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If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?
An anonymous reader asks: "This question was posted on Ask Slashdot about a week ago: 'If Mac OS X Came to x86, Would You Switch?' This makes me ask why not have Windows run on PowerPC? Windows/PPC would not necessarily have to run on Apple hardware, or at least not exclusively on it. I'm sure their friends at IBM and Motorola would be happy to provide chips to anyone that wanted to make computers to run this new OS. Microsoft could dust off the code from NT4/PPC, add some code from Virtual PC to get Windows/x86 compatibility, and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware." An additional question comes to mind, however: If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?
"You can't polish a turd"
No
Wouldn't Intel like the extra competition?
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
No.
[ check out my ruby book @ http://ww
Personally, if I was going to buy a mac, I would use the mac stuff with it.. I mean you are paying extra for the look and feel of being on a mac. If you are just gunna use windows, why not just buy a PC--if I'm not mistaken they are a fair bit cheaper.
Boxing Equipment Reviews
Oh, you're serious.
Sorry!
sig mind freed
Intel would start crying...
...pay more for hardware if you're going to run Windows anyway?
... if I want to run a crappy system on PPC architecture, I can simply fire up System 7. Windows not needed - Historical Mac software gives me all the crappy I need - peddle that filth elsewhere ...
The quality of Microsoft software combined with the cost-effective PPC hardware! Not to mention the compatibility!
Mac OS X is 90% of the reason I have PPC.
If Mac OS X was on x86 I'd have a x86.
Why would you run Windows on much more expensive hardware?
Intel would have to sit there and bear it, since Microsoft has more command of its market than Intel would. If you recall back around '98 Intel had been developing graphics software to encourage people to use more processor power, and Microsoft basically told them to stop since it wasn't Intel's place to write software... Microsoft basically threatened to stop developing for Intel, and since at that time AMD was starting to gain market share, this scared the shit out of them. Suffice it to say, Microsoft is the dominant player in the WinTel relationship.
yours,
kbs
even though microsoft will never switch winxp to PowerPC, hypothetically, I would switch.
The efficiency of the PowerPC architecture is very nice and since I don't depend on software other than a media player, mozilla and a large number of open-source tools, the binary incompatability won't be a problem.
I am in disbelief. Was the poster actually serious? Who would give a fuck?
I mean, those that use PPC (mostly Mac and PPC Linux users) use it becasue they don't want to use Windows. What conceivable reason would they have to switch to Windows? Hell, what reason would M$ have to port Windows to a platform where they know that no one will buy there product.
This is just dumb. Nothing to see here, move along.
Let's put expensive software on expensive hardware!
No. OS X is a great OS and I choose to run it in my PPC hardware (Powerbook). It fits my needs perfectly. I choose to run Windows on my gaming system (AMD CPU) and Linux on my servers. I don't see any advantage to running Windows on PPC hardware. I think the performance gain would be minimal to nonexistant over x86 with Windows, and the initial invest in hardware would be much more costly. I choose my OS based on my needs for that particular system. The platform it runs on is incidental.
It works. Don't do games on it, and don't run it with low memory. There are a few gotchas, but they're minimal. It's not as slow as you would want to believe, and it occasionally gets bogged down but it's tennable. It's like running on a 900mhz box when run on a ppc32/PowerBookG4. It costs a few bucks, and you still have to buy Norton or McAfee, etc. But it's otherwise as useful and harmless as XP. Oh, except you need to buy an XP license for it, too.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
MacOS is already superior ro Windows IMHO. And powerful x86 hardware is already much cheaper if you insist on running Windows. I don't see any incentive here... Didn't Microsft use to have an old version of NT that ran on the Alpha before?
I think most Windows users (myself included) don't care what hardware they use, as long as it's fast+cheap and all their apps/games run on it. I doubt that a PPC platform would be much faster/cheaper than x86 (even if you did magically manage to port Windows to it at full efficiency), and if it was, Intel/AMD would change so that it wasn't.
To sum up: I'd switch if there was a point. However there doesn't seem to be too many points.
The reason the OSX on x86 discussion came up is because people want the OS they think they want on the hardware they know they like. Asking a bunch of Linux nerds if they want to run the OS they don't like on the hardware they aren't entirely familiar with isn't going to provoke a huge discussion.
How many people run virtual pc on their macs as a coequal platform ?
Keep that crap off my G3! I wouldn't do it if they gave it away for free.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
... they say Bill Gates is in hysterics, can you knock it off with the weird jokes?
There was NT for the MIPS, Alpha and PPC, and they all failed miserably in the market. Windows users see no value in running on anything other than the volume-leading processor architecture. There's no value in it.
There isn't enought PPC production capacity to even supply 20% of the x86 market demand.
When I was in college (I'm a second-year grad student now) was right about when Apple starting producing the G4s and I thought, Wow, those machines rock. They look nice and they are super powerful. It's too bad I don't like the MacOS. When I got to grad school, I bought a Powerbook laptop and it was the best computer-buying decision I ever made. Once I actually sat down and spent some time with OS X, I realized that I liked it much better than any flavor of Windows. So, no, I wouldn't switch, and I'm glad I spend the time to learn OS X instead.
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
I'm left to wonder what benefits would prompt anybody to switch to PPC running windows. I know the benefit for users running OSX on x86 would be the increased range of hardware for users to select from, but is there anything special PPC has over x86 that would warrent such a switch?
If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?
pffft.. Screw Intel, How would AMD react ?
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
This is only useful if you dual boot. I guess this is more likely to happen than OSX coming to x86, so it would be a happy medium between having both a PC and a Mac and having a single computer.
I am assuming that if a Mac user needs a Windows application to run on their machine they use something like Virtual PC. Otherwise, I wonder what the point would be of running Windows on a Mac or PowerPC machine when the folks that own those probably have a strong preference for a non-Windows OS.
http://www.busyweather.com/
This might just be the most dangerous Ask Slashdot post ever. It plays RIGHT into the anti-windowsism here :)
I remember asking a computer teacher in middle school why the programs on the Macs wouldn't work on the PC's, and I was just told "Thats the way it is" Here we are, within striking distance of program/platform interoperability and independence.
Just slap your favor flav of linux on whatever system you want, forget Windows, forget MacOS. And forget vendors that wont follow the lead to platform interoperability.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Strangest. Ask Slashdot. Ever.
Once more, people are overlooking an oft ignored market base:
Masochists.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
So I can run Windows, on a Mac, running Virtual Machine, which in turn will emulate OSX! Genius I tell you!
We all live in a #FFFF00 submarine...
People are going to switch to Windows from OS X. Oh sure. They'll probably line up around the Best Buy at midnight. Yeah. Uh huh.
Dell makes an iPod. Sony makes an iPod. Windows is trying to be OS X. Microsoft has a music store. HP licenses the iPod. Hmmm.
Yep. Everybody wants to be Apple.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
would you root for them?
No. Just no. This OS would have all the bad things about Mac OS (no x86 software will run), with none of the good (iApps, UNIXness, Cocoa, etc). Sure, the developers could just recompile, but what about all your legacy apps? VPC doesn't really cut it. Sorry, but this idea will never happen, especially considering Microsoft's devotion to legacy app support.
You probably don't.
The biggest thing Windows has going for it is the massive number of existing applications. But a different processor architecture would require porting. But unless the platform catches on, noone is going to port.
So why would anyone switch? This is pretty much the fate of the old Windows-Alpha port. Very few apps got ported (PuTTY is one of the few I know). Besides, most people were using Alphas as server machines, for which the software they needed was already available on the competing Unixes.
So.. no.. I don't think Windows could ever haul itself off the x86 platform. Too many legacy apps which are x86-specific.
Otherwise the processors are going to cost more than x86 chips and there'll be no point. We don't run windows because we have the superior architecture you know.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I like the unix functionality on mac osx. cygwin doesn't cut it for me. I like the OSX UI more than the free window managers. Beside, I doubt Windows on the mac would have very much support from software vendors.
this is like asking if you would like dogshit any better if it were spread on a ritz cracker instead of a graham cracker.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
But it would be cool to dual-boot OSX and a WinOS, perhaps for gaming or whatever...
Who doesn't like free music?
As mentioned numerous times already in this thread, OS-X is arguably a much better OS than Windows, and I doubt that most OS-X users would switch from it to Windows. Again, especially without Apple's support.
http://amishthrasher.blogspot.com/
Ok, so in 1996, NT4 came out on x86, which was the first step that Microsoft really took into making Windows a real OS.
It ran on PPC, Intel, Alpha and MIPS. That's a lot of architectures. Now, think about it: One of the things about Microsoft is, generally speaking, they have no soul. If they make money selling a product, they'll sell it. Now, that's not to say they won't STOP selling any product that's not making money (*cough*XBOX*cough*) just to drag their competition to the ground, but they also won't turn down cash for ideological reasons.
The fact that when Windows 2000 came out reflects that no one really used NT 4 on anything other than Intel hardware. Now, this might be because the hardware developers never really were 100% behind MS, or it might be because someone that was shelling out cash for an Alpha or a MIPS workstation (but I do remember there being a drop-in MIPS chip that would work in a socket.... 5? Pentium board?) wanted a better OS, or any other reason.
