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Darwin on Crusoe?
MacOS Rumors is running a blurb that Apple is exploring porting Darwin to other processors (including Transmeta's Crusoe processor) due to frustration with availability of high speed Motorola G4 processors. An interesting though, a Mac without a Motorola chip... Of course, it's just a rumor at this point... (update: I've got it
confirmed from "anonymous sources" that this is true)
Crusoe runs whatever file systems the developers of the operating system it's running (and developers of "third-party" file systems - which, on free-software OSes, could be thought of as "file systems not in the official code base", e.g. ReiserFS for Linux) tell it to run.
It doesn't, but many OSes (dating back at least as far as SunOS 2.0, in the mid '80's) have a "virtual file system" or "installable file system" mechanism that allows more than one file system type to run on that OS; code above the file system makes generic "read file", "write file", "remove file", etc. calls, which turn into calls to the "read file", "write file", etc. functions for the OS in question.
That's how UNIXes these days support their default on-disk file system, and the ISO 9660 file system on CD-ROMs, and remote file systems such as NFS (and SMB/CIFS, at least on Linux, with smbfs); that's how Windows NT supports the Windows 9x version of the DOS file system, and NTFS, and the ISO 9660 file system, and remote file systems such as SMB/CIFS (and NFS, with third-party add-ons); and so on.
MacOS X has, as far as I know, such a mechanism (it may or may not be the VFS mechanism in current BSDs).
But I'm not sure how this is at all relevant to Crusoe. Most OSes Crusoe is likely to run have such a "virtual file system" mechanism, but most if not all OSes Crusoe is likely to run will think they're just running on an x86 processor, and the VFS mechanism will work Just Fine on any x86 (or SPARC, or Alpha, or PowerPC, or...) processor - it doesn't require special CPU magic.
As nice a story as this is, I believe that another possibility is more likely. Apple's relationship with Motorola has often been strained. By issuing this rumor, they hoping to pressure Motorola a bit more.
Long time Apple watchers will remember periodic stories about MacOS being ported to Intel - the most recent followed the purchase of NeXT. But, nothing has come out of it. As nice as the Crusoe chip sounds, I suspect that if Apple was to do a port, AMD or Intel would be the more likely target.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
do not believe *anything* on macosrumors! Ryan, the guy who writes it, has literally no fucking idea what the hell he is talking about.
the only reason anyone (who isn't an idiot) reads mosr is to see just how bad it is.
check out mosr.net, it was set up by people who were thoroughly pissed off the shite mosr.com writes. it looks like it isn't being updated anymore, but check out some of the archived stuff - its very funny (in a juvenile way). especially the stuff about ryan's girlfriend...
It runs 680X0 apps like the high-end Macs that run on those processors. A Pentium 166 runs MacOS 6 apps like a Mac IIfx under DOS. Think of what it'd be like on a PIII equivalent.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'm glad that Apple is finally looking at other processors and architectures for its software. Don't get me wrong, Apple hardware is great. However, there's nothing quite like building your own computer, an option long denied to Mac users. This appears to open up that possibility to some extent, and I am quite happy.
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Instead of "porting" Darwin to x86 and running it on a bog-standard Crusoe, why not talk the Crusoe into being a G4 instead of an x86? I was under the impression that the Crusoe's code-morphing software could be reworked to emulate other instruction sets besides x86 ...
That being said - i was with apple sticking with the PPC for a long time.. but now, with almost a _year_ of failure... i'm beginning to believe that there needs to be another way to power our Macs. We have almost 12 months of proof that Motorola can't cut it. Hell, they care 20 times more about embedded processors - and are simply not _that_ interested in high end PPCs.
Now, if you want some _honest_ reporting of what's going on, besides the bong resin i spewed out on my page, go read about the G4 mess over at AppleInsider. It tells about the problems that Apple is having with Mot and how they went begging to IBM to make AltiVec enabled PPCs.
I do think that Apple is in real trouble with the PPC series.. and its not the technology, its the companies involved.
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Black light Media is looking for some good advertisers!
