4 ms·

>You seem awfully confident about (1) Take a Macintosh, open it. Inspect using the novel technique of "looking". Not to be glib, but when Apple decided to dit

>You seem awfully confident about (1) Take a Macintosh, open it. Inspect using the novel technique of "looking". Not to be glib, but when Apple decided to ditch other platforms for Intel-styled chips, they bought into the entire R&D work of their principle competitors. Back in the day with the 680x0 Macs and the PowerPC Macs, even things like RAM and video-cards weren't interchangeable between the platforms (due to endian-issues and timing issues etc.). The early 3d cards were a prime example of having to buy Apple branded hardware (or co-developed in partnership) for Apple branded computers. So for example, if you wanted to upgrade your Mac with a better video card, you couldn't run over and buy the $199 Nvidia card that 90% of the market could buy. You had to buy the "Made for Macintosh" Nvidia card at the 20% markup. What Apple bought when going Intel was expertise in a vast marketplace of hardware manufacturers and R&D departments, doing Apple's work effectively for them. So what's in an Apple branded case? Probably some x-ATX board, the standard combination of chipset chips from whoever Apple could purchase from cheapest, a perfectly stock Intel chip and perfectly stock memory. With PCI-E ports with perfectly stock video cards (or video on the mobo, like value PC builders go with). If you are careful you might notice Apple uses a different boot system that's equivalent to the traditional BIOS (and is the direction some PC systems have already gone as well). What Apple also bought when adopting an open architecture was that unfortunately, it makes locking it down really really hard. They came to the same party as everybody else, but they don't like the music. Too bad. If Apple wants to sell a closed architecture, then that's what they should sell. But they decided to adopt an architecture that's designed not to be locked down, then are trying to lock it down after the fact.

