The Logic Off Topic list

At 09:52 PM 1/07/02 +1000, you wrote:
>> >If you have, any suggestion on a sequencer to go with it?  Or, is
>> >Steinberg the only good answer?
>> >
>> It looks like Steinberg is one of the very few viable alternatives. :-(
>
>I bet steinberg are as happy as pigs in poo over this news!!

Imagine if Gates pulled the plug on Mac Office development. 

"As of September 30, 2002 you can kiss your ass goodbye Stevo"

That said, I am having increasing misgivings about M$ and I had hoped 
that in time Emagic might develop for Linux (or Be again -- who knows). 
By selling out their PC supporters Emagic appears to have painted itself 
into a shrinking corner of the market. 

Perhaps they are up against it in the competition with Steinberg, Sonar,
Vegas and Fruity and Orion etc at the low end. Maybe the thinking is that
by concentrating on one platform they can develop faster and using the new
audio systems supposedly arriving in forthcoming OSX versions they will be
able to escape the treadmill of playing catchup with Steinberg (VST2  and 3
is coming, ASIO etc).

You can see how Apple -- with Final Cut Pro and now
Emagic's software suite --  is trying to offer a compelling reason for
"content" developers to use its expensive and relatively underperforming
hardware now that a robust OS is available from M$. If it had bought Adobe
at some stage that would have fitted in nicely with the current strategy. 

Motorola makes only a fraction of its revenue from chips for Macs whereas
AMD and Intel are at it Hammer and tongs racing ahead with development on
X86 with Via, Transmeta and Nvidia in the equation somewhere too. That is
why the 680xO series had to be abandoned and the rate of development of
PowerPC has been embarassing over the last few years -- PowerPC kicked x86
butt for years in the mid 90s but that is all over now baby blue  -- the R
and D funding just isn't there for non x86 processors -- Sun, HP,IBM, DEC
-- all have/are falling by the wayside. 

One possible avenue of relief might be that Apple finally does the sensible
thing (what it should have done in the 80's) and becomes a software company
and release OSX on Opteron (SledgeHammer) or something -- which would offer
inexpensive high performance hardware on what one would hope would be a
decent OS. One reason why this is unlikely is that Jobs has a thing for
hardware -- he loves the design stuff by all reports and even involved
himself in designing factories in his Next days.

Just today I read a pretty nasty article about Apple's management of faults
with their equipment (disk drives, monitors, modems with dropouts to
BigPond, Australia's biggest ISP etc)  and OSX's lack of performance. (See
Bleeding Edge, Melbourne's  "The Age" Thursday last week). Not the sort of
thing that would make me want to spend between double and triple the money
(Australian prices) for a lesser performing machine.

Regards,
M