Where is Bill Gates when you need him ?

[ravingdave]

Prove to me how Bill Gates DIDN'T use Apple's algorithyms etc.

The fact that Apple didn't sue is some evidence that it didn't happen.

The fact that Apple Inc. Hired Microsoft Inc. to do software development for the Mac operating system, and Shortly thereafter Microsoft releases "Windows" is some evidence that it did.


I mentioned this discussion to a friend, and he reminded me of what happened to "Double stack" Microsoft was sued by double stack, and before the case went to trial, Microsoft bought a controlling interest in double stack and stopped the lawsuit.

My recollection is that Microsoft had a whole host of such events, and it appears to me they have a better legal dept. than software deveolopment
department.

I remeber Microsoft Lawyers telling the judge in the Federal anti-trust case, that "Explorer" was an essential part of Windows, and windows wouldn't run correctly without it. They then trot out a video of a "crippled" copy of windows as proof. Experts immediately point out that the Clock on the screen contradicts what Microsoft is saying. Microsoft, embarassed, withdraws the video. Microsoft was intentionally trying to confuse the difference between their Internet "Explorer" application, and their "Explorer" Kernel. Of course experts in the industry raised an immediate hue and cry. Most people remebered that Windows 95 didn't originally have Internet explorer with it. (I have a copy that doesn't.)

Microsoft was caught at the trial attempting all sorts of lies and doublespeak, tricks, etc. The held back the Federal govt. Lawsuit for years. I wonder how long they could have held back Apple inc ?


David

[MSimon]

The fact that Apple Inc. Hired Microsoft Inc. to do software development for the Mac operating system, and Shortly thereafter Microsoft releases "Windows" is some evidence that it did.

So why didn't Apple sue?

[ravingdave]

The fact that Apple Inc. Hired Microsoft Inc. to do software development for the Mac operating system, and Shortly thereafter Microsoft releases "Windows" is some evidence that it did.

So why didn't Apple sue?

The planets weren't in proper alignment.


David

[jabowery]

The fact that Apple Inc. Hired Microsoft Inc. to do software development for the Mac operating system, and Shortly thereafter Microsoft releases "Windows" is some evidence that it did.

So why didn't Apple sue?

The planets weren't in proper alignment.

Actually, I was in communication with Larry Tesler during the entire transition from Xerox PARC to the Lisa to the Mac. Apple's position w/re PARC was tenuous enough that if they had tried to play hardball with MS, MS could easily have teamed up with Xerox to eat their lunch.

I don't know that MS had to steal any code from Apple but I do know that there was some code I worked on at Filoli Information Systems (FOE) that ended up in NeXT's middleware (EOF) at least to the point that the same construct names ("transaction context" etc.) were being used for the data structures and methods. EOF ended up as Web Objects over at Apple when Jobs returned there from NeXT.

[Aero]

So why didn't Apple sue?

Apple did sue. They lost.

http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinv ... dows_2.htm

Google search is a very useful tool.

[jabowery]

So why didn't Apple sue?

Apple did sue. They lost.

http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinv ... dows_2.htm

Google search is a very useful tool.

From TFA: "Bill Gates claimed that Apple had taken ideas from the graphical user interface developed by Xerox for Xerox's Alto and Star computers." Gates was correct but what he didn't say was that maybe both Apple and MS owed a serious debt to Xerox.

NOW we get to the _really_ interesting question: Why didn't XEROX sue?

The answer is essentially the same as the answer to the question:

Why did Xerox so ignore PARC's accomplishment?

[MSimon]

The fact that Apple Inc. Hired Microsoft Inc. to do software development for the Mac operating system, and Shortly thereafter Microsoft releases "Windows" is some evidence that it did.

So why didn't Apple sue?

The planets weren't in proper alignment.


David

So let me see: there is no evidence that MS stole Apple code. Which there for is proof positive that there has been a cover up.

OK it seems that both MS and Apple stole from Xerox and MS even bought a license from Apple.

[ravingdave]

So why didn't Apple sue?

The planets weren't in proper alignment.


David

So let me see: there is no evidence that MS stole Apple code.

When Gassée saw Windows 1.0, he dismissed the software as no threat.

But when Sculley saw the software, he was enraged. Microsoft had been provided early prototypes of the Macintosh and some source code to help optimize Word and MultiPlan. Now Windows had a menu bar almost identical to Apple's. Windows even had a 'Special' menu, containing disk operations. Other elements were strikingly similar. Windows came bundled with Write and Paint, both mimicking Apple's MacPaint and MacWrite.