Ok I'm going to play devil's advocate and try and look at it from Apple's viewpoint. I don't think they can afford to port MacOS X to x86 due to previously mentioned hardware sales, BUT they always "secured" that by keeping the MacOS ROM veiled in mystery and secret. I imagine that the big "no go" here is that Apple just finished UMA chipset for use in the new iMacs, Powerbooks, and Sawtooths. I'm not an engineer, just a biology student, but I would think putting a x86 chip on a MB designed for RISC, I know the "categories" are useless/blurring, would require some design changes. That would be on a design I imagine that has already cost them some money and quite a bit of time to get where they wanted...it was primarly for cost reasons as far as I know. That's why the iMac's are slowly coming down in price along with a predicted drop in the iBook's price. Yep and I have to agree that Apple doesn't have the touch of death on technology either. SCSI is far from dead, the number of digital video devices using Firewire is growing (Sony even gave it its own product name), and wireless networks are becoming within range of multi-computer homes in terms of price. Anyway that's just my .02 or .03.
Um, small point here -- and totally meaningless in the "real world", but AltiVec does not mean G4.
:-D).
The G4 has a lot of enhancements besides AV, and AV could theoretically been retrofitted into a G3.
More importantly, the G3 was pretty close to a PPC 603e chip -- great integer performance but so-so floating point scores. Of course, the FP scores of a 603e still trounced Pentiums at the time, so it was deliciously ironic to hear PC lovers talking about "crippled" FP in the G3. Other enhancements to the G3 carried the FP scores forward even though no major effort was made to make FP gains.
I could be wrong, but I think the G4 is closer to the PowerPC 604e. Among the similarities is SMP - multiprocessor support. Apple gave up on SMP in MacOS long ago, but the BSD kernel in Mac OS X is more than up to it.
Lastly, the MacOS is probably MORE portable thank Linux. MacOS has been under a major rewrite for the last 2 years. Much of the MacOS is tied to just a few libraries, most prominent of the group is QuickTime (update that library for AV support and lotsa linked apps get a kick in the ass). Apple has been preparing for a move to MacOS X, and afterwards a move to 64-bit, for quite some time. Apple does not want to maintain two OS trees indefinately, like some other OS companies we know of...
Lastly, people have already forgotton that MacOS X did beta in an Intel version. Remember Rhapsody? I saw it and actually fought to try installing it on three PC's (lovely... hardware conflicts with a Mac
For all that Apple still doesn't do (no bundled development tools... grrr), they have made the best of their situation.... better than any of their "wut no floppie drive" detractors. Nice clean systems with no ribbon cables strewn across 3 or four internal case/CPU fans.
Anyways, I got off the track, but last thing is Apple has an amazing record of making quite varied hardware APPEAR to be what they've used before. Just ask the LinuxPPC coders how varied the Apple hardware is. For all the MacOS glitches over the year, they have the flexibility to do anything they like with their systems... things that Microsoft and Intel can only immitate. If Apple wants to move onto Transmeta or even Intel, you can bet those new systems will never have the same problems as Windows/WinCE on same platforms.
Scott
PS _ Does anyone know if BSD on PowerPC can run Linux/PPC binaries, like say BSD/x86 can run Linux binaries?? This would be real interesting if someone starts shipping PowerPC Linux boxes (plain vanilla), and you can target BSD and still execute the binary under MacOS Consumer...
Does anyone here actually thing thak Apple Inc. (notice the "Computer" is gone) is actually going to waste time and money on porting Darwin to other architectures? OF COURSE NOT!
The whole POINT of Darwin is that it is under the APSL... Apple has ALREADY been encouraging developers to port Darwin to any platform they feel like. There is already a Darwin source compileable on Linux/x86. The only reason there aren't others is because all Darwin developement is pretty much on hold until DP3 is released and the Darwin codebase is synched with MacOS X.
When that happens we will have Mach 3.0, IOKit (Driver builder) and all the new tools/features that MacOS X has (and grow with) so we can effectively start porting Darwin to x86 (again, the source is already there), Sparc, MIPS, IA-64... whatever! Apple doesn't care. They don't have to do the work, they just manage the results and fold the changes back into MacOS X (and vice versa).
There is no doubt in my mind that by this time next year Darwin will be running on x86 and at least one or two other "Alternative" platforms (most likely SPARC and Alpha). Unless MacOS X dies, I don't see why Darwin wouldn't be on all relevant platforms within 2-3 years.
The trick to all this of course is whether Apple will:
Effectively making MacOS X a fully portable operting system not dependant on hardware, only on Darwin.
It woudl be even more interesting to see Mac on a Sparc chip or an 1000Mhz Alpha. Now that would be speed in style. Think of the graphic capabilities that would have.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
I'm a little skeptical that after all this time Apple's looking to go x86, even on a Crusoe. A Crusoe variant "emulating" a PPC is another story. MacOS X itself, as in the BSD/Darwin layers, is a reasonable enough proposal for it, but the sticking point would remain the legacy OS 9 emulation layer. Software-based emulation would certainly work, but it wouldn't be fast enough.