The fact is, you can say that PPC might be a faster processor platform today, with a higher bus speed and better performance per clock, but its close. Very close. I don't think MS would be able to polish a PPC version of Windows as much as they have the Intel version, meaning you might take a relative performance penalty... and there isn't a price advantage in PPC over x86.
So yeah, the previous failure, combined with the pitfalls of a new version listed above make a pretty strong case for "no."
I might try it for a bit as a novelty, but there's just no good reason to switch from MacOS or Linux/PPC to WindowsPPC.
Seriously, porting to PPC, or any other platform for that matter, would take away Window's biggest advantages: their wide software and hardware support due to their virtual monoply.
Why would anyone want to use windows on an architecture where there are far less windows apps then mac or linux apps? I suppose MS might soften that blow by bundling an integrated version of VirtualPC to run x86 software, but it would still mean a significant speed hit.
I suppose PPCs do have advantages for certain kinds of calculations over current x86 stuff, but if you really want to do that kind of stuff you can allready do it on mac or linux, so there's not much of an opening for MS there.
And for everything else you'd do under windows, you can allready do things just as well on x86 hardware..
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Windows on a PPC platform would create an interesting conundrum. The programs on x86 Windows would have to be, at the very least, recompiled for PPC hardware. For once, Mac users (of whom I am one from time to time) could finally claim that all the software was designed for the Mac OS, as none of the existing Windows software would actually work on this Windows on PPC OS.
Because combining Virtual PC with a souped up WinNT on PPC core wouldn't really be any better than VPC with OS X.
The only advantage that I see is the possibility of dual booting. This would solve the age old problem of "not having enough games on the mac". That being said, you can see why microsoft would NOT want to port it to the PPC, as it would only give them a paltry increase in sales, while making the mac platform that much more enticing. And let's face it, microsoft has ZERO control over the devlopment over apple's hardware.
I know there are other PPC vendors than apple, but it's the one we all think about when discussing these "port this OS to that architecture" questions.
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
Would I like to run windows on cheap, competitive hardware or slower, more expensive, older hardware wow let me see
I can equate this to those people exclusively running Linux on G4 desktops, etc
You are obviously aware that they tried to make a go of NT on several other hardware platforms already. In addition to PowerPC there was also MIPS and Alpha. If I remember correctly, MS was dropped by one vendor and the other two were dropped by MS. There just wasn't enough of a demand for NT on workstations to pay for the development even with the cash cow of Windows on x86 PC's. So I guess my question to you is if they failed before what makes you think they could do well now?
It would be silly to run out and adopt Windows for the PPC, just as OSX on x86. For instance, none of your current Windows applications would run on the PPC box, just as none of your Mac's OSX applications would run on an x86. Developers would have to retool their applications for the other processors. This costs time and money, which are not available to most companies. Personally, I would rather them invest more time in porting their applications over to Linux. At least this would offer a clear benefit to the market.
Personally, I feel these moves would do nothing but damage to IT. It would require more support and more development work for no real benefit.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Windows users would enjoy big a big boost in security because most of the exploits for holes in the OS wouldn't run on the new architecture.
The bad news:
None of their apps or device drivers would run either.
(OK, maybe most of the apps would run under emulation, but that's never going to be particularly fast or trouble-free.)
The NT4 disks came with Windows for x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PPC.
It didn't succeed then, it sure wouldn't now.
OTOH, I wouldn't mind if I could get a commodity PPC platform to run, say, Yellow Dog Linux on. The x86 architecture um, how to put this delicately, leaves something to be desired.
-- Alastair
I would probably put it on a test system...No I would not switch (doubt I ever would leave Slackware)but it would be fun to tinker with (I always enjoy going to the Apple stores to play around with their UNIX-Like systems)...but the first thing I would do is get a real mouse (regardless of platform). Eric
Why?
Really, why was this story even posted? The barrier for entry to Windows is already lower on Intel than PPC. 99% of people buy PPC to get MacOS and have made a decision to stay away from Windows. Maybe for some obscure server configuration or something - I don't know. Ewww. I think I just felt my PowerBook shudder.
It's like going to church and asking the congregation if, next week, they would like to hold a Satanic mass and worship the devil rather than the usual Sunday drill.
There used to be a version of Windows that ran on PPc PREP; it was Windows NT 3.1 (3.5?) fo PPC. It was discontinued years ago because of its' overwhelming popularity and availability of hardware.
I've got your sig, right here.
NT4 ran on PPC, up until SP3 (the last install discs with PPC support were SP3 based).
Nobody switched, and that was in the days of the gratuitously unstable System 7.5 and Mac OS 7.6, which tended to crash if you looked at them wrong.
I suspect that BeOS has more users than NT for PPC, at least for Macs. And neither OS ran on G3's or later CPU's.
Now, with OS X and VPC, why the hell would I want to run Windows of all things on a Mac? other way 'round I can see, especially with WINE support or something similar (like Mac-on-Linux) to get Windows software compatibility. But even then, I'd probably stick to PPC, as the hardware is generally better quality and definitely better designed.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
This was actually the plan back around 1995. Apple and IBM were working on something called "CHRP" (Common Hardware Reference Platform) which was to be a design spec for a computer that could run MacOS (System 7 at the time, but moving to System 8 (the real System 8, Copland!) soon after), OS/2, AIX and Windows NT.
You may recall that at around this time, Intel entered the motherboard market and for a short time kicked the Taiwanese out on their butts. Hence, the Taiwanese were looking seriously at building CHRP motherboards and systems. Had Apple completed the spec on time and gotten it out there, things might have been quite different.
As it happened, internal politics killed CHRP inside Apple, IBM got tired of the nonsense and Microsoft put a bullet into the head of NT/PPC.
That a horde of tens of thousands of viruses would leave the Windows partition to invade my Mac OS X partition, where life is definitely more attractive. A little bit like the yearly spring break assault on Mexico.
All about me
If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?
They would panic, of course ! The whole x86 architecture is ugly as hell, and the IBM PC architecture even more so, so low level programmers would propably open a bottle or two and party if we could ditch our x86's for PPC's :-)
The 8086/8088 (to which even the Pentium 4 tries to be backwards compatible with to some degree) was a hack at Intel to get a 16 bit processor to market fast and was meant to have a very short lifespan. Intel was developing a way better processor then (can't remember its number, could anyone fill it in ?). So they took the Z80 processor and extended it. You see the relation even today in the register namings.
I wasn't aware how much the x86 really sucks until I began programming the Motorolla M68000 in the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis as a hobby a few weeks ago. That processor is about as old as the 8086/8088 but has so many cool and useful features that the x86's doesn't have even today (like the eight address registers and the postincrement/predecrement features which make it trivial to set up eight stacks at once, just to name two features).
And then IBM came along. They wanted to get a "cheap" computer to market fast, and used Intels 8086/8088. And like the processor, the whole IBM PC was meant to have a short lifespan.
Unfortunately the PC became a success, and so its lifespan had to be expanded artificially and backward compability had to be put in. This is true for the Intel processors as well as the whole PC architecture. As time passed by more and more things were added without really fixing the underlying problems.
I think computers could be cheaper and more powerful if we'd had a better mainstream processor and computer architecture, one that was meant to live long and thus was better designed. But this is just a dream, I'm afraid...
Why would I leave my Amiga 3000 [m68030] with Workbench to go to a PPC with windows?
Seriously!
The Amiga will never die.
Video Production Support
I'm sure their friends at IBM and Motorola would be happy to provide chips to anyone that wanted to make computers to run this new OS.
You're making it sound like IBM is really eager for someone to ask for their PPC processors. Well, guess what? Apple has been practically begging IBM for enough PPC processors for their computers, and the processors were in such short supply that they had to repeatedly delay critical product launches for many months. It happened with the new G5 Imac, and it happened with the bigger G5s.
I know that WindowsNT ran on the Alpha and Mips. Didn't it run on the PPC also.
I hate to say it but WindowsNT was not a hit on the Alpha or the Mips chips. I would say the PPC is no different. Not to mention that OS/X has a huge software base advantage over the mythical WindowXP for the PPC. Not to mention that the OS/X system is as good if not better than WindowsXP
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There was a port of Windows NT to the PPC platform, as well of the Alpha. It was such a miserable failure that WinNT Alpha looked like a roaring success by comparisson.
So, no, no one did care when Windows came to the PPC last time, so I doubt they'd give a flying fuck now, either.
processing... HELL NO!
Now, why do I have a VERY strange feeling that this topic will generate the highest number of M$ flames, ridicules, putdowns... since... SCO turned to the darkside (before that, since M$ came out with Win 95).
Just a feeling...really.
heh +100 insightful
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
And after I start running Windows on my Mac, I think I'll outfit my Fiat with chrome wheels, spoiler, and a fart pipe!
...I would be switching to the same operating system (including its faults) on different hardware, being forced to emulate all of my current applications? Can someone give me a good reason to?
You can't polish a turd
Oh yes you can! See?
And I remember on the old Ripley's show (circa 80's) a farmer that made jewelry out of chicken droppings.
