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I’d kill to see Project Star Trek but well never see that.

For those who don’t know it was Apple’s port to Intel before they decided that PPC was the way forward after m68k.


I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

There are a few copies of late shell builds floating around in private collections that have release predicated on the end of someone's legal liability (shall we euphemistically say). I don't know about complete system images, though.

And those guys are all getting up there in years.


Oh really? I had assumed it lost long long ago. Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways) I just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly.

> Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways)…

For anyone who might not know, parts of it did forcefully and successfully escape containment. Core Mac Toolbox APIs originally created for Star Trek (like the portable C implementation of QuickDraw 2D) were installed on hundreds of millions of PCs as QTML, which QuickTime for Windows was built on, which was in turn a requirement for iTunes for Windows. QTML on Rhapsody was also the PoC for Carbon for Mac OS X, with ClarisWorks as the guinea pig.

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... (see page 28)


Right. I know they used the BIOS rewrite and way of keeping it in memory to base the PPC code on to get a jumpstart because it was already done and useful.

But it was never released as an x86 version, not even to developers. And by the time OS X went to Intel they were on a totally different codebase so I expect little if any code survived that.


> Ganatra: I-- this-- it's tough, because I don't specifically remember-- it's not like a presidential assassination or 9/11 where, "Where were you the day that Copland was cancelled?

lmfao


It would be sort of interesting, but would it be a lot different from the CHRP version?

Edit: Yes, and I was never aware of Novell's part in all of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project#Architecture


> Since it never got past internal demo

it was a joint venture with novell and caldera employees had exposure to the resources, a year or so after the project fell apart.

> just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly

a lot more people had exposure to it than you'd think. it sounds very interesting to us, but honestly, it was probably pretty obvious to everyone involved that it was a bad idea unless apple was serious about dropping ppc


It wasn’t about dropping PPC. It was a project that was killed because they moved to PPC instead of Intel.

apple began evaluating ppc in 1991 and it was the stronger choice in the org, from what i've heard. so yes, it was about dropping ppc

Swift is not heavily tied to the Apple ecosystem anymore, and it’s getting better every year.

However that perception tends to mean it’s only heavily used there.


Foundation and SwiftUI definitely are, which makes porting Swift applications very difficult.

Home charging us a reasonably thick cable. It’s not bad by any stretch but it’s more than an appliance cord.

Plus you just got home. You probably want to go inside and may be carrying packages or such, which you might have to juggle or put down to get the cable and plug in.

When it’s time to leave you have to unplug and then store the cable, leave it on the floor (trip hazard for others), or have installed an overhead cable system.

With wireless it’s all gone. Pull into you’re garage? You’re done. You were doing that anyway, so it’s no different. Ready to leave? Just back out. Again, same thing. Nothing extra.

Yeah it’s convenience. But it’s not a small win, it’s big. And it’s every time you use your car. Twice.

Your car can always charge. It can always precondition. You used to have to go to gas stations, now you don’t even have to plug in. It’s fully automatic and taken care of for you.

“You don’t need a remote. You can just get up to change the volume”. How well did that argument go over? Every TV has remotes. Buttons are hidden and effectively dead.


Let’s waste precious energy to save 30 seconds twice a day. A remote control is apples to oranges here.

Time is more precious then energy for a great number of people. Which includes a lot of Porsche drivers I'm guessing.

Maybe your remotes run on fairy dust but the rest of ours run on alkaline batteries.

The losses from this charger are nearly the same as the losses from a wired charger.


It’s a 10% loss in addition to the normal losses

That's not what's written in the article.

The article is very much not clear if that 90% is talking about round trip or just the efficiency of the wireless charging in addition to the usual charging losses.

Applying a little common sense with experiences of other wireless chargers, its most likely just the losses of the wireless charging solution.


The convenience factor is nice because most people (like me) don't bother to actually charge the EV every night.

Just laziness / not necessary for my commute. However, my understanding is that keeping the battery around 80% is better for lifespan. So, the convenience will actually result in longer lasting batteries?


thanks Claude

AI;DR


Well put, they had a delicate line.

Those departments buy their products. If they took that angle publicly I bet many departments would suddenly been much less interested in buying/renewing. Accountability seems to be super unpopular (which says A LOT) with their customers.


I get it, but I also just don't understand why they couldn't effectively explain to the police that they were a for-profit company. The police definitely understand that!

Like, when the police were saying "we can't turn on body cameras all the time because it might violate victims rights" the correct response from axon was "we also happen to sell a very expensive victim redaction software on a separate SKU, until you buy that probably just want to let your officers use discretion wink-nod."

(I am maybe unfairly assuming here that their actual intent was to make money rather than protect the public from police abuses. I'd love to hear from folks at Axon if that isn't true!)


They could have just talked out of both sides of their mouths. Tell the public it’s to curb abuse, tell the police in private “we all know what it’s really for” wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

Maybe offer up a few token cases where they caught abuse and the cop got in trouble or something changed as proof.

Nope. You’re right, they ran right into that wall.


I’ve been following kernel development for something like three years using LWN and other sources.

I can’t remember anyone earning the level of hostile treatment he did and getting kicked out.

I don’t see how it would ever happen.


> I can’t remember anyone earning the level of hostile treatment he did and getting kicked out.

You don't seem to be following it very closely, as apparently you failed to come across the history of abuse and hostile behavior of bcachefs's maintainer.


So even if this does release pressure with no negative side effects anywhere it isn’t actually useful for preventing “the big one”.

They’ve been through this a few times before, and they absolutely know how important it is.

If they had tried to move to Apple Silicon and said “but none of your old software will work“ it would’ve been dead in the water. Look at how well the early Windows on ARM efforts went, although they were also hamstrung by hardware.


Yeah, I thought that was interesting. Knowing Apple they must’ve profiled a ton of code and decided the hit from not “fixing“ that wasn’t worth enough.

The M chips were already so much faster then the Intel chips Apple was using before (except on Mac Pro maybe) that it was probably still a net win.


> If they’re not selling tokens (and why would I want them to)

That’s one of the two things that has stood out most to me. Siri AI answers my questions. And that’s it. She stops.

Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all constantly try and get you to answer follow-up questions. Because if you do that, you’ll use up more tokens and get more “addicted“ and end up buying a plan.

Apple doesn’t have one. I guess iCloud, but let’s face it, they already pushed that a ton anyway. They’re not trying to get you to use it for the sake of use. It’s not trying to be your friend.

And just like David Pogue says, it doesn’t lie. I just asked it an incredibly stupid question. Can you get pregnant from a picture?

“While I'm not a doctor, no, you cannot get pregnant from looking at a picture of someone. Pregnancy requires physical contact and the transfer of sperm to an egg. For accurate information regarding reproduction, consult a healthcare professional.”

Look at that! It immediately says it’s not a doctor. It gives a good answer, and then it says you need to seek out real advice to be sure things are accurate. Of the summer, I also got responses that ended with something along the lines of “I am an AI, please check information for accuracy.”

I’ve gotten incorrect answers, but they come with disclaimers and it doesn’t act like some omnipotent god that is desperate to be your friend.


You realize this isn’t an Apple marketing piece, it’s an extremely well known tech reviewer who used to work for the NYT and was one of the two(?) who was allowed to test the iPhone before its release.

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