Tracktion Software

birrbits · Post by **birrbits** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 5:24 am

egbert wrote:On the BeBox with dual 60 - 66 MHz PPC 601s, BeOS wowed the nerds at computer shows with demos of it running several video streams simultaneously. Imagine what it might have done on todays hardware ...

I have beos 5 running on a 2.7 GHz Celeron (p4 based)...its pretty crazy, thanks for the info

kenn michael · Post by **kenn michael** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 5:28 am

great posts egbert! thanks for all the historical info!

egbert · Post by **egbert** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 6:18 am

kenn michael wrote:great posts egbert! thanks for all the historical info!

An entertaining read on all this is The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman. The whole Pixar story is fascinating if you want to know how all that animation software came into being. Some salutary lessons in there - eg the fallout for the creative types when some got rich at the time of the IPO ... and others didn't.

Steve's star rose very high with the float of Pixar which made him a paper billionaire but Deutschman makes it clear that, while some of the 20 years of work that made Toy Story possible was done on Steve's dime, it was really nothing much to do with him and in fact he really botched the negotiations with Disney.

machinesworking · Post by **machinesworking** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 6:36 am

egbert wrote:Steve's star rose very high with the float of Pixar which made him a paper billionaire but Deutschman makes it clear that, while some of the 20 years of work that made Toy Story possible was done on Steve's dime, it was really nothing much to do with him and in fact he really botched the negotiations with Disney.

It's a constant in this world isn't it? that presidents and CEO's rarely actually contribute to the actual content of a company. Jobs is just good at figuring out what might be popular with the masses, and grafting his name to it. Same with Bill Gates, and every other supposed "key" player in almost every tech industry bosses chair.
It's like people who concentrate on actors and go see movies based on that, instead of what the plot of the movie is.

In some ways it pisses me off that the people who actually made XP and OSX these decent and stable OS's are ignored in favor of an egotistic figurehead...

egbert · Post by **egbert** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 7:00 am

machinesworking wrote:It's a constant in this world isn't it? that presidents and CEO's rarely actually contribute to the actual content of a company. Jobs is just good at figuring out what might be popular with the masses, and grafting his name to it.

Very true. Apparently the crew that were the brains of Pixar were mostly super smart PhDs with computer graphics backgrounds. Who apart from a few people with an interest in the biz knows their names?

These guys were a tight unit of mostly hippie types who worked in collaboration for a succession of patrons in different parts of the USA over twenty years. An eccentric millionaire had them working in some mansion at one stage IIRC. Later, they moved west and were based with Lucasfilm where the name Pixar was coined and then Jobs bought them for 10 mill.

The Pixar people were based in SF some distance from Next and Steve drove up and annoyed them from time to time but they basically pursued their own vision throughout. Their ideas really needed the hardware to catch up - eg early calculations of the cost of rendering a feature length animation for commercial release were around <cue Dr Evil voice> 1 billion dollars muahahaha!.

Rendering the same number of frames could probably done on a handful of dual dual opteron machines in a bedroom these days.

stefancrs · Post by **stefancrs** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 8:27 am

Sidenote: I've never seen an OS that is as nice to code for as BeOS. Their API kicks ass. It'll be interesting to see what happens with OpenBeOS and YellowTab.

egbert · Post by **egbert** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 12:54 pm

Santa comes to Steve's house early in 2006.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29096

APPLE CEO Steve Jobs star appears to be in the ascendant after a report said Walt Disney will buy Pixar.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Walt Disney is likely to acquire Pixar, and that will make Jobs the biggest individual shareholder in Disneyworld, and also make him even richer than he already is.

Steve JobsThe Pixar (tick: PIXR) share price stood at $57.26 when the markets closed yesterday, and is currently valued at not far short of $7 billion.

AD80 · Post by **AD80** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:59 pm

Word on the street is Rossetta apps arent performing as well as people thought they would. Not that it matters cuz Steve Jobs in invinsible now. He can sell ice to an eskimo.

machinesworking · Post by **machinesworking** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 3:02 am

AD80 wrote:Word on the street is Rossetta apps arent performing as well as people thought they would. Not that it matters cuz Steve Jobs in invinsible now. He can sell ice to an eskimo.

Well personally I wouldn't use Rossetta, and now that Live 5 is going to be updated in about a month, along with Logic, and Zebra 2...... only NI Komplete, and GURU are holding me back.
So yeah, I don't give a rats ass if Rossetta doesn't work that well, I'm about real universal binaries, and it seems the audio community is going at a good pace for my preference.

( and before anybody comments, yeah I know I'll have to wait on NI...

)

AD80 · Post by **AD80** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 6:22 pm

Heres the intro to the Macworld tests.

Macworld Lab’s tests do show that the new Intel-based iMac is faster than the iMac G5 when running native applications. However, we found that those improvements are generally much less than what Apple claims is a 2x improvement in speed.

Instead, our tests found the new 2.0GHz Core Duo iMac takes rougly 10 to 25 percent less time than the G5 iMac to perform the same native application tasks, albeit with some notable exceptions. (If you'd prefer, that makes the Core Duo iMac 1.1 to 1.3 times as fast.) And we also found that applications that aren’t yet Intel-native—which must run using Apple’s Rosetta code-translation technology—tend to run half as fast as the same applications running natively on the iMac G5.

stefancrs · Post by **stefancrs** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 6:42 pm

If rosetta can emulate a PPC with about 50% efficiency, it kicks arse.

AD80 · Post by **AD80** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 6:57 pm

I'm sure it does kick ass, but 50% efficiency is unnacceptable for anything but surfing the net, and possibly word processing. So basically you buy a $2500 lap top and wait god knows how long for all the devs to start porting stuff? And sometimes even get charged for the universal version ala Ableton?

I still cant see how those chips are doing so much more than inside the dull little PC boxes like the commercial said. They're probably not even doing as much as in the PPC Macs right now.

stefancrs · Post by **stefancrs** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 8:41 pm

50% is acceptable for _lots_ of applications, just as a 2GHz p4 is acceptable for lots of applications. (Compared to other x86 cpu's, with twice the perfomance). If anyone expect a PPC emulator running even above a 50% efficiency, they know quite little about emulating a whole different system. It took quite a while to get an Amiga 1200 emulator up to speed on systems _way_ more faster than twice as fast as the amiga.

And, uhm, the x86 CPU's didn't do _anything_ inside PPC Macs...

But, fwiw, I don't expect the new Macs to give you a better bang for the buck than an ordinary well built x86 system.

polaris20 · Post by **polaris20** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 9:54 pm

stefancrs wrote:
But, fwiw, I don't expect the new Macs to give you a better bang for the buck than an ordinary well built x86 system.

Better bang for the buck than a well build PC? No. Better bang for the buck than a PPC Mac? Hell yeah. Once the transition is done, that is.

11011011 · Post by **11011011** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 11:13 pm

I wouldn't look forward to running it under rosetta, so curious if 2.1 for OSX has Intel-native binary?

Tracktion Software

KVR Audio

New x86-based Macs are out!