Apple luvs P.A. Semi

While there are certainly strategic considerations involved in Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi, for Apple they would never quite amount to a sufficient reason to go ahead with the deal without being combined with a more intangible factor, which might be described as compatibility or affinity.

To put it simply, Apple must see a lot to like in P.A. Semi, and for its part, P.A. Semi found Apple's overture welcome.

This wouldn't be so much about specific technologies as about corporate culture and the sheer competence of the people who make up the company, and whether those people anticipate becoming engaged or even enchanted with what they'll be doing following the acquisition.

So take all speculation based in strategic theories with a grain of salt, and join me in relishing the moment with a twinkle of delight.

time to loosen Windows-dependence

According to Roughly Drafted, IBM has begun to take a serious look at Mac OS X for their own internal use.

This is arguably more meaningful than it would be if the company in question were, for example, General Motors, since IBM has more than a little reason not to love Apple, given Apple's abandonment of their PowerPC processor line.

It serves as yet another signal that Windows' hegemony is nearing its end, and that all are well advised to avoid further entrenching their dependence upon Windows and Windows-related proprietary technologies.

Follow this link for a detailed synopsis of the IBM initiative.

Microsoft's money pit

Rumor has it that Microsoft is moving in the direction of establishing a retail chain of its own.

Without a massive clue infusion, they're about as likely to succeed at this as Gateway did.

posted without comment (for now)

Global Warming - Doomsday Called Off (first of five segments)

The source of this series is CBC Newsworld.

21 years living with ‘the knowledge’

As described in detail elsewhere, in January, 1987 I witnessed a pair of glowing red spheres at relatively close range, as they crossed the sky of southern California, west of El Centro. They overtook me from behind, passed directly overhead, and then continued on in front of me for several minutes before I lost sight of them in the distance. I was not abducted, nor did I suffer any ill effects, except for lingering anxiety and fatigue.

Did this event change my life? Yes and no. Except for the fact that I determined, the following day, to pay a visit to the area where I'd grown up and a few of the people I'd known in my youth, there was no immediate change that you could point to. I returned to the same community where I'd been living and to the same job I'd left a short time earlier. But one thing was plainly different; I no longer had the luxury of scoffing at those who claimed Earth was being visited by extraterrestrials.

Many years later I happened across the web address of the National UFO Reporting Center, and saved it, only later making use of it to file a report. This weekend I discovered the existence of the Mutual UFO Network, and again filed a report (getting a few details mixed up on the first attempt).

Looking further into the various organizations, I've arrived at the opinion that MUFON is probably the most credible of them, that is if you like your UFO accounts unmixed with talk of advanced technologies (which, if developed, could render efforts to develop renewable sources of energy unnecessary), grandiose conspiracy theories, and cosmic consciousness - not that there aren't conspiracies or that there's anything wrong with cosmic consciousness.

If you aren't put off by the tangential connections mentioned above, then you might also find Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and The Disclosure Project worth your time. Both of these are headed by Dr. Steven M. Greer and inevitably strongly reflect his own belief system and concerns. Even if you find his forays into such subjects distracting, Dr. Greer's credibility is impeccable as compared, for instance, with Tom Cruise.

On the other hand, if you're a storm chaser at heart, you'll want to go straight to the latest reports page which lists the 20 most recent sightings reported to MUFON. Don't forget to bring your video camera! Be warned, some of them are bogus, and some relate to events that happened months or years prior to being reported, but there's enough left to keep you very busy.

old myths die hard

When Auto Warehousing Co. announced, last July, that they would be moving quickly to replace Windows PCs with Macs, both employees and customers balked, thinking Macs would be more expensive and that the increased expense would either constrain payroll and benefits or result in higher costs for services, and their bankers wanted assurance that it made good business sense.

Caught off guard by this upwelling of resistance, AWC pushed back the schedule on the conversion project and made use of the time to build support for it, by detailing their thoroughly practical fiscal reasons for going through with it. They estimated that, over three years, Windows licensing would cost them $1.82 Million, whereas the total cost of switching to Macs would be only $335,000.

Even so, it wasn't easy. Dale Frantz, AWC's CIO, had this to say: "We knew we were going down an entirely new road, but we didn't anticipate the huge emotional response that we got back. People are passionate on both sides of the aisle. There's a lot of talk about the cult of Macs, but there's just as strongly a cult of Microsoft. It's just not as widely publicized."

There were also some technical issues, and Apple provided assitance with some of these. It helps that AWC is a large enough company to have the talent to handle most such issues in-house, including the rewriting of a custom, mission critical application in Java.

the slippery slope: armed, autonomous robots

University of Sheffield Professor Noel Sharkey was recently among those presenting at a conference called The Ethics of Autonomous Military Systems, organized by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.

While the warnings raised by Professor Sharkey earned him a lampooning in Engadget, in my opinion he's the one talking sense and those making fun of him are fools.

His speech at the RUSI conference appears not to be publicly available, but he addressed the same concerns in a commentary published last August in The Guardian.

I am a fan of robotics in general, but autonomous machinery is a very powerful technology, and like all powerful technologies it needs to be handled with care.

synchronicity strikes again

By strange coincidence, my previous post here fell on the very same day that Microsoft chose to issue another in a series of assurances that they will publish the APIs their own application software (Office) makes use of.

While it's true that if they follow through on this promise it will enable third-party software vendors to develop programs which work better and are more competitive with Microsoft's own products, it will also enable developers of Windows emulation environments (Wine and CrossOver) to remove the remaining barriers to running Windows applications without Windows.

Frankly, this is probably the greater concern for Microsoft, especially given that Vista has so far failed to supplant XP as "the standard". The existence of emulators that work every bit as well as Windows itself could further rigidify that standard, wrenching it from Microsoft's hands much as Microsoft wrested it away from IBM many years ago.

reason #51: open source software

Far more is known, more widely, outside Apple, about how Mac OS X works than is know outside Microsoft about how Windows works, and this is even more true of Vista than it was of XP.

Apple not only participates in and contributes to a broad range of open source projects, but it also sponsors a few of its own.

The prime example of the latter is Darwin - the kernel (xnu) and BSD Unix component of Mac OS X, freely available as source code. (Microsoft could do far worse than to base Windows 7 on Darwin, and doing so would be perfectly legal so long as they complied with the license, which requires publishing changes to the code.)

That's just where it starts. Safari's rendering core, roughly analogous to Gecko, is available as WebKit, and other Apple sponsored open source projects include a streaming server, and an implementation of Zeroconf, which allows computers to find resources across a network, as well as several others of more interest to programmers than to end users.

Even Apple's proprietary code is exceptionally well documented, making it easy to incorporate their public APIs into third-party software, and their private APIs have a way of transforming into public APIs, once they've evolved to the point of being stable.

This all makes for a thriving ecosystem, one which is about to grow dramatically with the release of the iPhone SDK, if not this month then next.

Windows geek throws the switch

Chris Pirillo has made it official, for the purpose of general computer use he's made the switch to Mac OS X.