Apple Bytes Back
Microsoft Windows version 1.0 was considered buggy, crude, and slow. This rough start was made worse by a threatened lawsuit from Apple Computers. In September 1985, Apple lawyers warned Bill Gates that Windows 1.0 infringed on Apple copyrights and patents, and that his corporation stoled Apple's trade secrets. Microsoft Windows had similar drop-down menus, tiled windows and mouse support

I guess it all depends on what you regard as evidence.

Which there for is proof positive that there has been a cover up.

Huh?

OK it seems that both MS and Apple stole from Xerox and MS even bought a license from Apple.

"Microsoft had licensed GUI elements from Xerox, including a desktop-style interface used on the Xerox 8010,the commercial version of the Alto. (Apple had also licensed the GUI from Xerox for $100 million in Apple stock.)"

Sculley was shocked at how much Windows 2.0 resembled the Macintosh, and he believed this to be a breach of contract. Sculley, along with most of the Apple legal team, believed that the November 1985 agreement gave Microsoft permission to use Macintosh displays in Windows 1.x, but not in any later versions.

Seriously, have none of you ever seen the movie "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" ?



David

[MSimon]

Evidence?

I guess the fact that a trial court says that what ever MS got from Apple they got fair and square is proof that no theft occurred.

Of course if using something I paid for is evidence of theft we are all in trouble.

[jabowery]

"Microsoft had licensed GUI elements from Xerox, including a desktop-style interface used on the Xerox 8010,the commercial version of the Alto. (Apple had also licensed the GUI from Xerox for $100 million in Apple stock.)"

Sculley was shocked at how much Windows 2.0 resembled the Macintosh, and he believed this to be a breach of contract. Sculley, along with most of the Apple legal team, believed that the November 1985 agreement gave Microsoft permission to use Macintosh displays in Windows 1.x, but not in any later versions.

Seriously, have none of you ever seen the movie "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" ?

Admittedly, I didn't pay much attention to the deals when they went down, let alone when I watched "The Pirates of Silicon Valley", because the problems with economic rent seeking by Gates dwarf all other considerations of what went down between Xerox, Apple and MS.

[MSimon]

It is only rent seeking when the government makes you buy.

As long as you haver a choice it is not rent seeking.

In any case MS's monopoly will not last much longer. Cheap computers are killing MS.

[ravingdave]

Evidence?

I guess the fact that a trial court says that what ever MS got from Apple they got fair and square is proof that no theft occurred.

Of course if using something I paid for is evidence of theft we are all in trouble.

You switch gears faster than I can keep up with. Initially you said that if Apple thought Microsoft had stolen their stuff, why didn't they sue ?

The argument being that the lack of a lawsuit proves Microsoft didn't steal anything. Now that we find out that there WAS a lawsuit, the new standard is because a Judge says so, that proves Microsoft didn't steal anything.

I personally don't believe in the infallability of the legal system, and I have very little faith in it's ability to convict the guilty or free the innocent.

It appears to me that our individual assesments (regarding Apple/Microsoft and the weasely Bill Gates) simply comes down to a difference of opinion.



David

[MSimon]

It appears to me that our individual assesments (regarding Apple/Microsoft and the weasely Bill Gates) simply comes down to a difference of opinion.

Pretty much. In any case I alter my position when I have new facts.

BTW the biggest crock foisted on us was the "C" language and register oriented computers.

The waste of resources far outstrips anything Apple, MS, etc. have gotten away with. You know why? You can see MS p&l sheet. No one sees the waste that "C" and register machines, with branch predictions, pipelines, pipeline flushes, cache coherency, cache flushes, clumsy reentrancy, stack thrashes, clock trees, power management etc. etc. etc. costs us because "every one does it that way".

240X the processing ability at 1/28th the power consumption. Do the math.

The speed, power and size advantages of the SEAforth 40C18 design are ideally suited for today’s high data throughput requirements in a wide range of consumer electronics, networking, automotive and defense applications. The chip is currently in beta testing at leading OEMs. “Power consumption is an extremely critical factor when designing devices for embedded automotive applications,” said Jeff Ota, Advanced Technology Engineering, BMW Technology Office Palo Alto. “While running tests on edge filtering for automotive imaging applications, we found the SEAforth 40C18 delivers advanced filtering capabilities at a fraction of the power consumed by other products available in the market today.”