tptacek 17y ago
It just took you over 300 words to say the same thing you said one comment earlier. I think you know less about how platform technology works than you think you do, and you'd benefit from opening your mind a bit. Again: Dell could probably lock code down to Dell boxes, if they had anything worth locking down.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Well, you didn't seem to understand it when I said it >shorter<. So tptacek, enlighten us, what's the principle hardware differences between a run-of-the-mill desktop Mac and a run-of-the-mill desktop dell? Protip: if you use the acronym "DRM" in your response you loose because you obviously don't understand what "DRM" means.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    So, I just took the 7 minutes required to give a casual read to every comment you've posted here, and here's what I've come up with: * I have no idea what your technical expertise is, because you're anonymous, haven't filled out your profile, and have never posted a technical comment here. You have "a lead developer" and an ex CTO that screwed your company, so I assume you (a) didn't found that company and (b) don't lead a dev team. Once you typed the letters C++. * You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg. * Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN. I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are. I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever. I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here.
    - elblanco 17y ago
      > I have no idea what your technical expertise is...blah blah blah Correct, correct and correct. I did a fair amount of hacking about as a computational linguist in my younger years. I haven't run into many others who have. So I'd suspect that we'd talk past each other in any technical conversation. Only one correction, I co-lead my company's dev team, usually providing front-end design work, domain expertise and providing pithy input on algorithmic analysis for some of the more problematic issues that regular coding won't teach. Like, "should I recursively crawl an unweighted digraph to find up-to n-length paths between disjoint and incomplete sets of nodes?" or "how should I deal with a sparse matrix when computing the steady state values of an Eigenvector on a graph with an uncertain morphology?" or my recent fav "given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?" > You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg. I really really dislike Apple's pricing scheme and worse yet Apple fanboys who can inject even the most insane irrationality into any topic that even mentions fruit. For example, our current "discussion" centers around pretty basic business decisions, for which your reply is first disagreement, then agreement but without agreeing with my principle point just to be contrary, while simultaneously insulting me all because I said something to the effect of "Apple can't make the margins work". I think it's the word can't associated with Apple that got you riled up -- I dunno. Specific responses: a) I have said and agreed with some things Pro-Apple where I see it. Reread my posts in detail. If you want some more, Apple makes a reasonably good OS, writes reasonably good software. It's nothing particularly special, but it's at least modern and up-to-date. b) I do irrationally dislike the platform, you'll get no argument from me. c) I used 'em off and on since at least the late 80's. But not terribly hardcore or for any extended length of time. My pretty much unused MacBook Pro goes down in personal history as one of the worst wastes of money I've ever managed to throw away. d) And then I linked to one of the highest rated input devices on NewEgg and it was still 50% below the cost of the comparable Apple offering. And still nobody could provide any rational statement why Apple's kb/mouse combo was worth $100 other than vague hand waving about being more "productive" or "feeling better about yourself" or some other touchy-feely nonsense. Which is a small scale exemplar of the irrationality that pervades the entire platform from top to bottom...correction, at the bottom. What Apple is doing at the top is perfectly rational from a business perspective. They've managed to finally crack the nut on two things: 1) How to sell absolutely vanilla PC hardware at high margins - something no other maker does effectively, it's the holy grail of the modern computer business. 2) How to get people to use their feelings in a consumer purchase rather than their brains. So people will shell out 20-50% above cost to buy said vanilla PC hardware because it runs that one killer app you can't get on a Windows computer, Steve Jobs' love. >Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN. Good. When the entire Apple ecosystem stops being majority filled with pretentious snobbish self-absorbed assholes too in touch with their feelings to be healthy, I'll complain about something else and have only good things to say about the platform. >I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are. To be honest, I haven't kept up with the latest ISA developments from Intel (and I guess AMD since they kinda diverged a bit for a while there into mutually incompatible register and vector unit ops - but I guess they've kissed and made-up). But last time I checked there's a CPUID opcode (0FA2h with appropriate values in EAX for desired returns to check in EBX, ECX, etc.) in the x86 ISA that Apple is probably using to lock out Atom chips. Hackintoshers would have to find where Apple calls CPUID and fill the registers with something else that would pass Apple's processor check, or just force a positive reponse - probably 3 or 4 other approaches or whatever. In other words, probably a 2 hour hack and patch. Maybe they're doing something more sophisticated in their check, but I doubt Apple went through the effort of counting clock cycles on some standard discriminator test-set of opcodes just to determine processor type so they could salt the earth for Hackintoshers. Dunno, don't care. Point is Apple chose to expend resources building this kind of processor check into their OS for the explicit purpose of preventing specifically Hackintoshers that use Atom powered netbooks. Hackintoshers on other x86 ISA hardware are unaffected. It's kind-of mean spirited in my book. It's also another demonstration that Apple's hardware is perfectly vanilla Intel platform hardware. I mean, it's not my field. But I can buy a MacBook Pro today and install Windows on it. I suspect the differences between the MacBook Pro and an Atom Netbook are about as great as the MacBook Pro and the Wintel desktop sitting next to me. So I'm not pointing at a particularly small set of hardware and calling it "vanilla". But Apple has to keep their software a bit flexible through mid-cycle revs of their hardware (when was the last time they stealth swapped out motherboards for ones from a cheaper manufacturer or changed video card chipset vendors? The point is that Apple tries really hard to make that kind of thing not matter). >I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever. We are probably in violent agreement regarding the technical aspects of what Apple is doing re: stopping Atom based users of their software -- I'll even defer to your greater expertise in the field. And I suspect we're in agreement over why Apple is doing it. What I don't understand is why you've felt the need to pointlessly disagree with me and then insult me and how I've chosen to make my responses. This isn't Twitter last I saw. If my posts are tl;dr for you, then don't bother. Best yet, is that you've so far just disagreed with me for no particular reason other than to disagree with me. You've provided no counter-argument, no factual statement, no business reasoning, nothing except disparaging remarks about conciseness. >I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here. Good. Don't talk to me. Other than general statements of adolescent contrarianism I'm attempting to use as a foil against which to provide more overly verbose commentary, you haven't said anything of any particular value in this thread before this post re:using the ISA to check processors. And now I know you're openly vindictive so I don't see this going in a particularly positive direction. Oh, and once again, no response to a simple question (diff between Apple branded hardware and stock PC stuff). Just contrarianism.

tptacek 17y ago

It just took you over 300 words to say the same thing you said one comment earlier. I think you know less about how platform technology works than you think you do, and you'd benefit from opening your mind a bit. Again: Dell could probably lock code down to Dell boxes, if they had anything worth locking down.

