apple pro apps and mac+intel

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it’s been some time since the introduction of the first intel based mac systems started shipping. first it was the imac, next came the mac mini, and starting to trickle into the market is the macbook pro. oddly, the only universal versions of apple software beyond the operating system, was ilife and iwork. now, almost three months after the mac+intel adventure, general purpose applications like final cut studio, aperture, and logic are scheduled to arrive on the apple scene.

from reports, the rosetta technology is effective in translating the powerPC code into intel core duo speak, but the performance has not been up to snuff with native algorithyms. of course, safari, mail, ichat AV, itunes, and ical work great, and the expectations of final cut studio and announced features of aperture 1.1 on intel will live up the the partnership apple and intel made last june 2005. we all want the transition from G5 RISC to core dou X86 heritage.

the next generation of chips, based on the intel core microarchitecture look even better, as they will integrate rich x64 architecture, industry leading performance per watt specificiations, and bring the intel processors on par with AMD opteron and athlon processors. intel might have been a little late to the 64-bit party, but with the juggernaught of resources and engineering gusto, late 2006 will be the time apple+intel shines.

universal binary woes

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as apple transitions from freescale and IBM powerPC processors to intel core duo processors, mac OS X developers must deliver universal binary versions of their applications, which allow native processor performance on both the powerPC and intel platforms. it all seems fine, except once you consider that if you have legacy powerPC version of an application, it becomes completely obsolete once the developer moved to the hybrid universal version.

apple computer has announced a crossgrade program for their pro apps including, final cut studio, logic, and aperture. when these application ship, if you do no fork over the crossgrade fee, your application version will be retired. developers will not continue to support three customers: powerPC only, intel only, universal. that’s too much work to test, so you’ll need the universal version to work properly. most likely major applications will move to the universal code on the next major revision to avoid these upgrade issues. hopefully at NAB 2006, apple will revise all their applications to the next version to make moot the move to universal unnecessary for powerPC workflows.

adobe revises video production studio

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for the mac user, any announcement from adobe use to receive the same cheers and shouts that an apple product release would receive. that was before apple began releasing products built from the ground up for the mac. apple has more mac developers than anyone on the planet, trying to make the mac the most relevant platform for media production and creation. because apple does not worry about operating peculiarities (worrying about apple quartz extreme as compared to microsoft directX technology), they can customize their applications to sing on mac, instead of concern themselves about a dueling operating system strategy.

when it comes to media development, the mac is the way to go with final cut pro, motion, DVD studio pro, shake, logic pro, soundtrack pro, and aperture. adobe has after effects professional, premiere pro, photoshop, audition, encore DVD, and illustrator. of the adobe production studio, only after effects, photoshop, and illustrator work on the mac. if one needs to edit sound using audition, or authoring a DVD using encore DVD, or even editing a project using premiere pro, you have to use a windows based PC.

the lines are blurring in the coming year as both the mac and windows PC will utilize the same GPU (NVIDIA or ATI), CPU (intel core duo), and motherboard architecture (intel chipsets), so the apples to oranges comparison will no longer hold. no more will we have to guess what operating system based on the powerPC or intel core duo will reign supreme. when we have similar applications that run equally well natively on microsoft windows as well as apple mac OS X on the more or less the same hardware, we will know who makes the better machine.

i look forward to seeing where adobe takes its mac development, as the operating systems will determine the moves and motivations of customers, instead of the decisions of IBM versus intel, or freescale versus AMD. It’s an intel world now. May the best OS win.

CES 2006 preview

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two years ago medialive canceled the annual trek to the las vegas strip for comdex, the largest gathering of IT professionals on the planet. no one event has taken it’s place, but the heir to the event this year will be the international CES 2006. historically, panasonic, samsung, cisco systems, and HP gave keynotes, but this year intel, sony, yahoo, and google deliver addresses.

intel has already reshaped their company logo and processor line for what looks be be an incredible year of product introductions. yahoo and google move outside of internet search to offer a whole slew of web services and applications, some may say only now at a nascent level. computer processors and graphics engines have already exceeded the expectations of the average user generating e-mail, simple documents, and balancing a spreadsheet, but with the introduction of high definitions video and multi channel audio, even the consumer wants a few processors to rev up the music rips, transfer of photos on to portable viewing devices, and simple HD editing. What a year 2006 will be.

hard drives come from one place

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a week before Christmas is usually a quiet time when companies rev down for the end of the year, but also prepare for next year launches. earlier today in the world of storage, seagate announced they will acquire maxtor. over the last five years, the entire storage arena in the SCSI, SAS, SATA, and PATA has shrunk from many manufacturers to just three major players. in 2001 maxtor acquired the quantum hard drive division. in 2002 IBM hard disk drive division was sold to hitachi. so we have just three major manufacturers of drives: seagate, hitachi, and western digital, with a long shot samsung as a rouge drive maker.

storage has never been cheaper, with some mechanism approaching 25???°¬¨¬®¬¨¬¢ a GB, with normal prices around 50???°¬¨¬®¬¨¬¢ a GB. will pricing and innovation increase, or shunt? 2006 should see the introduction of 1 TB hard drives.

apple in 2006

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if you wait long enough, everything comes to los angeles. dvexpo west opens at the LA convention center from 7-9 december 2005, and panasonic has prepared a presentation on the DVCPRO HD AG-HVX200 camcorder. so 2006 will usher in a new generation of affordable hidef, along with other computational milestones in the mactel world.

if you would have asked me a few months ago about the intel platform, i would say it was good for the x86 operating systems (solaris, linux, irix, windows), but did not have much of an impact, since i was a mac user. this summer everything changed and i’ve become a intel fan.