Of course, in the original switch from 680x0 processors to the PPC, Apple managed to pull off the transition with exactly that: software emulation and a period of hybrid ("fat") binaries until PPC-native apps became the norm. So who knows.
On the other hand, assuming IBM can pump out Crusoes quickly enough, a multi-Crusoe machine might be cheaper to build than a G4. And a Crusoe tweaked to do its microcode translation magic on the G3/G4 instruction set could make things mighty interesting.
Apple change processors now and waste money "porting" Darwin to other chips? Mr.AlternaOS programmer can download the source and port it to his favourite ISA. I can't see Apple developing on more than one ISA at a time, just like the other software+hardware vendors like Sun, IBM, and SGI (does SGI count anymore?). If you're having wet dreams about OS X on x86 just look back before the Mac was released, the Apple camp was divided between the Mac developers and the guys working on the older Apple stuff and caused alot of problems within the company, shortly thereafter Jobs got handed a pink slip. I don't put very much faith into the Mac rumours sites, most of their rumours are started by people that WISH something would happen and it picks up from there. Ford doesn't make Chevys, why would Apple make PCs?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
That's my whole point. How can I read content on a site to judge that site when that site can't deliver the content I'm supposed to judge? And as for how well it "loads up", yes, I'm sorry if my standards are so high that I expect it to load a page on request, not barf all over the page with raw error messages. Most sites that even attempt some degree of cluefullness will present a page saying, in plain english (or whatever native language you understand) that an error has occurred. More enlightened sites will provide a link back to the front page, and even a helpful link to send a message about the error to the web admin. But then I guess that's too much to expect from high-church geeks.
I can hear it now:
"Error recovery? ERROR RECOVERY??? We don't need no stinkin' error recovery!"
Sure, they get misinformation sometimes, but they don't misrepresent it as fact, and the correct information far outweighs the errors.
It's conceivable that Apple could work with Transmeta to make a PowerPC clone. But that's what it would have to be - same architecture, same instruction set, different chip.
I remember thinking awhile back that AMD would make an interesting addition to the Apple-IBM-Motorola partnership - after all, AMD already licences technology from Motorola, and vice-versa I think.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Oh my. My feelings are hurt. Lets see, go to Netcraft and look at what www.macosrumors.com is running, and I see:
www.macosrumors.com is running Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) PHP/3.0.14 on FreeBSD
Gosh. And I thought FreeBSDers were so much better, so much more knowledgable, so much cooler, than us lowlife Linux fucks. I guess what amazes me is why a site devoted to the MacOS isn't hosted on MacOS with a MacOS server...
Mac OS is pretty stable these days. Apps bail from time to time, true; however, I have never once had to reinstall MacOS (not counting upgrades, obviously) and my Macs have not been treated with kid gloves. In a long-term sense, it's definitely more stable than Windows -- and it was even in the Dark Times of System 7.5 and the PowerPC shift.
But that wouldn't be a Mac. It'd be a bastardized Mac-like implentation. No matter how much you try to justify it, it they just no longer would be the Mac's that we've known. A lot of the Mac OS' ease of use comes from it's closeness to the hardware. Things like Plug and Play (which apple never bothered to name as such) work much better on every iteration of mac compared to PC's. They also do USB much better than PC's. That's not just beacuse of a couple extensions to the Mac OS. It's beacause Apple knows EXACTLY what chips to expect in each Mac system, as well as tolerances of things like motherboards and cables. Microsoft can have pretty much no assurances that vendor A's USB implentation is anything like vendor B's (especially so the smaller the vendor is)... they may even use the same chipset, but place them at different distances from the PCI brideg chips, messing up the timing...
A lot of folks here have been complaining that ./ is running a story from Ryan Meaders website.
/. each day that referenced mosr.com, that means he'd be /.'d every single day...
But if you think about it - if we ran a story on
so, i promise to do may part, and each day, sumbit a story to slashdot telling everyone about something new that Ryan Meader is talking about. Won't you join me in my fight against stupidity on the web via non-violent means?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
If Transmeta were to get a cash infusion from Apple, I'm sure they'd be happy to put some ressources into emulating G3 and G4's (and 680x0's too ...) in "software" for the Crusoe.