R(k)
and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware
Apple has regular builds of it's code OS, Darwin, on both Intel and PPC hardware. This is available to anyone here.
It's been said that Apple still build all of their apps on Intel-based Darwin, therefore keeping an eye on portability, while giving them a chance to see where optimisation could break other platforms.
Apple had to change processor in the past and wants to keep it's options open, this time around. Besides, don't forget Mac OS X is basically a souped-up OpenStep, wich ran on both 68K, PPC and Intel hardware. (Oh yeah... Sun hardware too for a while).
Windows WAS on PPC and MIPS (NT 4.0 ws devloped on MIPS in fact). No apps, no one cared. I dont see this having changed. I wouldn't switch for the same reason I've not sitched Windows in favor of MacOS, Solaris, IRIX etc if it wont run my Apps of choice its not usable.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The .Net CLR works on PPC. We are getting closer to the point where all our programs will run on any CPU.
I'm not too sure how that will work given the new power architecture but I did read that (I work for IBM)
I've been looking everywhere for more on the windows virtualization since then and have not found anything on it... perhaps a fellow
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Reading everyone's comments about PowerPC sucking makes me realize that most of these people have never had the pleasure of taking a masters level Organization and Architecture class.. because if people truely understood the power of a RISC processor and its simplicity and superior design.. they'd dump CISC in a minute. The fact remains.. intel could never shake the 8086 CISC precedent.. and it will forever remain backwards compatibe to 1980's technology... seeing a horribly inefficient CISC pipeline makes me want to cry. Branch Hazard! Bubble! Data Hazard! Flush or glorious 16 stage Pipeline! errrrrrr... Hazard! Hazard! Hazard!!
I totally agree ! The whole x86 processor architecture looks like Frankensteins Monster: butt ugly, as more and more features/instructions were added but still lacking nice and powerful features other architectures sponsor for years now...
The best thing Intel and AMD could do is throw the whole x86 architecture into the trashbin, sit down and develop a whole new processor.
windows on ppc?
the only way that's going to happen is xbox2.
would i use it? my manager said all microsoft products should be taken away from me, i said please take them now!!
so NO!
why would moving the platform make windows any better?
its time to go get your head seen to before your brain goes pop
Have you used it? For any extended period of time?
I find it to be a lot more userfriendly and intuitive. Expose rocks, the abilty to close apps and other such things while doing the equivalent of "alt-tab" is another great feature. It doesn't necessarily get in my way at all, there are quirky things that do get to me, but all in all the enormous number of small tiny features are what seperate it for me. Once i use it for awhile on my powerbook I hate using my windows pc... it just doesn't feel as, useful to me.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
Microsoft could dust off the code from NT4/PPC, add some code from Virtual PC to get Windows/x86 compatibility, and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware."
.NET has been created to solve? Same OS & Apps running on different platforms?
Isn't this what
Doh!
The biggest question that MS would ask is "why". ie. How would it hurt them to keep on their current x86 platforms? The only area where I can see non-x86 making a significnat impact is with low power (wattage) devices. For these, MS would likely back a new ARM-based platform.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
NT 3.00+ (at least) came for i386[+], MIPS, PPC and Alpha. MIPS and PPC didn't have enough interested buyers to maintain the platform. Alpha held out a bit longer and actually had some followers. Microsoft wasn't stupid, they lost money on the platforms, saw no way to recover it and cancelled non x86 NT. Consider that Microsoft's Xbox2 developer systems are Macintosh G5s with customized NT kernels. It's not like that was hard.
According to rumor, the AIM alliance was formed because Motorola wanted to learn from IBM how to better serve Apple. Apple wanted to have a hand in their next architecture and wanted to get some of the performance from IBM. IBM, everybody understood, was going to take over the world with OS/2 beige boxen running PPC -- this plan changed to NT beige boxen running PPC. But in the 1992/1993 timeframe, when x86 was weakest (just before Pentium), even IBM couldn't muster the market to ditch backwards compatibility. The PowerPC 615 was behind schedule, power hungry and had some legal problems (fundamentally, I don't think it was strategic -- Apple learned how hard it was to get programmers to program native PPC code when they could stick with 68k and have it emulated well enough).
To answer your question: Nobody would buy PPC Windows, because they didn't. There's no backwards compatibility, no program base, and these days nobody actually knows what system they're running on anyway. If you want compute cycles, you either need an Athlon (faster than hell memory access), Itanic (faster than hell double precision float) or Power (8-32 CPUs in one system). If you want a Windows interface, you don't care what you have because the processor wastes too much time waiting for you.
It was a close race. Unfortunately, the ballot boxes weren't stuffed well enough. The final answer is in... NO!
My Systems
And the quality and polish of Apple's hardware is the other 10%. The processor architecture is of zero concern, except maybe as it pertains to battery life and heat.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Considering the new Mac OS has a heart of BSD, which is already ported to x86, and some of its apps (Safari) also have a heart from apps already ported to x86. I expect an Apple port to x86 hardware would take a bit less effort.
Now, getting apps to run on this is another story.....
The windows code has come so far from the NT core that I expect the MS porting effort ot be much higher. But, MS does have more money and developers so, this may not equal more time.
OTOH, why not use an OS already ported to both of these platforms, as well as many others. Perhaps Linux or BSD. Then you can have an OS and apps on both and still be able to transfer your docs.
Then again, why not pick the OS/Platform that meets your needs the best.
Perhaps I don't really see the benefit of porting two crappy OS's to more platforms (Thats my trollbait line).
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
I have no idea, but recall seeing that on the back a t-shirt around '97.
Considering Intel chips are outperforming IBM PPC chips... I would say they and AMD would laugh and keep putting out new processors. I could see reason for somthing like CherryOS where you could run a 'debatebly' superior OS to better hardware. IF you are desperate for a RISC computer go get an SGI workstation.
Any performance gain (if any) would be removed by the fact that everything is emulated. So what you are asking is for Microsoft to spend money on software that runs slow, and costs way to much just so some nerd thinks it is cool to run. I am just hoping that Microsoft makes operating systems that works on one architecture, not two.
mnewberg.com
The main question is, switching to Windows from what?
If I have a PPC and I have to run Linux, I might switch. I REALLY like Linux, but the fact is that Windows "just works" a little bit more, and while I do most of my gaming on consoles, if the games appeared, I would seriously look at buying a copy. For all our complaining, Windows does have a lot going for it. I could always dual boot anyways. A true copy of Office could come in handy.
If I have a PPC and it's a Mac with OS X... I don't see why ANYONE would. It's got the great design of the Mac and stability and CLI goodness of Unix. And OS X already HAS Office, so that point is moot. The only thing that I could think of would be the games, and Apple could push more on that (better hardware (GFX cards not 6-12 months behind x86) would help). Dual boot, MAYBE.
From Linux, decent chance. From OS X, nope.
That's how I see it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Why would Windows on PPC make me want to switch? It's cost me a lot of work (and some money) to switch away from Windows the first time, why would I go back?
Blech!
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The question is whether you like your OS to be totally promiscuous. Microsoft has built an empire with a totally promiscuous OS strategy running on any hardware that comes along. Apple's business strategy relies upon reving their OS faster than Microsoft's OS. The end game for Apple is to produce a superior OS in feature, reliability and productivity at the end of every rev cycle.
Promiscuity adds the QC burden of playing with every Tom, Dick and Harry piece of hardware. Apple would rather release a *discrete* promiscuous OS version of MacOS X for a given market segment than open their doors to the world of hardware hell.
For the Open Source inclined, promiscuity provides freedom of choice. For Apple promiscuity provides new marketshare at no expense to its existing base. Discrete promiscuity delivers a hardware spec for targeted customers. Much better business case from Apple's point of view.
For one thing, Darwin/x86 already exists. The range of device drivers is limited, but it already exists, you could run it today if you wanted (assuming you have x86 hardware handy, and relatively unremarkable peripherals that need supporting). It's not just the kernel either, it's essentially a complete, if somewhat sparse, BSD distro.
That would leave only the closed source part of OS X to port. Basically of this is user programs and libraries - file browsers and text editors and preference managers and such. That's not the sort of stuff you typically code in assembler. There were rumours a while back that Apple was actually building the entirety of OS X on x86 every once in a while, just as a sanity check - to make sure that no hardware specific code was creeping into the higher levels of software where it doesn't belong.
The same cannot be said of Windows. Work on the ppc kernel was presumably more or less abandoned since NT4 (which was, what, 11 years ago?). And as for the higher level utilities and libraries, one somehow gets the impression that they're considerably cobwebbier than the equivalent OS X code. Hardware abstractions have probably been broken in a lot of places, all of which would need fixing, over the years since the original notepad was written...
And, as for the overall premise of abandoning OS X for Windows/PPC - are you kidding? People who want to run Windows, are running it. The only ones using an OS they don't want, are doing so because they thought (rightly or wrongly) that x86 hardware was the only affordable way to go.
I mean, there might be the odd MS zealot who got an iMac for Christmas, and can't sell it because Auntie Anne's feelings would be hurt, but other than that... People who just buy a random computer because they don't know what they want don't just somehow end up with a Mac - they end up with the beigeish PC the greasy man at UltraCompuMaxiLand recommended.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
No, I don't think so. The reason OSX does so well now, is because its stability is quite good. In Anandtech's review (and my own experience), OSX and Windows had about the same amount of crashes and lockups, but OSX could recover from most where Windows sometimes could not.