elblanco 17y ago
Well, you didn't seem to understand it when I said it >shorter<. So tptacek, enlighten us, what's the principle hardware differences between a run-of-the-mill desktop Mac and a run-of-the-mill desktop dell? Protip: if you use the acronym "DRM" in your response you loose because you obviously don't understand what "DRM" means.
- tptacek 17y ago
  So, I just took the 7 minutes required to give a casual read to every comment you've posted here, and here's what I've come up with: * I have no idea what your technical expertise is, because you're anonymous, haven't filled out your profile, and have never posted a technical comment here. You have "a lead developer" and an ex CTO that screwed your company, so I assume you (a) didn't found that company and (b) don't lead a dev team. Once you typed the letters C++. * You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg. * Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN. I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are. I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever. I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    > I have no idea what your technical expertise is...blah blah blah Correct, correct and correct. I did a fair amount of hacking about as a computational linguist in my younger years. I haven't run into many others who have. So I'd suspect that we'd talk past each other in any technical conversation. Only one correction, I co-lead my company's dev team, usually providing front-end design work, domain expertise and providing pithy input on algorithmic analysis for some of the more problematic issues that regular coding won't teach. Like, "should I recursively crawl an unweighted digraph to find up-to n-length paths between disjoint and incomplete sets of nodes?" or "how should I deal with a sparse matrix when computing the steady state values of an Eigenvector on a graph with an uncertain morphology?" or my recent fav "given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?" > You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg. I really really dislike Apple's pricing scheme and worse yet Apple fanboys who can inject even the most insane irrationality into any topic that even mentions fruit. For example, our current "discussion" centers around pretty basic business decisions, for which your reply is first disagreement, then agreement but without agreeing with my principle point just to be contrary, while simultaneously insulting me all because I said something to the effect of "Apple can't make the margins work". I think it's the word can't associated with Apple that got you riled up -- I dunno. Specific responses: a) I have said and agreed with some things Pro-Apple where I see it. Reread my posts in detail. If you want some more, Apple makes a reasonably good OS, writes reasonably good software. It's nothing particularly special, but it's at least modern and up-to-date. b) I do irrationally dislike the platform, you'll get no argument from me. c) I used 'em off and on since at least the late 80's. But not terribly hardcore or for any extended length of time. My pretty much unused MacBook Pro goes down in personal history as one of the worst wastes of money I've ever managed to throw away. d) And then I linked to one of the highest rated input devices on NewEgg and it was still 50% below the cost of the comparable Apple offering. And still nobody could provide any rational statement why Apple's kb/mouse combo was worth $100 other than vague hand waving about being more "productive" or "feeling better about yourself" or some other touchy-feely nonsense. Which is a small scale exemplar of the irrationality that pervades the entire platform from top to bottom...correction, at the bottom. What Apple is doing at the top is perfectly rational from a business perspective. They've managed to finally crack the nut on two things: 1) How to sell absolutely vanilla PC hardware at high margins - something no other maker does effectively, it's the holy grail of the modern computer business. 2) How to get people to use their feelings in a consumer purchase rather than their brains. So people will shell out 20-50% above cost to buy said vanilla PC hardware because it runs that one killer app you can't get on a Windows computer, Steve Jobs' love. >Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN. Good. When the entire Apple ecosystem stops being majority filled with pretentious snobbish self-absorbed assholes too in touch with their feelings to be healthy, I'll complain about something else and have only good things to say about the platform. >I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are. To be honest, I haven't kept up with the latest ISA developments from Intel (and I guess AMD since they kinda diverged a bit for a while there into mutually incompatible register and vector unit ops - but I guess they've kissed and made-up). But last time I checked there's a CPUID opcode (0FA2h with appropriate values in EAX for desired returns to check in EBX, ECX, etc.) in the x86 ISA that Apple is probably using to lock out Atom chips. Hackintoshers would have to find where Apple calls CPUID and fill the registers with something else that would pass Apple's processor check, or just force a positive reponse - probably 3 or 4 other approaches or whatever. In other words, probably a 2 hour hack and patch. Maybe they're doing something more sophisticated in their check, but I doubt Apple went through the effort of counting clock cycles on some standard discriminator test-set of opcodes just to determine processor type so they could salt the earth for Hackintoshers. Dunno, don't care. Point is Apple chose to expend resources building this kind of processor check into their OS for the explicit purpose of preventing specifically Hackintoshers that use Atom powered netbooks. Hackintoshers on other x86 ISA hardware are unaffected. It's kind-of mean spirited in my book. It's also another demonstration that Apple's hardware is perfectly vanilla Intel platform hardware. I mean, it's not my field. But I can buy a MacBook Pro today and install Windows on it. I suspect the differences between the MacBook Pro and an Atom Netbook are about as great as the MacBook Pro and the Wintel desktop sitting next to me. So I'm not pointing at a particularly small set of hardware and calling it "vanilla". But Apple has to keep their software a bit flexible through mid-cycle revs of their hardware (when was the last time they stealth swapped out motherboards for ones from a cheaper manufacturer or changed video card chipset vendors? The point is that Apple tries really hard to make that kind of thing not matter). >I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever. We are probably in violent agreement regarding the technical aspects of what Apple is doing re: stopping Atom based users of their software -- I'll even defer to your greater expertise in the field. And I suspect we're in agreement over why Apple is doing it. What I don't understand is why you've felt the need to pointlessly disagree with me and then insult me and how I've chosen to make my responses. This isn't Twitter last I saw. If my posts are tl;dr for you, then don't bother. Best yet, is that you've so far just disagreed with me for no particular reason other than to disagree with me. You've provided no counter-argument, no factual statement, no business reasoning, nothing except disparaging remarks about conciseness. >I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here. Good. Don't talk to me. Other than general statements of adolescent contrarianism I'm attempting to use as a foil against which to provide more overly verbose commentary, you haven't said anything of any particular value in this thread before this post re:using the ISA to check processors. And now I know you're openly vindictive so I don't see this going in a particularly positive direction. Oh, and once again, no response to a simple question (diff between Apple branded hardware and stock PC stuff). Just contrarianism.