After all, Apple would be better off getting the 'experts' to do the porting (emulation) part, and then just test the results. If nothing else, this would allow for easier creation of Apple clones, as long as Apple licensed the OS.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Not true. Apple's party line doesn't mean Darwin isn't going to x86. Remember, open source?
BTW, Darwin compiles on x86 today. Runs is a different matter.
>the roll your own crowd.
that market isn't as attractive as you might think. it's composed largely of people who want to buy components on the cheap. the margins there are thin, and strongly susceptible to economies of scale. if you're not one of the really big fish in that market, or one of the hyerspecialized little fish, you're fish food. that's why we're unlikely ever to see a vertically integrated hardware/OS/software vendor in the x86 clone market.
Apple's marketing is strongly based on transparent hardware support and ease of use.. "it works, right out of the box", "this is the manual you get with a Mac", "there is no step three", etc. that requires tight synchronization between hardware and software, and the roll your own crowd could traditionally care less about that. they want to build what's cheap, not bow down before someone's list of officially approved hardware. the last thing Apple needs is to have its brand shot down by a proliferation of nightmare boxes built by people who don't give a damn about Apple specs.
besides, it costs like hell to support umpty-seven different permutations of hardware at all, let alone reliably. Microsoft has trouble doing it, and they're just a tad bigger than Apple is. you even hear occasional stories about Linux users not being able to get a certain hardware configuration to work, and we have a fairly decent amount of support, too.
so when you take the various factors into account.. loss of margins on the hardware side, negative branding from noncompliant hardware in the marketplace, and a geometric increase in the cost of support on the software side.. you'd have to buy a whole lot of Apple-produced software to offset what you'd cost them.
just between you, me, and the fencepost error, i don't think you were planning to spend more than a couple $K on software, were you?
Porting to Crusoe would indeed at this time mean porting to x86. But that other, really interesting bit of info in that rumour article would indeed need porting to a new platform:
... -- and tenuous evidence suggests that AMD may also have shown interest in supporting Darwin with a modified version of its Athlon processor that has been stripped of its x86 emulation hardware.
Now maybe this is old news for some, but I didn't know that AMD seriously considered stripping the Athlon of its x86 legacy stuff. Such a processor couldWhile this Would Be A Good Thing, it's not quite this simple. The motherboard would have to include the Apple ROM, which is one of the primary keys to getting MacOS to run on other hardware archs. There is also the matter of the device support. MacOS MoBoards have so much on them: 16bit sound, Firewire, etc. old Macs has SCSI-1, video, etc. on the board also. Finally, the BIOS for MacOS is their own product called OpenFirmware, which they would have to either write around or release compatability info on.
Now don't get me wrong, the MacOS hardware software dependency is going towards something where this may be possible. For instance:
The ROM is slowly being moved into a system file which gets loaded into RAM. MacOSX doesn't (read: "shouldn't") access the ROM at all, I believe (Yay!)
Video and SCSI are now off the board. Video is going to be standard AGP (as in Sawtooth G4's) rather than on-board or in a special 66MHz yet 32 bit PCI slot.
MacOSX early versions/Rhapsody Dr's were released under certain x86 platforms already. MOSR had a report of someone seeing a Rhapsody DR at Cupertino(sp?) running on a Sun SPARc 4.
So there are hurdles to overcome, but Apple has been overcoming them slowly anyway. The most likely thing that I would see happening is Apple making motherboards based on their hardware for different CPU (AMD-Motorola alliance crossed with Apple-Moto-IBM's 'AIM' alliance may yield something interesting...K7's maybe?) would probably be the most likely outcome.
In this case, you will still have a premade system from Apple then build on it.
- Sig
That's the thing- Darwin isn't NeXTSTEP. It was derived from the underlying BSD of NeXTSTEP and OpenStep/Mach, but that doesn't make it NeXTSTEP. Signifigant changes have taken place, including a new version of the Mach kernel between OpenStep 4.2 and what is now called Mac OS X. I personally haven't looked at the Darwin source yet. Apple might've maintianed the i386 port, but there's an equal chance that they let it die in upgrading the BSD system. While it probably wouldn't be that hard to have a Darwin/Intel, it's not a trivial matter.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
OpenFirmware is NOT an Apple product. It's an IEEE standard. OpenFirmware.org
--
"I was a fool to think I could dream as a normal man."