That said... Windows runs on THOUSANDS of configurations. OSX is designed to work with specific hardware. If OSX started supporting multiple chipsets, RAM, video cards, etc... it would not be NEARLY as stable as it is today -- that's just a simple fact. And I'm not saying it can't be done... but Apple simply doesn't have the resources to do it. They don't have the manpower nor the capital to start supporting drivers for each piece of hardware on the market, like Microsoft does.
However, if a way was found around the budget and human constraints for Apple (perhaps other capital, more investment, etc), then this could be feasible in the future. And to that end, would be great for the end-users because it would cause both companies to innovate and develop software APIs that are friendly to developers of all kinds. For me, a Mac is useless because I am a heavy gamer and not much else -- and for that, the Mac lags behind in both variety and support of games. If however, Apple's OSX API was better to develop for than say, Direct X, and allowed more functionality and less code -- developers could make it happen.
And that's what I'd LOVE to see. I don't care about it being Mac or Windows -- if it doesn't play my games, it isn't worth shit. Period.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I have a PPC laptop in my basement that was an IBM Thinkpad, jointly made by IBM and Motorola.
It has a BIOS that comes up by Motorola, similar to what they had on their desktop "PowerStack" line of PPC based PC's.
I believe the processor is a 100 Mhz PPC or so, the rest of the thing is almost exactly like a standard Thinkpad 655-750.
It still has the NT4 O/S on the HD that Motorola and IBM jointly developed, and it still does nothing useful.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Well, I've used it for extended periods of time.
One of my research labs uses Mac OSX exlusively. I've nothing against it, except that personally I find the UI non-intuitive.
The quirky features just gets in the way of getting my work done. Btw, am not too fond of Windows either, but sometimes a clean basic Windows Install is not as bad as it's made out to be.
I guess it's just a question of what you are used to.
NT4 did come to PowerPC Reference Platform, and nobody cared. If it came to New World Mac or compatible, some people might dual boot it, if and only if there were some software -- but it's probably easier in the long run for companies to just port (our outsource the porting of) the software to Mac OS X, which in my experience is the best OS out there at this time. As far as PowerPC architecture in general, it's got some advantages over i386, but on the other hand, I'm not sure if they're worth having to either recompile everything or use emulation -- which would probably result in something kind of like Virtual PC for Mac (which is mainly for stuff like Access and can't run games too well, evidently).
And the reason for Windows on PPC would be what exactly? There definitely is no business case, and I can't even find much of a technical benefit. Why would hardware manufactures even want to switch or support multiple hardware lines for multiple "Windows PCs"? Makes no sense from any angle I can see.
I believe that Mac OS X is generally a better OS than Windows XP, but it's not really the main reason a mac is better than a windows PC. The main reason is that the full product is controlled and delivered by a single company.
Let's see -- do I want to trade an innovative and secure OS that never crashes for one that is derivative, insecure and buggy?
I'll get back to you on that...
-ch
OK, so what if MS put windows on PPC? Are the vendors of all the apps you're going to use comile for the PPC platform? Does the C# and .Net mumbo-jumbo nullify this?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
More like "if Windows went to PPC, would we switch". None of the MacOS (or ported Linux) programs would work, so we'd reduce a useful Mac to junk, unless we switched to Windows programs. And why would Windows users want a more expensive, unusual platform that offers benefits only under MacOS, even assuming the Windows port included HW drivers for "Mac" PPC peripherals? The Apple warranty won't apply, and where's the Windows/PPC support? Nah, the "WinTel" (including clones like AMD) platform seems stuck in their marriage made in hell forever.
--
make install -not war
...and I'll switch from Windows. I've wanted to for some time. Oh yeah, and make the games that I want to play for OSX too. I figure while I'm wishing upon a shooting star I might as well ask for the whole ball of wax. :P
What's a sig? Pete Brubaker
...I am a mac enthusiast, but if I could run both Operating Systems I would.
"Yeah, yeah, windows sucks!"
"Heh, heh, you said 'windows'."
"Shut up, buttmunch!'
I drank what? -- Socrates
Win32 actually ran great. The machine was fast and stable. Primary problem:
No applications. Same problem Linux has.
Blogging because I can...
What kind a of a sick sonofabitch roots for the Yankees?
-Waldo Jaquith
Windows on x86 could be the crappiest computing experience of all time, and I still wouldn't switch away from it, so long as they've got one thing:
Hardware and software compatibility.
Compatibility is king - end of story. I'll follow the hardware and software I want to use - the actual OS or architecture are irrelevant. If, all of a sudden, all the apps I wanted to use were being optimized for OS X on PPC, and were going to stay that way long-term, I'd have no choice but to switch.
If I changed either my architecture or my operating system to one other than the dominant platform, my applications would lose functionality, take less-than-full advantage of my hardware, or not be able to run at all. That's unacceptable. So, I'm staying put.
ahh... no.
that is the basic answer.
Would you have sex with margaret tatcher?
that is the smart-ass answer
Is bill gates cooler than steven jobs?
this is the functional answer.
your answer will says whether you 'switch' or not.
Sorry
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Like any linux user, I would only run Windows when I had to (i.e. games).
It would be interesting to see how many more games/apps would be ported to PPC if there were Windows PPC.
"Sure, sure... BUT WHAT IF?!"
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Windows, and an unsatisfying Linux desktop experience was the whole reason I left x86 -- why would I want to bring that horror to PPC?
The only reason I have to run windows or even get near it is 3d apps and games. And if they resurrected the PPC port of Windows NT (hello, NT 3.x! They killed it for a reason!), there's still no compelling reason for Discreet to port MAX. And Maya's already available for OS X.
.exes that would), you'd still have the hideous optimization problems that pretty much every PC game in the last three years suffers from. You can't upgrade a mac the same way you can upgrade a PC, and while half of the G4s and all the G5s might be able to run the OS and games decently, that's less than 10% of the userbase. :P
After that comes games, and I doubt any developer would compile two versions... hell, 95% of game developers don't even bother with ports to non-Windows OSsen on the SAME ARCH.
Assuming WinXP for PPC was released tomorrow and for some reason Doom 3 and Counterstrike and everything else ran on it (or released recompiled
Ultimately, people keep whining about how Apple Should Release OS X For x86 because they want to have their cake and eat it to- they want the nice OS and they want their games and their dirt cheap vending machine hardware.
Obviously, it's one or the other- cheap hardware decent games and shit OS, or a decent OS on moderately priced hardware with jack shit for games.
Personally, I want PPC binaries for games that have been ported to linux. Isn't portability one of the advantages of the system?
The processor architecture is of zero concern, except maybe as it pertains to battery life and heat.
Does this really mean the chorus of 'RISC is better' ignorance from Macheads is over??
Come on, let's have a RISC vs. CISC fight for good old times.
I'll champion the Microchip PIC processor (RISC).
You champion the Motorola 68HC11 processor (CISC).
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
Who still has that windows 2000 for Dec Alpha pre-release build (like 10 builds before release or something like that) that was canned because that compaq was in bed with Intel for the home PC and workstation market?
Some readers might be new in the OS world, but there was a time when NT was on MIPS, Dec Alpha and Intel processors. There's an historical reason for the "Wintel" word.
So all this to say, would I switch? Hell no, history has shown that it's not always the best hardware (amiga to name an example) that wins. And besides, porting drivers. apps, windows hacks, kernel workarounds, and all the nightmares that I can't think of, I wouldn't even dare think of the logistics of that would imply at microsoft and on their top partners.
Remember when win2000 came out, driver support was a nightmare, manufacturers would say "well this is not a home OS, this joystick or that sound card (I remember with my soundblaster live) won't be supported... (and when it was, drivers weren't multi processor-aware, blablabla). I would imagine that it would be the same kind of problems for PPC ports, and all this for what? faster rendering time? some high-end renderers are already ported supported on different OSes, faster Office? (err?) faster net? what are the benefits? cost? x86 systems are almost shipping inside cereal boxes nowadays.
just my C$0.02
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
...ruin a perfectly good architecture with a POS operating system because...?
PGA
Is that true? Why are nerds everywhere not calling for mass migration to this utopian open hardware?
I'm not joking, this sounds cool. I don't want to start a cisc vs risc war, but if this is for real, why don't people push for this cool, efficient, open hardware? Otherwise I'll just have to buy a PPC Amiga.
sustainable living
Consider that Microsoft can pull a plug on Office for X and you will clearly see that Apple will not try to move teir OS to the x86. Also I think that Microsoft will not invade PPC market just beacuse they can barely get it right with x86 what makes you think that they will go after 10% market share of PPC? I think things will be exactly where they are for the next year or so.
Of course not, me neither...
So I have several iX86 and several PPC and all of them run Mandrake...
Ummmm, didn't that happen already? I could have sworn I had a PPC that came with Windows NT on it. It had those nifty dual 604e processors. Apparently, there wasn't enough interest the first time around...