Featuring the smallest core size design (0.13 mm2), the SEAforth chip consumes 28 times less power while running 240 times faster than competing architectures. The SEAforth 40C18 breaks the memory bottleneck by creating a RAM and ROM on each core. This enables individual cores to run at the full native speed of the silicon instead of being throttled down to a slower external system clock frequency.The automatic synchronization feature between cores allows the processors to share the computing load by talking to each other to pass data, status signals and even code blocks. When individual CPUs are not active, they automatically shut down or sleep, consuming just 5.4 µW in leakage current until awakened.

http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?opt ... &id=59#BMW

And what is the native speed of the silicon they are using? 700 MHz. Rather far from the leading edge. And you know what the biggest cost is for the chip? The package.

[ravingdave]

BTW the biggest crock foisted on us was the "C" language and register oriented computers.

The waste of resources far outstrips anything Apple, MS, etc. have gotten away with. You know why? You can see MS p&l sheet. No one sees the waste that "C" and register machines, with branch predictions, pipelines, pipeline flushes, cache coherency, cache flushes, clumsy reentrancy, stack thrashes, clock trees, power management etc. etc. etc. costs us because "every one does it that way".

I would be very interested to see an alternative way. How would a processor work without registers ? I've seen architecture that uses memory as registers, (PIC chips) but you still have to be able to do some sort of register like operation.

240X the processing ability at 1/28th the power consumption. Do the math.

The speed, power and size advantages of the SEAforth 40C18 design are ideally suited for today’s high data throughput requirements in a wide range of consumer electronics, networking, automotive and defense applications. The chip is currently in beta testing at leading OEMs. “Power consumption is an extremely critical factor when designing devices for embedded automotive applications,” said Jeff Ota, Advanced Technology Engineering, BMW Technology Office Palo Alto. “While running tests on edge filtering for automotive imaging applications, we found the SEAforth 40C18 delivers advanced filtering capabilities at a fraction of the power consumed by other products available in the market today.”

Featuring the smallest core size design (0.13 mm2), the SEAforth chip consumes 28 times less power while running 240 times faster than competing architectures. The SEAforth 40C18 breaks the memory bottleneck by creating a RAM and ROM on each core. This enables individual cores to run at the full native speed of the silicon instead of being throttled down to a slower external system clock frequency.The automatic synchronization feature between cores allows the processors to share the computing load by talking to each other to pass data, status signals and even code blocks. When individual CPUs are not active, they automatically shut down or sleep, consuming just 5.4 µW in leakage current until awakened.

http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?opt ... &id=59#BMW

And what is the native speed of the silicon they are using? 700 MHz. Rather far from the leading edge. And you know what the biggest cost is for the chip? The package.

It sounds interesting, but without some look at the architecture, I don't know how to make an informed opinion.

I guess each processor shares a massive parallel bus system with indivudal chuncks of Rom/Ram mapped across the addressing range of the whole group. I wonder how they prevent bus contention with so many processors ? They probably have something akin to a server handling bus access requests, or some kind of bus controller.

I wonder how many I/O pins they have, and how they configure them to work with 40 processors. My guess is that I/O is a shared resource like a network printer or some such. I might contact their sales office monday and find out what they cost and if they have a development kit available.

In any case, I think massively parallel processing is more like the way the human brain works, and I bet we see a lot more of it in the future.

David

[MSimon]

Dave,

It is called a zero operand processor. It is not exactly no registers. The registers are implicit in the instruction and are implemented as an internal stack.

Which says in effect: as many registers as you need. You are not limited to 8 data registers and 8 address registers. At the same time instructions are simpler so you can pack more operations into a function.

You don't need 9 bits to specify operands and destination. If you make the top of the stack implicitly a test register you can make tests like JZ, JN, and others implicit (i.e. you don't have to do a test instruction). This simplifies the hardware and makes the code faster.

It sounds interesting, but without some look at the architecture, I don't know how to make an informed opinion.

Here is the data sheet:

http://www.intellasys.net/templates/tri ... aSheet.pdf

BTW the data sheet provides answers to many of your questions. They probably have development boards. However at this time I think they are only interested in high volume apps. So avoid the mktg dept for your needs. Instead contact Jeff Fox (jeff at intellasys dot net), at the co. and tell him I sent you. That might get you some pull.

BTW the processor is around $2 in high volumes.

The idea is that there is a processor for every couple of pins and most of the I/O is serial. It comes in an 88 pin package.

Note that the current economic downturn will probably give them access to higher speed silicon.

And this is just the beginning. With more pins they could have many more address/data buses.

Their 24 processor chip is in production.

Evaluation kit:

http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?opt ... &Itemid=74