On Macintoshes, you can access it by holding down Command-Option-O-F while booting. On Suns, it's Stop-A. I believe someone actually wrote a Forth version of Breakout that could run on Apple's OF implementation. Pretty neat trick for a boot monitor, imho.
Some PCI devices even have Forth driver code in their ROMs.
Darwin has not been ported to x86. There was talk about porting it but as far as I know it was never carried out. Apple was talking about it before but they have sence gotten rid of any mention of it being ported, not to mention running on any intel platform.
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Can I Play With Madness?
Open Firmware is IEEE 1275. The home page is
http://playground.sun.com/1275/
The idea behind Open Firmware came from Sun during their transition from MC68000 CPUs to SPARC. Problem: two different CPU architectures, and you want to write add-in board device drivers just once, rather than N times for N different processors.
Solution: put an interpreter on the motherboard, written native for the processor on the motherboard, and write the drivers for the peripheral boards (which go into PROMs on the peripheral boards) in the interpreted language. This way, the system can boot from devices that were never envisioned when the motherboard was designed.
This is a standard that WinTel world would do well to adopt.
How hard would it be to port Darwin to Crusoe, anyway? Not much, I suppose... not to mention that they'll be able to take advantage of the experience with Mobile Linux. OTOH, given that it's been months since Darwin was released and it still hasn't been ported even to Intel, maybe there's a catch involved.
:)
Anyway, I'm not really sure about what this means for Apple. Will they be opening their architecture - and furthermore, will they do it the right way this time around? Speculation, speculation. All I know is that I want my quad-G4 box!!!!
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
While it's great to see more competition in Apple's processor market, one has to question their true motivations. That is, are there real concerns with the future outcome of project V'Ger, or do they feel they have to jump onto the incredibly hyped bandwagon that is Transmeta? These days, I feel that Apple is less of a computer company, and more of a clothing brand.
Now I should preface this by saying that MacOS Rumors is not a very reliable source, but this rumor just make sense.
Back in 1997, Apple introduced G3 machines. The initial machines ran at 233 and 266 MHz. Now back then, Pentium IIs were also up to 266MHz, and Mac fanatics had a valid claim in saying that the G3 beat the PII.
However, a lot has changed since then. Or rather, it hasn't. That's the problem. G3s are now up to 500MHz(but only in the form of an upgrade, not from Apple), and G4s are maxing out at 450MHz.
But Intel an AMD have been pushing the x86 farther than anyone imagined. And Apple?
Well it's probably not really Apple's fault, but Motorola and IBM have really dropped the ball with the G4. In fact, an article that recently appeared in AppleInsider reports conditions to be far worse than anyone imagined. If things truly are that bad, Apple is smart to move.
In addition, doing the port should be far easier than it would have been with the old MacOS(Apple tried this once, it was called Star Trek IIRC). In fact, in it's earlier developer releases, there was an Intel version of Rhapsody(now called MacOS X Server, and really the predecessor to OS X). But that version was Steved(pissing off some developers and users).
So, if Apple is in fact doing this, it is a very smart move. MacOS X looks great, but no one but the most fervent Mac addicts would buy a 500MHz G4 8 months from now.
But there could be problems, the main one being that Apple would be forced to compete with other PC manufacturers, who, regardless of what Apple says, have far better price/performance ratios than Apple. I'm a Mac user, and I know if I could run the MacOS on it, my next machine would not be a G4.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple makes most of it's money off of hardware sales, and though they are trying to diversify(Quicktime, Final Cut Pro, the upcoming AppleWorks 6, etc.), their revenue from hardware is about 95% of the total IIRC.
Of course, opening up the kick-ass MacOS interface to all PC users could mean enormous hardware sales, but that is speculation.
I guess in conclusion, Mac users would love this, Apple stock holders probably wouldn't.
Went to the web site pointed out in the opening article, and this is what I got:
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost' (61) in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 3
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL link index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 4
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL link index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 38
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL result index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 39
Fatal error: Call to unsupported or undefined function error() in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 40
Seems to me we've got a bunch of clueless rookies running the site, which makes any information they have to spill extremely suspect.
I have serious doubts that Apple will ever port it's OS to anything other than Apple hardware. It seems to me that this is a thinly disguised threat aimed at Motorola. Motorola is taking way too long (in Apple's opinion) to get the G4s up to full speed, so Apple is threatening to move it's systems to another platform. In a few months, Motorola will have the bugs worked out of the G4s, and Apple will forget all about porting Darwin to Crusoe, x86, sparc, or whatever else they're supposedly "considering".
