Apr 96 Newsbits
Volume Number: 12
Issue Number: 4
Column Tag: Newsbits
By John Kawakami, Editorial Assistant
Apple May Have Figured Out How to Use
the Internet After All
Apple’s QuickDraw 3D team is working to have QD3D adopted as the foundation for the
next version of VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, the dominant VR standard
on the Internet. The project and proposal, titled Out of This World, are viewable at the
URL below. In order to participate in the development of VRML, Apple must follow the
the rules set forth by the VRML Architecture Group, which are modeled on the Internet
RFC process, an “open” process. That means that all competing proposals are publicly
available on the Internet, and each proposal must be a functioning package. To compete
effectively, not only must Apple show that their API is the best, but they must have
proof-of-concept demos, free source code, free SDKs, and they must also provide some
access to the engineering team.
What’s most encouraging about this effort to evangelize QD3D, we feel, is that it
is like the evangelism for Internet Config, which is now a de facto standard despite the
Internet Config’s open development stands in stark contrast to that of technologies like
AOCE and QuickDraw GX, which were developed “behind closed doors”.
Evangelism for QD3D is also in line with Apple’s latest efforts to make more
developer resources available for free on the Internet, and may signal a change in the
way they promote new technologies.
Out of This World / QuickDraw 3D:
http://product.info.apple.com/qd3d/VRML20/Out_Of_This_World.HTML
VRML Request for Proposals: http://vag.vrml.org/rfp.html
Internet Config: ftp://ftp.share.com/pub/internet-configuration/
The Usenet Macintosh Programming Awards
Once again, it’s time for the Usenet Macintosh Programming Awards. Matthew Xavier
Mora has organized this annual contest to honor people and products in the Macintosh
Programming world. Awards are given for Outstanding Programming for a
Commercial Product, a Shareware Product, a Freeware Product, and a utility. There’s
also a SmartFriend award for the most helpful comp.sys.mac.programmer.* net
citizen, and an award for Outstanding Support of the Macintosh programming
community.
Nominations are being accepted through March, voting will take place via email
during April, and the awards should be presented at the Netters’ Dinner at WWDC ’96
in May. For details, keep reading comp.sys.mac.programmer.info and the other groups.
(What? You don’t already?) If anything should change, the details will be
disseminated via these newsgroups.
Since this contest is intended for programmers to honor their peers, one must
answer this question to nominate a programmer: “What is the recommended sleep
value for WaitNextEvent for a foreground Application?”
http://www.best.com/~mxmora/UMPA.html
LPA Announces Fuzzy Logic Tools
Logic Programming Associates’ FLINT makes fuzzy logic technology available within a
sophisticated programming environment. Fuzzy logic permits the use of imprecise and
vague information, knowledge and concepts to be used in an exact mathematical
manner. Words such as “fast”, “slow”, “very hot”, “slightly cold”, “not very hot”
can be used to enhance traditional rule-base or expert systems. Qualitative and
imprecise reasoning statements can be incorporated within these rule-bases to
produce simpler, more intuitive and better behaved models. According to Lotfi Zadeh,
the father of fuzzy logic, the linguistic, or “fuzzy”, description of a system is much
more effective than a more specific, numerical or mathematical description. FLINT
supports:
• standard and user-defined membership functions
• linear and curved membership lines
• automatic propagation of fuzzy values
• range of and/or/not combinators
• configurable linguistic hedges
• standard and user-defined defuzzification algorithms
The product is available immediately worldwide for Windows, Macintosh and
MS-DOS, and costs US$995. This includes the cost of a full-featured LPA Prolog
compiler and programming development environment, and features two
well-documented classical examples: a fuzzy controller and a project risk analyser.
FLINT is also available as a versatile programming toolkit for LPA Prolog or as
an extension to LPA’s popular expert system toolkit, Flex.
Logic Programming Associates, US Toll Free: 1-800-949-7567 Tel: +44 181
871 2016 Fax: +44 181 874 0449
lpa@cix.compulink.co.uk
http://www.lpa.co.uk
For information about fuzzy logic, see
http://www.cs.tamu.edu/research/CFL/
QC for the PowerMac
Onyx Technology today announced a free update to its popular QC stress testing tool for
the Macintosh. Version 1.2 is the long awaited PowerPC native version of QC;
previous versions ran emulated on PowerMacs. New optimizations made in testing code
together with the native PowerPC code have resulted in performance improvements
ranging from 100% to 500%.