Yeah, but y'know why the Yankees (and in your scenario, Astros) always win? "'Cuz everybody's too busy looking at the stripes."
I run PPC, and let me tell you... If M$ started allowing fat binaries out of .NET for PPC and a significant number of programs started appearing for PPC, and they made a version of Windows that could be used inside OS X much like OS 9 or X11 are, I'd actually give money to the beast for the first time in a long while.
Now for why it won't happen... Companies would stop programming for the Mac. They'd only program for Windows, saying, "well, it runs on Windows for PPC, so get that!", and then the entire Apple platform would die out. Then Microsoft would be a near-total monopoly again (except for Linux being there, of course...) and then they might actually lose in an anti-trust case. Microsoft would then be broken up and slowly die against Linux. Well, slowly, but less slowly than they already are. This situation alone will prevent NT for PPC from ever coming back.
The only reason I could see for making the switch to PPC is exactly what MS is doing with the Xbox. Embedded software. The PPC is a much better general purpose embedded/mobile processor than anything Intel makes (I know the StrongARM people will flame me here) :-D
interesting ONLY because of the following points.
1)Windows biggest problem with stability is the vast number of hardware devices it must support. Mac hardware is closed up tight so the driver base is quite small.
2)Windows biggest security issue again is the large codebase to allow copmatability with numerous hardware and software(BIOS) configurations and that 'bloat' makes the codebase very difficult to maintain.
3)PPC processors(or RISC in general) are very good at emulating CISC chips, a G4 or G5 can match the performance of a similarly clocked P4 in emulation(a 1.8Ghz G4 can emulate a 1.8Ghz P4), though a 1.8Ghz P4 is quite slow by todays standards it is easily fast enough for a compatability layer allowing unmodified x86 win32 code to run in an appears-to-be-native mode(users wouldn't know the difference)
OK, now here are the issues.
1)Windows has a lot of bloat that would carry over to PPC simply because removing the bloat isn't cost-effective.
2)MacOSX is a strong OS and their is little reason to run Windows on a machine that runs OSX well.
3)MacOSX can run virtualPC quite well, and have a great WindowsXP desktop on the mac already, that performs very nicely.
....Microsoft's Xbox2 hardware uses PPC, and currently M$ is developing a port of WinCE for PPC for the purposes of XBox2. Now, seeing as that the OS architectures are (somewhat) similar, this idea of "Windows on PPC" isn't too far from reality -UJ
I use Windows at work, where I have no choice. I use my Mac at home, where I do. Why would I want to bring Windows into my house?
You wouldn't want to run Windows on PPC architecture when you've got two very cheap, more powerful architectures available, x86 and AMD64.
OSX won't ever appear outside of PPC for a lot of reasons. Firstly, the cash that Apple gets from hardware sales.
Secondly, By far the biggest problem with x86 based PC's is also it's greatest strength. The sheer customisability - an almost infinite combination of hardware that can be tailored to any use. OSX isn't ready for that. I'm not sure if it could even handle adapting to so many different kinds of hardware. Certainly, Apple has no interest in spending money to develop support for all that hardware. Apple isn't Microsoft.
If you look at it in another way, the Apple Mac is just a console. It's an XBox in a different package. The hardware is controlled and proprietary. The software is controlled and proprietary. You void your warranty if you open the box. You can get some upgrades, but only ones that Apple approves. The only difference is that you can use it to photoshop instead of just playing games.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Believe it or not, such a business proposal really happened. There's a rare Power Macintosh (Quadra model or something) that came with an Intel chip as an expansion to run Windows 3.1.
How did the big plan work out? Few people wanted it. Almost nobody used it. So, to answer your question, a big fat "NO".
Forget PowerPC, right now MS can't even bring out a port of Windows to the 64-bit extensions (called AMD64) of x86 on time! The 64-bit extensions are just a minor upgrade from the existing 32-bit x86 codebase; Microsoft was given the earliest access to AMD's hardware -- at least a year before it was put on the market. What was the result? Well, SuSE Linux had an AMD64 version available the first day the Opteron AMD64 processor was released. Now there are several distros for AMD64 from Red Hat, and others too, as well as BSD ports. By the end of this year there will even be a version of Sun's Solaris OS also available for Opteron, even though Sun started porting its OS about a year later. What about Microsoft? Well, it's now almost two years since Opteron was first put on sale, and Microsoft is still in beta-testing with its Windows port!
So does anyone seriously think with this level of incompetence, that Microsoft will be able to port a version to PPC all that quickly?Slashdot has been getting popular enough that we have to feign some nonpartisanship for all the Windows dweebs.
If Windows XP was a shoe it would be like a orthopedic shoe; useful, but no one should really wants to wear it. Go figure.
Quack, quack.
Were you running OS X? 9.2 was only made to improve classic in OS X. You weren't running 9.2 on its own were you?
No, I coded up a stack of PPC assembly on my mac last weekend, and damn, it felt good to have all those extra registers and nice, simple instructions.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
You know, this question really doesn't have anything to do with Apple. It's a hypothetical question based on a processor architecture, and not necessarily Macintosh-based computers. Both IBM and Freescale sell Power PC microprocessors, and technically any motherboard manufacturer can design a board for a PowerPC, and buy the CPUs from either manufacturer, much as how they currently design boards for either Intel or AMD processors.
Why? Well, because the Power PC architecture doesn't have all of the nasty cruft that Intel-based systems have. Like IRQ nastiness that people keep designing around. Or the fact that they boot up in real mode, and need to be switched into protected mode as part of the boot process. Or all of the various BIOS limitations, like the fact you can't address beyond the first 1023 cylinders of a hard drive during IPL. Of the . Or the x86 instruction set and registers.
The cost of this cruft is both cost and power. As cheap as Intel-based hardware is (due to the economies of scale), it could be cheaper if it didn't have to contain hardware and code to work around the many limitations of the architecture. It would also be quite a bit faster than it currently is.
Windows on Power PC would be a boon for users, if either (or both) IBM and Freescale could ramp up production sufficiently, and if every Intel Windows user were willing to give up their current software investments (or if such a Windows system run Intel binaries).
Of course, Windows itself would still suck :).
The things keeping people from making such a move aren't technical -- they're economic and social.
Myself, I'm composing this on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X. I have little or no desire to run Windows on any architecture. I doubt if you'd find too many existing Power PC users who wish they could run Windows as their core OS -- it's Windows users who should want to run to run their OS of choice on an affordable Power PC architecture.
Yaz.
I believe that the one solid merit of Windows is its compatibility, just like the customizability of Linux and BSD, and the user interface of Mac. If it was not avaliable, I see no reason to use Windows at all over Mac OS.
Duh, that's why I run FreeBSD.
Seriously, when the KDE is "industrial strength", there would be no need to move OS X. And that should be soon (please?)...
downloading nine critical security updates every month! No other OS gives me my money's worth of software like Windows. It's like getting a whole new OS every lunar cycle!
why would I buy a more expensive piece of hardware to run an inferior operating system like windows?
I second your opinion.
I recently bought a laptop with XP and the bells and whistles . I should say that its not too annoying, but Windows is pretty much the same from my old laptop running NT4. Things configure a bit easier, such as Network cards, and maybe the whole thing is more secure and stable now, but thats hardly a revolution in about 6 yrs time !. (Ok 4 yrs if you want to start from Win2k). I cant understand what Microsoft's legions of programmers are upto. And quite a few of the software that runs on XP, be it from Microsoft (such as office) or Norton Symantec, while being capable enough in terms of features, seem to bloat and take a sizable chunk of RAM and cpu cycles.
I dont think I am getting any better bang for the buck.
I installed Debian Linux on my desktop and the thing runs like a beauty.
Microsoft has gotten too big for its own good. Its a victim of its own success.
The XBox2, which is based on the G5 PPC, uses G5 PowerMacs with a specially modifed WinNT (XP Kernel maybe?) for game development.
I don't know why Microsoft decided to go with PPC, although I suppose it has to do with the Altivec vector unit and the fact that the G5 is a damn fine CPU, better for graphics, but it means that PPC G5's might very well become cheaper in the near future (at least the older one in the XBox2) and it means that MS would not have that much difficulty to port the rest of Windows to the PPC and it also means that game developers would have slightly less hassle and more experience developing for Mac OSX.
But would Microsoft actually port and sell the whole Windows over to PPC? I don't think so. Who would buy it? People who use PPC now use it because that's what Macs come with and what Mac OSX runs on. If they wanted to use Windows, they would buy a PC. I doubt that the entire software market would suddenly jump at this, given that the major thrust is in x86 Windows software.
In any case, I am fantastically happy with OSX on my PowerBook, so Microsoft can do what it wants.
Again, did anyone think about binaries? Windows/x86 binaries wouldn't run on Windows/PPC. Now, they could add on an emulation layer, and since the entire OS and API's wouldn't be emulated, it'd be a heckuvalot faster than Virtual PC.
If they could make it fast enough and use the graphics card...fast enough that a 2 GHz G4 can emulate at LEAST a 1 GHz P3, or a dual 2.5 G5 can at least outrun a 3 GHz Pentium 4, and can use the graphics card, it might be worth switching, since you could play most Windows games and run most programs (even ones that use the graphics card).
