~mkw

Average guy, above average luck...the blog of M. Keith Warren

  • INTELligent Fruit...

    7 Comments

    The story of an Apple/Intel relationship is everywhere now so I assume it is a legit story. Apple will in some form be moving to chips from Intel. But what does that really mean? All stories have been essentially the same, long on speculation and short on details. Mid 2006 the switch will begin, that is about all the detail that exists at this point. Jobs is supposed to tell more at his WWDC keynote this morning but certainly the speech will create a cabal of questioning.
     
    I find it interesting that no reports have specified something that I think is a bigger issue here than manufacturer; architecture. No report that maintains a 'source' specifies that the move involves the use of X86; there is speculative coupling of the tidbit that Apple has had OSX running on X86 in a lab for some time. This should not be news to anyone who has paid attention as OSX is rooted from an X86 build based on BSD. The move also does not seem to make sense, if Apple is going X86 then why go with Intel - AMD is kicking their butt in so many technical categories...!?
     
    Why do we automatically assume that Apple would toe the Intel line, any agreement such as this will have a give and take. In most cases this is going to be economic but since we are all just guessing at this point I will insist that it is possible that Intel will manufacture a chip designed with an instruction set compatible with existing OSX apps. If they dont, could it also be possible that Intel will now exercise the HyperVisor virtualization technology to help the move? Maybe someone smarter than me could answer if these things are possible.
     
    Could it be possible that Apple will make and sell PCs? Forget their software which has become a niche for the 13 people who use it, the bulk of their revenue is based on their hardware which quite frankly is both aestetically and technically excellent.
     
    Could the chips be used as part of a new home entertainment appliance, an IPod for the living room?
     
    Could the story just be a bunch of speculation run amock? The NYT reported on it so truthfulness and bias need to be examined.
     
    How many people will walk out of the keynote in protest? Childish I know but we are talking about Apple fans.
     
    Scoble: Is it possible that Jobs saw a sneak peek of Longhorn and decided to abandon Apple's traditional business model in Mid 2006 (tentative Longhorn release timeframe!) and start selling Longhorn ready PCs!!!!!! (note to flamers: that was a joke)

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  • Is PDC 2005 worth it?

    17 Comments

    For Joe Schmo working at some big bank whose IT group gets saddled with a nice training budget the question of PDC attendance takes on a more colloquail form of begging the boss to send you away for a week. For a group of developers in a software shop like SourceGear, PDC takes on a unique position in that their success is tied closely to that of MSFT and their customers are the type of people who will be at PDC. 

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  • Creating Unattended installs of VS 2005 Beta 2

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    Performing unattended or "silent" installs in VS 2005 Beta 2 was surprisingly easy. Last night I downloaded the team suite iso from MSDN Subscriber downloads and then extracted the iso to a folder on my computer. In the root of the image there are 4 folders, one of which is the VS folder. Inside VS we find lots and lots of cabinet files, several folders and a setup.exe and vs_setup.msi folder. These launch a guided installer which includes MSDN but in my case I just wanted to automate the settings for my VS installs.

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  • Peter Blum breaks out version 3

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    Almost anyone who uses my web application notices the slick client side validation as well as other various goodies. Most of this stuff comes from an excellent set of validation and input control developeed by Peter Blum.

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  • Fox’s 24 and Microsoft

    8 Comments

    If you don’t watch 24 on Fox you don’t know what you are missing. In a world of predictable shows and boring writing it just stands out above the rest; I think Microsoft should sponsor some elements of the show 24, here is what I am thinking…

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