The update also includes support for the powerful “Block Bounds Checking” and
“Invalidate Free Memory” options on systems with Apple’s Modern Memory setting
turned on. Previous versions of these tests were incompatible with Modern Memory
and automatically disabled.
Updates are available at the Onyx ftp site.
QC is a system extension that allows programmers and test engineers to quickly
isolate problems in application software and code resources that would otherwise
randomly crash or hang various Macintosh configurations. These tests can be
performed by non-technical personnel with little or no knowledge of Macintosh
programming. Software engineers can take advantage of a custom API to achieve
pinpoint control from directly within their code. QC gives developers and Quality
Control personnel an extensive tool for stress testing their application software before
it’s shipped.
[QC spots many bugs that extensions like Even Better Bus Error and its cousins
try to catch. In response, some tool writers have stopped updating their extensions
because their tools are redundant. - jtk]
onyxtech@aol.com
http://www.std.com/onyxtech
ftp://ftp.std.com/vendors/onyxtech/QC/
Telescript Agents Can Hang Out On the Web
General Magic, Inc., announced the availability of a free pre-release version of its
Telescript Active Web Tools, a tool kit for developing active, personalized services for
the World Wide Web using agent technology. General Magic’s pre-release version of
the Active Web Tools is expected to be followed by updated releases through the year.
The Active Web Tools feature a set of software development tools based on General
Magic’s Telescript technology, an extensible, object-oriented remote programming
language for creating active, agent-based network services.
“The Web today is a passive entity - it connects you to lots of information, but
the burden is on users to ‘surf’ to find what they’re looking for,” said Marc Porat,
chairman and chief executive officer of General Magic. “The Telescript Active Web
Tools are designed to enable developers to turn the Web into an active entity where
users can delegate agents to watch, find, and orchestrate tasks on their behalf - even
while the user is off-line.”
General Magic’s presentation at Demo ’96, an industry conference, included a
demonstration of active, personalized services created with Active Web Tools. The
demonstration also showed two-way interoperability between Telescript technology
and Sun’s Java, illustrating the complementary nature of the two technologies. The
Telescript Active Web Tools offer support for industry standards. They may be used
with most web servers supporting the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). A web
browser supporting HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) can access Telescript agents
running on a web site - no special client software is required. The Active Web Tools
also enable agents to programmatically access and process content on remote web sites
using HTTP.
http://www.genmagic.com/awt
More Multiprocessing From Total Impact
Total Impact announced the Total PowerSMP and Total FreedomSMP, the fastest PCI
multiprocessor application accelerator solution available for Apple’s Power Macintosh
PCI computer systems. The Total PowerSMP system is equipped with 1, 2 or 4
PowerPC 604 microprocessors operating at clock speeds of 100, 120, 133 and
150MHz. The board also features 512K of secondary cache and up to 1 gigabyte of user
upgradable memory.
The Total PowerSMP board is controlled by Total FreedomSMP’s symmetric
multiprocessing software libraries. Total FreedomSMP’s libraries interface directly
with Apple’s Operating System ToolBox and allow application software to be launched
on the Total PowerSMP accelerator the same way that they’re launched within the
Power Macintosh itself.
Because the Total PowerSMP system does not have an operating system running
directly on any of its microprocessors, any application accessing the board has the full
attention of all available PowerPC 604’s on the board.
Total FreedomSMP will also ship with built-in library extensions that will work
with Daystar Digital’s Genesis MP software (see MacTech 12.3 [March 1996]
46-54). These library extensions will give users of applications that have been
written to take advantage of the Genesis MP system the ability to access the Total
PowerSMP accelerator boards without any software modification.
Total Impact, (805) 987-8704 http://www.totalimpact.com
Heidi Roizen Joins Apple
As everyone knows now, Apple has gone through major personnel changes. Dr. Gilbert
Amelio is not only the new CEO, but is also the Chairman of the Board. Dr. Amelio’s
success as a turnaround artist is well documented; he turned into profitable operations
both a money losing division at Rockwell and an unprofitable National Semiconductor.
Most significant to developers was the addition of Heidi Roizen, founder of
T/Maker, as Vice President of Developer Relations in late January. For more details,
see this month’s “Crabb’s Apple” column.
Apple Press Releases
http://support.info.apple.com/aboutapple/pr.html
Be There Now
Wonder what some Macintosh developers have been doing lately? You might want to
check out comp.sys.be, the Be newsgroup. You’ll watch in amazement as people talk
about command shells and environment variables. The Be is so “programmer
friendly” that it smells like Unix. Yikes!
news:comp.sys.be
Apple Supports Linux, MkLinux That Is...
