WiFi Details on Macintosh) and check to see that your IP address shows to the world you access as that of your raspberry pi. I do this all the time, including right now. It also helps to watch sports events.

Comment Re:No Autonomy (Score 2) 125

You might have missed that Musk made the same claim about 2016, with the 1-camera sensor system. The 2017 claim was with the newer 8-camera system, and the claim was made before Tesla even had software for the new sensors, and the Tesla then lacked adaptive cruise control, adaptive high beam, self parking, summon, and other things that the prior model did have. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed these claims.

Comment Spend a Billion to... (Score 2) 56

So Facebook will spend a billion to deliver what, exactly... a home internet speaker that will automatically post to Facebook pictures of my dinner, so I don't have to? Detect what TV shows I watch and give me automatic LIKEs for those? Listen to my phone calls and automatically "Friend" those people? Trick the Echo next to it into ordering random crap, so we get rid of it?

Comment Re:Intel doubled Mac sales (Score 1) 513

The 64-bit instruction set used in 64-bit x86 processors was originated by AMD. The ISA these days is a mix, since Intel designed most of the new instructions, SSE (AMD has a competing thing called 3D Now!), etc.

The machine architecture to run those instructions changes from processor family to processor family, and was certainly designed by Intel, when it's in an Intel chip. Both Intel and AMD use their own version of the technique first used in the NexGen's processors, the idea of converting x86 instructions on-the-fly into one or more RISC-like instructions. But just the idea (well, AMD bought NexGen and used some of their technology directly in the K6 series).

Comment Re:Intel doubled Mac sales (Score 1) 513

It's not really close to the same situation.

When Apple went PowerPC, they were going there for performance, to support the huge percentage of the media content creation market they had wound up with, back when PCs didn't support such things very well. Motorola wasn't competitive with Intel, in a big part because in 1996 Apple was the last standing 68K personal computer company and didn't have the market share to sustain that kind of development for Motorola/Freescale.

The idea with the AIM Alliance was to promote a standard PowerPC platform (PReP, I mean CHRP, no PPCP, ok, maybe CHRP... ) to rival the Intel/IBM Ad Hoc standard. That was not a bad idea.

The problem was that, immediately, other comapanies did this better than Apple. Power Computing won a big chunk of the market. My company at the time, PIOS AG, launched the first 300MHz Mac Clone available. And then when SJ came back, it was curtains for the gherkins... he was the original closed, appliance computer, and it had to be "mine, mine, all mine". Of course, SJ neglected one of the main points of AIM -- enough volume to keep hardware competitive with Intel. So in 1997, it was absolutely obvious that Apple would eventually leave PowerPC. The PPC970 was nice... for about two weeks. Intel pretty much invented the way all successful modern chip comapnies work, with multiple tweaks of each technology and three independent teams always working on the Next Big Thing. So there's a new thing every six months. That's how nVidia won on GPUs... doing the Intel thing.

But these days, Apple's scared off their high end media content creation people by phoning it in on the Mac Pro. A new major upgrade every five years, whether you need it or not. They have built market share mostly from iOS coattail people... like my sister Kathy. Maybe this report is nothing, but it makes perfect sense for Apple to move macOS closer to iOS. It saves on development efforts. It lets them push out more advanced ARM tech before it's possible to make that low enough power. It will win more coattail customers. The average desktop PC user today doesn't need a faster CPU than a decent ten-year-old PC, and Apple's ARM cores are already faster than that.

Not my next computer, but then again, the last Macintosh I'd even have considered using was the one I was the CHRP machine I was developing back then Jobs put the kebash on the whole thing. Apple doesn't build serious computers today, anyway.

Comment Re:Whoa (Score 1) 513

The real problem Adobe had wasn't Apple changing processors, it was Apple not selling enough computers. At one point Apple fell to about 1.5% of global PC shipments. Adobe did what every other successful company did -- it concentrated on supporting the platform with actual paying customers: Windows.

That prompted Apple to get more serious about their own in-house professional media content creation software. And that didn't help the rift between Apple and Adobe at all. Then there was Jobs, going in full attack mode about Adobe Flash... not that he was wrong about proprietary Flash vs. standard HTML5. And Adobe didn't fundamentally care, because Flash was just a means to the end of their selling Flash development tools. But a smack-down is a smack-down.

Today, the Mac is 10% of less of Apple's business. They don't want to kill it, but it's also a ton of work compared to iOS per unit sold. RIght now they have to have several different laptops at different performance levels, they have to have iMacs, they still have Mac Pros though they only seem to sell in the first year or two of their 5-year-or-so lifespan. As that market continues to shrink, Apple's going to contiune to lose interest unless it becomes, essentially, part of the iOS product lineup.

Comment Re:does Apple's A-series have the pci-e needed? (Score 1) 513

Most embedded application processors have at least one PCIe link... no idea about Apple's, specifically, but that's a standard everyday module on the Chinese Menu of ARM components. I don't know if Apple is using AMBA/AHB for high speed internals on today's SOCs, or something else, but it's available right now up to 1024-bits wide. I doubt they'd have a performance bottleneck for laptop/desktop things.

And they're not building a Xeon or i7, either... Apple's been slowly killing off their high-end users through years of high-end neglect. They could pick up more sales, and lower development costs, by pushing the Macintosh into more of a desktop/laptop iPad Pro kind of thing... still mouse & keyboard but more like what iOS users expect. Not that I'd buy one, but I'd never buy a Mac PC either.

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