Angus Thinks

Author: AngusThinks

  • No Osborne Effect?

    The Register has a new article up about the Osborne effect, a supposed problem that means that if you excessively pre-announce products then nobody buys the stuff that you’re selling right now. The article suggests that the whole idea is rubbish and that osborne was actually suffering from a totally different problem, Managment failure. Supposedly an executive found some old parts and spent a vast amount of money trying to put them into products, in the process wasting far more than the value of parts.

    Yet again Management failure causes a company to fail.

    [Article]

  • SQLEditor built for Mac On Intel

    SQLEditor has now been built for Mac OS X/Intel as well as Mac OS X/ppc. I was able to download the Xcode 2.1 release last night and worked on the port this morning. SQLEditor at the moment still has bits of Java as well as Objective C so I wasn’t entirely confident of success, but I converted the build target to the xcode native type and moved the java code into a separate target. Then I ran the build process and after a bit of fiddling I was able to produce what appears to be a working fat binary:

    file SQLEditor
    SQLEditor: Mach-O fat file with 2 architectures
    SQLEditor (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
    SQLEditor (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

    The new version of the application seems to run as well as the old on PPC, although it is currently set up to use the 10.4 sdk as opposed to the 10.2.8 sdk of release SQLEditor versions. (Although SQLEditor is not officially supported on less than 10.3)

    If I had a Mac On Intel machine to test it on I would be very curious to find out what happens. 🙂

    But as far as I can see, and with the assumption that the ported version will not have unexpected bugs, the process is simple.

    But will that assumption will hold? I have absolutely no idea.

  • Mac OS X Intel

    It has been officially announced that the Mac platform will be moving to Intel processors.

    I’m still thinking about what this means for MalcolmHardie Software and SQLEditor and I have been reading about the transition to find out more.

    Some useful points culled from publicly available documention:

    • Mac OS X on Intel doesn’t use Open Firmware (at least not currently). Does this mean that it uses a conventional BIOS or something entirely different?
    • Rosetta (the translation environment) does not run Applications built for Mac OS 8 or 9. Does this mean that the Classic environment will run them, or are these applications dead?
    • Rosetta doesn’t handle code written specifically for AltiVec
    • Rosetta must run the whole application, you apparently can’t mix some bits of native code and other bits of emulated code, even with plugins. (I suspect inter-application communication might work here though)

  • Apples & Intel?

    Maybe it’s going to be hardware based dynamic recompilation?

    Or some kind of microcode based emulator?

    Modern microprocessors are usually doing conversion of the assembly anyway, so why not from one instruction set to another.

    I guess we’ll all know in a few hours …

  • Next generation console problem

    Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles.

    This rather alarmist statement came out of a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference. One of the panelists, Chris Hecker, suggested that the next generation consoles such as the XBox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 may be better at doing pretty graphics than current hardware but be worse at gameplay and AI code.

    Why? The reasoning is that the graphics code is predictable, straight line code and the processors on the new systems are good at in order code execution. The AI code on the other hand is quite random which doesn’t suit the new processors at all. Currently out-of-order execution is used to speed things up, but the new chips have less capability in this area, so performance on this type of code is worse. This problem was, to some extent, predictable but it seems that the level of performance is much lower than expected with the development kits.

    My guess is that the Sony hardware may prove worse at this than the Microsoft hardware, simply because Microsoft is running something closer to a standard PC on the XBox added to the fact that the PowerPC chip range has been fairly solid in terms of performance so far. The Sony cell processors are completely new, so this remains something of an unknown quantity.

    Since the hardware hasn’t been released yet, this might be less of a problem than is anticipated, but given that this new information comes from people with direct experience of the hardware it seems unlikly to be wrong.

    However I’m no expert in this area so I think it’s going to have to be a case of wait and see.

    [Via Alice at Wonderland: Burn the house down (Link)] via [A Gamer’s Manifesto]

  • Key labels or no key labels?

    I’ve been slightly concerned recently that the key labels are rubbing off the keyboard of my iBook.

    But then I found this. A keyboard with no key labeling at all. 104 entirely black keys, no labels.

    Interestingly it promises to offer faster speeds for the experienced typist and has differently weighted keys for different finger strengths. It sounds really interesting, especially as it promises compatibility with Linux and Mac OS X. (USB presumably)

  • Odd Thoughts about modern books

    I was reading a review on Amazon.com for a book (more on Amazon failings in some later post), when I came across two lines that perfectly describe a large number of the second rate novels being published:

    “Recent Plot Chunk of On-Going Fantasy Story #62” and “Loud Explosion Clumsy Info Dump Space Adventure #23”

    The unfortunate thing really is how many books that I’ve read seem to fall into one of these two categories. Yet more are sitting on the shelves, virtual or otherwise, awaiting the unwary reader.

    The modern publishing industry, at least in the SF category, seems to delight in offering enormously length series of books, often without any end in sight. The Wheel of Time series seems to offer up an extremely large and very heavy new volume each each year. Which may be great if the series is worthwhile, but is it? I don’t know. I’ve decided not to consider reading it until the last book is published in case the author gets hit by a car or decides to stop writing it (as has happened to one series that I really liked).

    I have no idea whether the wheel of Time series is good or bad, I suspect that it probably better than average, because people continue to buy the books. But perhaps the publishing industry should move towards new ideas instead of ever lengthening series?

    However despite that, there are several excellent series on my bookshelf that I would be very pleased to see more of, so perhaps it depends on the readers.

  • Howl’s Moving Castle

    The trailer for Howl’s Moving Castle has appeared on the Apple trailers site. It looks, as ever for Studio Ghibli, most remarkable.

  • New Worlds Bookstore closed

    I just read that New Worlds bookstore in London is closing. This is really sad news because I often visited it when I lived in Cambridge. It had a quite amazing collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, especially US titles. But apparently the building is being demolished and the new premises aren’t large enough to take both it and the more profitable Murder One crime store as well.
    Originally Murder One was on the ground floor and New Worlds was in the basement, now only Murder One will survive. It seems unfortunately appropriate that a Crime book store would survive.

  • I should really be working, not blogging …

    I should really be working, not blogging today. (Since today is Monday).