Additionally, it'd have to be able to dual boot with OS X without a ton of work.
Why would I ever use Windows on Apple hardware? Apple's hardware isn't that much better than Wintel, it's their OS and software that I really like. If I'm going to get a PPC, I would like to do without the 18 billion security holes, the installation hassles, the blue screen of death, and all the other problems with Windows.
PPC in many cases is a more advanced arch., at least from what I understand. Would I use Windows on it? I'm trying to get away from windows on the x86 much less want it on PPC.
it said i had to make a first post to join the "gnaa" so here goes
Windows used to exist of PPC but no one was really buying it. NextStep was available for the PC and no one really bought it, leading to Apple's eventual purchase of NeXT (or was it the other way around).
If it didn't work out before, why would you think it will work now?
... it is about the OS, software and community. I would run Linux on PPC if I would get a better result for the same money. But until I do I will run it in x86.
No, I will not run Windows for anything except gaming, no matter the hardware.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Windows at present is mostly based on the 32-bit Intel architecture. Microsoft did its worst dirty tricks in the last dying days of the segmented 16-bit architecture, using DOS dominance to get market share for its 32-bit attempt. It's going to have to chose between AMD-64 and Intel-64 anyway, or support both, and binary application developers will need to make the same choice, so I guess the submitter would argue that PPC-64 (which has been around longer) is a viable option. However, there's a big movement away from software that's tied down to one platform or another, which is good for Linux, Java, and all the other OS, hardware and software vendors, programmers, and users.
The limited adoption and big troubles implementing Wine suggests to me that there would be little interest in a Microsoft port of Windows to yet another architecture. Windows 95 was probably the most-memorable MS-Windows version ever, and yet Microsoft has had to fragment even that identity to keep up its sales, starting with that crazy desktop in XP. The claim that Windows has excellent backward compatibility is bogus, too; for instance, the copy of TeraTerm that I carry around on a floppy has never worked on any NT2k or later system I've touched, and the default installation of Microsoft Word can't read files created by any version of Microsoft Works. I could contiue this rant...
I think you may be thinking about http://www.pegasosppc.com/
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
Did anyone forget the Xbox developement Kit..
Which is basically a dual g5 powermac with a
custome XP version on it. Plus windows WILL run
on the PPC... The Xbox will be PPC, so there
will be a version, which actually a lot of titles...
Hrmmm. I wonder if the next Gen of Xbox ModChips
wont be add on cards to your favorite powermac.. hehe
I buy PPC systems for one reason only: that's what OS X runs on. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay three times for a PPC CPU what an x86 CPU of equivalent speed costs and then run an OS that runs on x86 on it.
Of course, if someone started selling PPC CPUs for less than x86, AND PPC mainboards were not selling for more than comparable x86 mainboards, AND if the commercial software I use were available (We all know that any useful OSS gets ported to everything anyway...), then I might consider it.
In other words, NO.
x86, at this point in time, is a dirty hack. A 16-bit real mode BIOS is a dirty hack. I see no reason why CISC should be used on modern systems. How much code on your system is handcoded assembly? The x86 is designed for handcoded assembly. The PPC and other RISC chips are designed for compiled code.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
rather than running virtual pc to use a windows program here and there, it would be nice to slice up a small partition and run windows natively.
'nuff said
Aren't there laws in the U.S. against purposfully spreading a virus?
NMG
In answer to the question in the article: "How would Intel react?" That answer is simple: they'd just make a RISC/PPC compatible processor is all.
Wouldn't happen anyway, there's no market for M$ to do it because the only ones interersted would be multimedia pros and they already use PPC/Mac platform.
Now, if Apple went open hardware again (it wouldn't be x86 that would be to them a step backwards in tech) then yes I can see people in droves building MacOS PC's. The reason it didn't succeed when they tried it last time is it was limited to oem's vs. home builder and the OS was behind, was a lousy product. But OSX is indeed an excellent product.
That said though, it wouldn't happen though because part of what makes a Mac "just work" as mac addicts always say is because they make the hardware to match their software.
The "two compiles" problem has gone with .NET.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I would love to hook up a used iBook with WinXP and go to CoffeeBucks and wait for a Mac Addict to come around. I could even hook up a webcam so I could watch the faces again and again... The Horror! The Look of Betrayal! The Scream!
As an aside, I've spent the last week transferring my mother-in-law's data from her old OS9 iBook to her new OSX iBook and I have to say that no, Macs don't "just work." Neither does Windoze. Neither does Linux.
But that's the fun, isn't it?
--- Corporations Are A Fad.
For whatever reason, I read this as "if windows came to pocketpc, would you switch?" I.E. if I could run Win98 on my PDA, would I do it? I didn't hesitate to answer "yeah, why not". With 1GB of SD going for ~$100, and 300MHz+ CPUs, surely this would be able to mach the speed of a 100MHz Pentium. I'd do it.
In an single CPU G4/PowerBook, several different tools reported the CPU speed was about 900mhz. If you load down the VM with Norton, and so on, then it gets droopy in performance. But the clincher in perception is the poor graphics performance, because the GDI is different.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
No
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
If you could put a Yugo engine in a Maserati would you switch?
Okay, get off the OS idealogy wagon for a second, and entirely off which hardware is better. Now start thinking about barrier to entry and business models.
Name the OSes that run on x86. Now name the OSes that run on PPC.
Any low level geek can name three, and lots of computer users these days can name three as well, and even more can name two, even if they have contempt for it, be it for reasons they don't understand.
1) Windows
2) Mac OS
3) Linux
Now linux is intimidating for the average user. Most people won't bother to install it. It runs on both, but the cost to entry is too high for the average user. It costs no money, but way too much time.
Now look at the remaining two. One only runs x86, one only runs PPC. For 90% of the populace, the only choice is windows on x86. Most people don't think they have a choice. I'm dealing with more and more people that have problems with computers and bring them to me to fix. I have a way of making windows a little more secure, but that's only because I know and use features and free software which most people don't even know exist. Most require a complete wipe and reinstall.
Now think about a hardware switch to PPC. Intel dies but Dell and the others adapt over 5-10 years. Windows chugs along.
Then there are people like me continuing to reinstall windows in that time.
"Hey, yanno this is the third time you sent this to me. Maybe you should think about another OS. I got a copy of Mac OS X here if you'd like to try it. In my professional opinion its more secure and will save you money and time." No need to buy any new hardware"
And maybe this action won't kill microsoft over night, but it will erode markets share, and microsoft cannot abide eroding market share of any amount.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
From what I can tell there is a special version of Windows that does run on PowerPC. The version in question is running on Apple hardware and is serving as the development platform for the next generation of XBOX. see here.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
They haven't got the x86 port right yet.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Lately? Maybe that's a matter of perspective. Apple has been making machines with ATA/IDE hard drives for over a decade, and PCI machines for almost as long.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
What could possibly be an advantage to doing this?
I've used NT 3.51 on MIPS/ARc, and I must say, it's a lot like using NT 3.51 on a 486. Whoopdedoo. I doubt there would be any difference today with XP on PPC. Other than the vital, unrelenting clueless of a large percentage of Microsoft's userbase. Can you imaging how many store returns, support calls, and other costs would be incurred every time a comsumer bought product X for the PPC and tried to load it on their PC.
And emulation. Fah! Emulation, bintrans, dynamic recompilation. Neat shit. Not a consumer grade item.
There is absolutely no economic advantage to a Microsoft PPC move. If Apple ever starts the long-rumored downward spiral, they may try to bail out with full commoditization. And may have ported the OSX gui to x86 + Darwin waiting in the wings. That is to their advantage.
Evidence that Microsoft would never consider this move. The XBox. For reasons of time and monetary constraint, Microsoft chose to hack together an x86-based gaming console instead of porting to a custom CPU. Likewise with the embedded market. I don't know if anyone thinks XP embedded is worthwhile (esp. with VXworks, Lynx, and QNX to compete with), but Microsoft didn't trouble to port a Windows subset to any other BSP's either.
How about Windows on a Cray?
How about Windows on an IBM mainframe?
How about Windows on an Apple?
To me, these are the same questions. People who buy apple machines don't buy them because they can get Microsoft software. It's a different world...players are people like Adobe, or MacroMedia, not really MS.
My Graphic Designer friend would rather poke his eye out than use Windows.
--Pete --pete
MacOS X's core is already available as an x86 version. All they'd need to really do, since a very sizeable portion of the Aqua interface system is written in Objective C, would be to account for endianness and call it done. It'd take all of a 6-12 month project, I'd suspect, to put it into an alpha class release stage.
Microsoft, on the other hand, would probably have a nightmare on their hands as I suspect they've not taken any consideration for endianness, 64 bits (No, they still don't have it out in the hands of the public- it's been months now and they knew about amd64, etc. for some time now...)- it's probably all nasty, crufty x86-32 code and using some aborted NT 3.51 code wouldn't help out much...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hey Bill, I'll take a hundred million-million copies of NT/PPC if YOU spend a boat load of cash to get it to market soon. Really!
And I bet a hundred thousand of my very, very good slashdot friends would do the same. Really-really!