If, while reading the following newsbit, some of the names are unfamiliar, you should
refer to the section below titled, “You can’t tell the players without a card...”, and also
check out the URLs.
Apple Computer, Inc., announced on February 5 that it is supporting a project
with the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to port Linux, a freely distributed version of
UNIX, to a variety of Power Macintosh products. This version of Linux operates on the
OSF Mach microkernel, which will be running natively on the PowerPC
microprocessor. The announcement was made at the Conference on Freely
Redistributable Software held in Cambridge. A demo of an early prototype was shown
as part of the announcement.
“This is part of Apple’s overall effort to embrace more open industry standards,
particularly those popular in the Internet community,” said Ike Nassi, vice president
of Apple system software technologies. “This software will be particularly popular
with Mac users in higher education as well as the scientific research communities who
have asked for our support of Linux.”
With Linux, a student or researcher will have an extremely low-cost, yet
high-performance PowerPC-based UNIX system for personal use. Advanced research
that requires UNIX applications will now be possible on an engineer’s personal
Macintosh. [Advanced research into networked Marathon will be possible too.
Academics also prefer the superior document editing tools available on the Macintosh.
- jk]
Apple is supporting this one specific project with OSF, nicknamed MkLinux,
which is a microkernel-based operating system that is 100% compatible with the
original monolithic Linux, since it is based upon almost entirely unmodified Linux
code. Because it works with the OSF Mach3 microkernel, it is trivial to port to any
platforms supported by the OSF Mach3 microkernel. The Linux sources now include
the Mach interface as a new machine type, but the same sources can also be used to
build the original monolithic Linux.
By using the OSF Mach3 microkernel, the resulting Linux system can also take
advantage of new technologies, such as SMP, MMP, and hard real-time support.
The porting group reports, on their web page, that porting from Intel to the
PowerMac and getting to boot to multiuser took approximately three engineer-weeks,
harnessing some of the work done on the native port of Linux to the PowerPC.
Linux for the Power Macintosh (Apple’s Site about their efforts):
http://www.mklinux.apple.com/
Linux on the OSF Microkernel (as opposed to the vanilla monolithic Linux):
http://www.gr.osf.org/mklinux/
Linux for the PowerPC (porting Linux to the PowerPC):
http://www.linuxppc.org/
The OpenMac Project (porting Linux and NetBSD to the Macintosh):
http://puma.bevd.blacksburg.va.us/openmac/
NetBSD (a version of BSD Unix; Linux is based heavily on BSD Unix, not on
System V): http://www.netbsd.org/index.html
You can’t tell the players without a card...
In typical Unix fashion, the effort to port Linux, the popular free operating
system, over to the Power Macintosh, the most popular PowerPC platform, has
fragmented into several loosely affiliated development threads. If this continues, there
will be one Unix variant per Unix progammer! In the near future, these variants will
likely reunite into a single system. What follows are descriptions of various Unix
distributions in rough chronological order.
AT&T - used to own Unix, and developed the System V Unix which is popular with
businesses.
BSD - Berkeley Standard Distribution, a variant of Unix which departed from
AT&T’s Unix. Popular with universities because it was almost free and comes with
sources. The free version is named NetBSD.
Mach 3.0 - a microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon. Variants have been
developed at other sites, including the OSF.
Tenon Intersystems, MachTEN - a commercial BSD variant which runs with
Macintosh System 7. It’s been around a long time and is very stable. It also uses the
Mach kernel.
A/UX - remember this?
OSF - the Open Software Foundation, which invents large, complex standards.
They also have their own version of Mach 3.
OSF Mach3 Microkernel - a microkernel upon which an system can be executed.
This contrasts with a monolithic kernel, which loads the entire OS at boot time. There
are versions of this microkernel for several microprocessors.
Linux - a kernel, drivers and applications which form a free, Unix-like system.
It operates on various processors, including x86, 68K, and PowerPC processors, but
not on all systems based on these processors. The Macintosh doesn’t yet have a stable
version of Linux.
HURD - the GNU project’s Unix replacement. Hurd is an acronym for “Hird of
Unix-Replacing Daemons”. Hird, in turn, is an acronym for “Hurd of Interfaces
Representing Depth”. I mention this mainly because it’s a funny acronym. [If you’re a
nird. - man]