intel has some work to do to improve the energy efficiency and performance of their silicon, but in about a year, there stuff will rock our world. they’ve been working on a few initiatives ever since andy grove left the company. they’ve botched up a few items like itanium and the calyley (LCOS) microdisplays. grove lead intel for almost 20 years, replacing gordon moore, until craig barrett took the reign for a short 7 years, and now we have paul otellini. otellini took over in may 2005, and for his debut announced that apple computer is their latest customer. then came the woodcrest, conroe, and merom stuff in september at IDF, and next month otellini will keynote at CES 2006 in las vegas releasing the viiv platform.

i wonder when apple will keynote at CES? so 2006 will be a great year for intel and apple as their partnership may start as early as january at macworld expo 2006 in san francisco, and i can’t wait for some great products. sometime in 2006 we should hear about mac OS X leopard, the successor to mac OS X tiger, which should ship around the same time as microsoft windows vista (Q1 2007). never before, in my recollection have apple customers been privy to such long term planning, and budgeting so we should know when to upgrade systems and applications.

apple has a fantastic digital media platform based on final cut pro. in this suite of products called final cut studio, we have DVD studio pro, soundtrack pro, motion, and complementary shake and logic. these applications make staying on the mac platform worth the long wait, since these apps are so tightly integrated into the OS. they perform well, have regular upgrades, and have a devoted user community. in los angeles, i get to go to three monthly user group meetings:

motion graphics los angeles
los angeles final cut pro user group
los angeles logic pro user group

the future is bright. apple will lead the way into the intel transition. apple consumer electronics like ipod and future stuff will lead in new growth and dominance.

so as the year closes out, merry Christmas and happy new year to all. 2006 should be the true transitional year from powerPC to intel, NTSC (SDTV) to ATSC (HDTV), AG-DVX100B to AG-HVX200, and war to peace (i pray).

fixed pricing

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every few years a new must have service appears in the marketplace that is not a one time purchase but a reoccurring price. before one leaves their home, the bills come in for all these services. for example:

$ 9.95/month napster music
$24.99/month sirius satellite radio
$24.99/month brinks home security monitoring
$12.95/month TiVo
$39.99/month mobile phone service
$16.95/month OnStar in-vehicle system

so these basic services will set you back around $130 a month, and that still does not include other utilities (gas, electric, water, and phone), automobile services, magazines and newspapers, and cable/satellite television. will 2006 finally bring in the monthly computer rental, where over a large broadband pipe, you get to use a computer with many applications, but administer nothing?

upgrade to joomla from mambo

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dot upgrades are simple, but platform upgrades take some time. i was able to switch from mambo server to joomla server without much data loss, but i did loose a day of hits. sure, the default locations of my installations had changed, so the quick upgrade was out of the question. here are my steps going from mambo 4.5.3 to joomla 1.0.3 for those who want to try.

always start with a current backup of the mySQL database exporting all relevant tables and in the structure tab selecting add drop table, add auto_increment value, enclose table and field names with backquotes, complete inserts, use hexadecimal for binary fields, save as file, with no compression. from there you might have to change the default location of the site and run a the installer script on the original mambo SQL called migrate_Mambo4523_to_Joomla_100.sql to make the administrator panel work again. after a few hours of recovery, you’ll have your very own joomla server up and running. goodbye miro and mambo.

using phpmyadmin i also had to cut and paste the text into the script window, since the browse text file failed every time.

long road to upgrade

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so i thought it would be simple upgrading wordpress from version 1.5.1 to 1.5.2, by simply backing up the mySQL database, writing over the old files, and coming back up, maybe 5 or 10 minutes. now 7 hours later, wordpress and my blog are back online. yes, you should always have a production and test environment, but i thought i knew what i was doing.

my mistake was simple, but fatal. all i had to do was use phpmyadmin to drop the new blank data, and restore the old data from my last backup. when i tried if first, i got an error #1064, and something about bad syntax. i did a google search, and found many suggestions as bleak as it’s all over, to try a second time. after around five times, i thought if i reinstall the basic components it would work, so i removed mySQL, PHP, phpmyadmin, joomla, wordpress, and started from scratch.

i’m using a very robust server from westhost, and everything seemed to be working. i even installed perl and python for good measure, but when i got to PHP version 4.x and even PHP version 5.x it was failing to install. this is a remote install using a powerful site control panel. on occasion it would time out, but i would in the past log right back in to try the install. after 45 minutes of install/uninstall frustration, i decided it was not my multiple browsers, but something on my host computer. i wrote around 11 AM to westhost support, and finally around 4 PM got the fix.

so now with a clean install of the underlying architecture, i thought for sure i could get wordpress up again, but i got the same syntax error. using a fine text editor, textwrangler, i tried my last attempt to cut and paste the table definitions into phpmyadmin, and that solved the odd syntax errors. i don’t know if the browser upload function added special characters or removed backquotes, or what, but a simple text paste solved my seven hour site down warning.

i will be more dutiful next time i want to upgrade my site technology. i will not blame PHP or mySQL and concentrate only on the application.

giving thanks

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next week americans around the globe will sit down and give thanks to God for all, thanksgiving 2005. be it katrina, rita, 9/11, dover PA school board, alito, or limbaugh milestones, it is all good, and God deserved the propers. a trend over the last five years, is moving from the big breasted turkey dinner, to a heritage bird, or what the first few thanksgivings might have served, instead of the genetically engineered and bred bird that goes on most peoples plates.

www.marysturkeys.com
www.reeseturkeys.com
www.heritagefoodsusa.com
www.heritageturkeyfoundation.org
www.slowfoodusa.org