Truuuuuuuust uuuuuuus! We're your friends, Bill!
--Udo.
http://downloads.activestate.com/unsupported/Perl
It is actually a desktop case (not tower) and makes a nice monitor stand! Not good for much else.
it did and I didn't. If it did again: again I wouldn't.
And it's technically gone with Java, but until Big Apps or games get a .Net port, and until there's a .Net runtime on other architectures.... what's the big deal?
considering most of the crowd from /. are people who have switch to different OS from Windows, most of the people would answear no!, you will still have a crapy OS on a different processor, so what's the point on a switch?? I might think on having MacOSX on an x86.. but never the opposite..
Take a buggy insecure OS and replace my stable, fast, easy to use OS? Sure!
And while you're at it why not replace my regular coffee with decafe.
Oh hell, why not kick me in the balls too. Because if I were stupid enough to do such a moronic thing I shouldn't enjoy my morning coffee or ever have kids.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
linux is available in serveral flavors for both ppc and x86. so, the answer is simple, who prefers to run linux on mac hardware over generic x86 boxes? i think the answer is that most people prefer cheap hardware.
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
Not elsewhere. The AS/400, for instance, had a true hardware abstraction layer ( HAL ). Dont confuse this with NT's "HAL". On the AS/400, nothing touched the real machine, OS or Apps. In NT, the HAL was *only* for the OS. The Apps had to compile to the underlying actual hardware. If the HAL in NT was there for everything, all the mentioned issues would not have been there.
emt 377 emt 4
hehe ...... .NET. if this happens, ms does the hardware for both (and the .NET clr stuff for both), third parties develop for .NET. just think about how beautifully it will work out for microsoft! ... runs to corner crying
ms will not have to try to support these two chips (in any hard fashion) as long as the apps use
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I don't think Intel's reaction would be Microsoft's biggest problem, the legal issues relating to an attempted extension of their monopoly would be more likely to cause problems, of course probably not in the US ...
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
-Who needs it ?
-who would like to buy it ?
-....anyway, Microsoft would be absolutely unable to port Windows to any other hardware.
Windows is such a mess that they have completely lost control of the development process ( One additional bug introduced for each bug corrected, one security hole added for each security hole plugged, Longhorn continuously delayed despite shedding features, Internet Explorer left behind and ridiculed by new browsers.)
No.
Because it costs money to buy PPC architechture. Mac parts are expensive, and support from some hardware vendors is not as not as good as on x86.
The reason I am using dualboot x86 system is the price of hardware. I love macs. I just don't love the price. Yeah, G5 can be faster than modern X86s, but it costs at least twice as much. Apple really has no cheap line (like Sempron/Celeron machines in x86).
only if:
1. IBM shells an awful lot of $$$$$ and designs a ppc processor which overwhelms every x86 processor with 1.5x performance (or at least in terms of price-performance ratio)
2. an app. compatability layer exists on Windows4ppc which dynamically translates EVERY x86 binary to run on ppc (like the FX!32 of WinNT for alpha)
3. Damn lot of mobo manufacturers starts designing ppc boards
4. more stable than x86 windows
No.1 is highly unlikely, since Intel and AMD aren't some brainless company which sells crappy chips (some people claim that Intel is, but I don't think they are that bad, at least they are still profitable), no.2 is highly likely (and essential) if MS starts to develop Windows for PPC. No.3 will be possible if MS announces Windows for PPC development.
Number four. Stable windows? Come on, what do you expect from Microsoft?
Conclusion : Although possible, very VERY unlikely.
ps : or maybe if IBM acquires both Intel and AMD, or if IBM acquires Microsoft, which are also highly unlikely.
Yup.
I seem to recall MS talking about how the HAL in NT enabled other underlying platforms. Not an obligation. Marketing? I dont quite know.
I always thought it was part a reining in of Intel, and a way to position themselves ( MS ) to move to other platforms should Intel prove not to be the platform that was going places.
emt 377 emt 4
Yeah, about heat. It's clear that the G5 is a superior chip by design. You can actually stack Apple's Xserve servers on top of each other. This would be unheard of in the scores of Intel cabinets that I admin (nice ones from Dell too). It's a matter of power consumption and heat production. And don't tell me to make my server room colder...it's already cold. The Intel boxes get so hot, we have to skip 1/3 of a "U" in the rack to let air through. But at an Oracle headquarter server room I saw racks of Xserve units stacked tight.
They also claim less power usage per CPU. Power dissipation on the G5s in the Xserve are in the range of 40 watts while a P4 2.8ghz is in the range of 60 watts. I think power dissipation on the G5 2.5ghz is 80 watts (this isn't in the Xserve). 80W is a lot but those are liquid cooled (from the factory) in the desktops. And a 2.5ghz G5 is a far cry from a 2.8ghz P4.
I went to an Apple demo and they really harped on this point although they tried to angle it from a cost standpoint. I don't see how 1 rack in a datacenter would make the switch worthwhile. But if you're just comparing apples to apples, I still can't find anyone who actually stacks Xeon class (2.4ghz+) dual CPU box directly on top of one another. Even in a 60 degree datacenter.
We certainly don't and we're paying for rack space!
Read with the parent title, then mod this funny.
emt 377 emt 4
... I'm assuming that WindowsPPC would not run on Mac hardware and Mac OS X would not run on non-Apple hardware. (for whatever reason)...
Ok, the main reason why I would use a PC is for Games, games ported to the Mac just don't run as well, any ported game really.
Hardware, If WindowsPPC was a reality (and popular), motherboard manufacturers start making motherboards for PPC architecture. This would really help Motorola or IBM, PPC chip costs would drop. Apple would be able to produce cheaper Mac's
Games. New games for Windows would be written for PPC architecture because it's better. Games ported to Mac would probably run just as fast or better on Mac OS X (if using OpenGL).
In the end i think that Apple would win because Mac OS X is a better, friendlier and more powerful system. Buying a new Mac would still be slightly more expensive...
hahaha hahahaha
aaaaaaaaaah hhahahahaha
uh no.
would anybody care?
;). Screw Doom XXIV, I like free software roulette!
My issue with Windows has nothing to do with hardware. I run x86 machines. I'm sitting next to a PIII 800 and an AMD Athlon64 3000+. If I could run OSX, I'd consider it. I like the idea of being able to use Quicken and still feel Unixy.The price tag would probably be too high for me to even want to bother paying for something I can use to pay for more things to use.
But I'll be perfectly honest. The real, non-philisophical, honest-to-god reason I run Linux these days is because I'm used to it. When I'm using Windows and have to get down and do some real work, I have to spend so much time getting Cygwin and stuff like libpcap working, that it'd be faster to install Gentoo. I feel naked without bash, emacs, python, perl, etc. and I hate having to look around for freaking check boxes here and there. I know where everything is, how I want it to be and I can get my stuff done quickly.
Then I also like keeping up with my favorite projects. The closest thing to playing games on my PC is compiling bleeding edge software and submitting bug reports when things crash
And I remember the AS/400, which had a real HAL. Extended to the applications, not just the OS.
On the AS/400, a different processor architecture would not require porting. Replace the HAL, off you go. I have seen it in action, too, we upgraded an AS/400 to a PowerPC from whatever was in the box originally. None of the applications changed at all. Not even a recompile. Just ran.
I have always wondered why MS didnt extend the HAl to everything.
emt 377 emt 4
Depends on how it's implemented. The one thing that seriously keeps me from buying a mac is software. I much prefer photshop / illustrator on OS X (I use it at work all day). But all the other software I want is Windows only. If I could buy an iMac and dual boot OS X and Win2k, I'd be at the Apple store right now. As far as that happening, I think MS could come out looking like champs because they could nail down the driver issues just like Apple has with the limited hardware they have to support, so Windows would be a LOT more stable. But then they'd have to compete with Apple on the merits of the OS alone, since the hardware playing field would be level. And developers would have more incentive to port software to OS X since they'd have to code for the system architecture anyways. But I can't see it ever happening, so I just got all excited over nothing.
do not read this line twice.
This has absolutely nothing to do with x86 vs. PPC though, simply a specific implementation of the two. If you compare AMD's Opteron to the PowerPC 970 than the picture is quite different.
As for actual power usage, those numbers are all over the place and vary greatly depending on just how they are measured. Be very careful with any power consumption numbers you hear for the G5 as they usually are "typical" power consumption figures being compared to "maximum" and/or "thermal design power" numbers for x86 chips.
IBM does a piss-poor job of releasing public documentation for their processors (though I guess they don't sell processors to us mere mortals like Intel and AMD do) so it's very difficult to get accurate data.
I dont have any particular desire to run windows on any platform, but it would probably mean much better hardware would be available for mac users within a generation or two. Currently, the PPC makes up a small percentage of IBM's income, but x86 IS intel's income. It has surprised people that the outdated CISC architecture has remained competitive over the years, but if IBM were putting anywhere near the R&D dollars into the PPC that Intel sinks into their 20 year old POS, it would become an amazing processor. If PPC had a large marketshare, IBM would give it much more priority than they do currently. Id venture it could well spell the end for Intel as well. No great loss.