0 1 - just my two bits
Apple is exploring porting Darwin to other processors (including Transmeta's Crusoe processor) due to frustration with availability of high speed Motorola G4 processors.
This blurb doesn't sound quite right -- the Crusoe in it's current incarnation isn't (and isn't meant to be) a high-Mhz monster. If Apple is exploring porting Darwin to Crusoe, it's most likely due to interest in portable and appliance-type devices which can take advantage of Crusoe's low power consumption, and not due to a speed advantage over the G4.
I'm sure that Apple isn't happy with Motorola's progress with the G4. The G4 is a pretty powerful processor, but it's losing the Mhz-marketing battle. Which brings up the question, what chips have high clockspeeds which could be replacements for the G4? Alphas? Athlons? Intel's upcoming Willamette and Foster chips?
Darwin is NEXTSTEP. It already runs on 68x00, HPPA, SPARC, i386 and PPC. Having Darwin/x86 is easy. Having OO frameworks on top of this is easy too. Having Cocoa apps on it is also easy.
But:
1/ Apple commited to Rhapsody/Intel, and never delivered it (beside the Developer Previews)
2/ Running on i386 would cut in their hardware sales.
3/ Apple have no choice but to deliver a 'compatibility box'. Darwin/x86 don't run legacy (68x00/ppc) mac apps.
Hence the rumor is crap.
Cheers,
--fred
This is great for Apple and for open sourcers everywhere, but let's keep track of the fact that Darwin is not OSX. Darwin is the foundation for OSX, but it lacks things like the Quartz imaging layer, Carbon and the Blue Box to run good old-fashioned Mac apps, and, of coourse, the notorious Aqua interface. Darwin has always been cross-platform (PPC and x86), it's only higher-level services that are platform-specific.
It's great that Apple is porting the code to other platforms. It will provide some basic level of interoperability and perhaps make it easier to port software (say, Adobe Photoshop) to other Darwin-based OSes. Note that I said easier, not easy. It'd probably still be a lot more fun to port SuSE apps to LinuxPPC.
What porting Darwin really does is make a good, basic POSIX-compliant BSD-like OS available for many major platforms. At the very least, it may provide some interesting ideas. But it sure don't mean that I can go out and buy some Crusoe-based laptop and run Mac OS X on it.
Translation: "I got scared during the dark days when Apple was 'beleagered,' so I ran and hid my head in the sand."
I just read this morning how they chose not to give or even sell (at street price) iMacs to freeiMac. The company FreeiMac would give away free iMac computers with the usual 3 years of Earthlink subscription plus accepting advertising.
Translation: "I read somewhere that Apple didn't want to supply tech support to thousands of users too dumb to know that there's no such thing as a free computer, and anyway, Apple already has an Earthlink deal going."
Talk about clueless! They have turned down another opportunity to increase the awareness and use of their computers. They already have an ever decreasing share of the market and decisions like this will only help seal their doom.
Translation: "What is this iMac thing everyone is talking about? Why have I never heard of it? I'm sure glad I sold all my Apple stock when they reached that high of 18."
Jobs is an insane, megalomanial leader of a corporation led by more fools. Not that Apple doesn't do good things -- the Macintosh is an incredible computer and I loved mine. But I bowed to economics and bought a less expensive PC (I prefer Linux or BeOS, thank you).
Translation: I've heard that Steve Jobs runs a tight ship, and forces his employees to work towards a common goal, and to be productive. It must suck to work where you have to earn your paycheck. Since I don't have a paycheck to worry about, I couldn't afford anything but this leftover PII doorstop, and whatever free OS I could find to run on it."
This possible move to the Crusoe processor may be the sign of intelligence: Emulating the G4 in a cheaper and less power-hungry processor == Less expensive G4 == Cheaper Macs == More consumers buying your expensive hardware.
Translation: "I don't know much about the G4, but I assume it uses electricity just as inefficiently as a Pentium. I wonder if I can get a free Crusoe. Too bad I flunked economics."
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I don't know if the porting story is true, but Mac OS Rumors has a spotty record. Many of its leads often seem to be lifted from elsewhere, the rumor reliability is poor, and usually so late as to be useless, besides which its articles are so filled with bogus predictions using words such as "likely", "possibly", "predicted", and longs chains of if-then scenarios as to completely obliterate any authoritative source that might have passed a true lead on in the first place.
You will be issued one grain of salt apiece.
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