Really, this article is the techno-geek equivalent of some guy laying on the roof his car at night, stoned, and wondering if the trees have people in them.
Interesting question, yes. A little 'speculative' though.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
I don't think MS is able to finish this in the same timeframe as Apple putting out the x86 port. Just look at how long they are taking to get the AMD64 port out. This chip is now available for about a year, and the 64-bit port is still in BETA, while most linux distro's can now be easily optimized for running AMD-64 code.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Way back when Apple first bought Next, I was a developer on the Classic MacOS. Times were tough. You couldn't write a Tender that included Macs.... it had to be Windows, Linux, or Unix. And in hindsight, fair enough. Then we got the beta CDs for Rhapsody. There was a version for PowerPCs, of course, but also a full OS for Intel, which installed fine on my old Pentium 90. It has a fairly minimal MacOS 8.0 interface. There was also Yellow Box, which was a set of DLLs which you installed on your Windows Box, allowing you to run Rhapsody for Intel programs. It seemed a BRILLIANT solution! Compile for Mac and Windows (and perhaps Solaris at the time). All customers happy. Mac Addicts happy too. But then Apple cut out the Intel versions. The Iron Curtain went back up. Opportunity lost. Now we mainly write Java on Windows, testing it on Linux, and perhaps giving it a quick lookover on MacOS X.
running OS X on x86 hardware can benefit you thusly: killer OS, inexpensive hardware.
On the other hand, there is no benefit at all (none, zero) to running any version of Windows on an Apple chip. Windows would be equally as bad running on an expensive G5 as it would on any other chip.
This is like asking "Would people buy a Jaguar designed and built in Detroit even though they remain as expensive as ever?". The answer is no, not many will, and fewer will like it.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Would you replace your (potentially hypothetical) Ferrari's motor with a Lada motor?
NT4's PPC port ran on RS/6000 workstations, not plastic cased consumer hardware. I ran it, on a lark, on an RS/6000 Box for a short period, before reinstalling AIX.
NT4 ran on consumer PPC hardware. Around the mid '90s I recall ads for dual 604-120 Windows NT boxes. Byte magazine had reviews and pointed out that the dual 604s scaled much better than dual Pentiums.
" Hell, what reason would M$ have to port Windows to a platform where they know that no one will buy there product."
Actually, I see some good reasons for M$ to port Windows to PPC.
Consider. Person A wants Person B to get a Mac. Person B already has a Windows PC and has therefore paid for a Windows license. Person B is worried that all his programs he already owns will be useless. Person A says, "Well, if that's all you're worried about, buy Windows XP-PPC, and you can run your Windows programs when it's necessary".
Person B buys a Mac, then person B buys ANOTHER Windows license. Bam, Microsoft now has made twice as much money as they would have if the person had kept with his Windows computer.
Additionally, people get it for less when they get Windows XP with a PC they buy. Since a Mac would come with OS X, they'd have to buy XP PPC seperately, and as a result have to buy it for $200 or $300, also giving extra profits to Microsoft.
When people hear they can still run Windows on Macs, more people will buy Macs and run Windows on them, meaning more people will buy second copies of Windows. Micro$oft doesn't care what hardware you use, as long as you're paying for and using Windows on it.
I hate base ball And Even I know that the correct analogy should be the Red Sox...
now hit the showers while we call up a relief pitcher...
Windows on PPC? So I could still pay for expensive hardware, AND pay for a mediocre operating system? Oh please, where do I sign up?
I will not debate this here, you know whats right ... most civil debaters have both OS's so ... Windows 64 and Tiger ... along with linux ... we all win i am just glad to hear that Intel finally learned the MHz GHz wasn't the way to go !!!
- MOSKIE
... if they ported Windows to PPC it wouldn't make me switch to windows ...
The way you phrase that suggests it is a hypothetical, however it had already happened and it failed. WinNT 4 retail CDs contain the binaries for x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC. In the mid 90s I recall ads for WinNT boxes that had dual PPC604-120s. Byte magazine reviewed these boxes and pointed out how the dual 604s scaled better than dual pentiums.
WinNT4 PPC had few customers. Those WinNT customers who wanted performance went with Alpha. Those who wanted price went with x86. The only advantage with PowerPC was being able to dual boot Windows or Mac OS but Apple never delivered. Admittedly that may have worked out better for Apple.
Sorry. I'm writing this on my X86 Linux laptop, currently booted into Win XP.
See, when I want to get some work done, I boot into Linux. But, when I'm done for the day, and am ready to slack, I boot into XP. (like now)
I'm not going to follow Windows to PPC if a port was available - why would I do so? Fedora and Debian have the best support for X86. Windows is secondary, for games and other leisure activities. (slashdot being one of them)
PPC offers nothing I'm particularly interested in. (Whoopee! Better floating point! Might matter if I gave a darn about floating point...)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Not only is PPC superior technically (meaningful to geeks though not the general public) benefiting from two decades of experience lost on the repeatability kludged X86, such a move would provide MANY benefits.
1) CHEAPER. Yes cheaper! What platform is every game system switching to (XBox, Sony, Nintendo)? Thats right PPC. Why? Because it provides more performance/$. The game market runs on free market principals unlike the desktop market held in a strangle hold by a few large companies, and the choice is clear.
2) Low power. Longer battery life. Cheaper operational costs.
3) Faster. Yes faster! The final word is the Linpack tests by the supercomputer hot-rodders who optimize their systems with any tweaks, compiler, and optimizations they can. What the result? Linpack Rpeak per processor the G5 bests the opteron, Xeon, and Itanium.
VT X G5 2GHz 8/processor
NCSA Xeon 3.06GHz 6.12/processor
LANL Opteron 2Ghz 4/processor
PNNL Itanium 1.5 GHz 6/processor
No wonder all the gaming system are choosing PPC as their platform.
I recently worked at a school where the science department was using a ten-year-old chemistry application, designed for Windows 3.1, which requires QuickTime 2 and will not recognize later versions. This application, as well as QuickTime 2 (which fortunately was distributed with it) installed with no problems on brand new Dell PCs running Windows XP SP1 (SP2 wasn't out yet). We're talking about an application requiring a media library created before the Registry existed. No problems.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
It's amazing that no one has mentioned this or alluded to the fact that Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft have all adopted special versions of the G5 for their next consoles.
;+)
x -2 -Inside-and-Out-Part-I/p3#memory
x -2 -Inside-and-Out-Part-II/p1#intro
More importantly... no one has mentioned that the XBOX 2 deployment box is running on Apple's Power Mac G5 with mod version of XP for XBOX2 development.
Now lets reopen the discussion flood gates...
http://editorials.teamxbox.com/xbox/858/The-Xbo
http://editorials.teamxbox.com/xbox/860/The-Xbo
Follow the following algorithm to experience a moment of intense joy:
;)
1. Acquire Windows for PPC.
2. Put Windows on your beautiful, pristine, PPC machine.
3. Experience the joys of Windows on PPC for one full week. You MUST use ONLY IE and Outlook Express for the full week. Your feeling at the end of the week should be similar to the expereience of waking up after a week-long bender in Tijuana, only to realize you've been having unprotected sex with an 80-year old Tijuana hooker with no teeth and a hygeine problem. NOTE: I have not experienced this... Ahem.
4. Re-install Mac OS/X on your machine, run it through a full update, set your wallpapers and so forth, then go to bed.
5. The next morning, find a sunny, beautiful spot in your apartment, power your PPC machine up, and check your email. Browse the web for a while using Mozilla. See how much better the system is now, how wonderfully it works, and realize your ordeal is over.
Relish the moment... Every now and then, if you need a pick-me-up, you can repeat it...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I have too much x86 Windows apps to run (games). So it would do me no good, unless they rebirthed some of those old apps that DEC had when the Alpha and RISC boxes came out, that could transmorph VAX-based binaries to RISC binaries as they ran, RISC to Alpha, etc.
Well, I think you are missing the point: The question was "If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?".
I imagine for most people reading SlashDot that is "switching from a Mac", which has a lot to do with Apple...
FF
With all due respect, I believe it is you who has missed the point.
You're assuming that the question "If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?" means "If Windows came to PPC, would you switch to Windows?". This is incorrect. The actual question is "If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch to a PPC-based system?".
The article does a pretty good job of trying to separate itself from Apple-specific hardware for this reason. It's not asking if Mac users would switch to Windows, but if Windows users would switch to PPC hardware (not necessarily from Apple) if Windows were natively available for it.
Yaz.
Gasp. Hahahahahahaha!
Choke. Hahahaha, NO!
If Windows were ported to PPC I would switch, to a different processor, that is.
Remain calm! All is well!
Microsoft has a minimalist port of Windows right now for the G5 Mac as a development environment for the new X Box. This is because IBM and Microsoft are developing a processor for the new XBox based on the POWER architecture which will be similar to the G5 used in the 64-bit Macs.
If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?
No thanks, I'll stay on PPC, M$ badwill be damned. I'm pretty satisfied with my PPC; so even if Windows came to PPC, I'd stay on PPC because of the neater architecture, high speed with less heat and the opportunity to run Linux, Amiga OS 4 beta and OS X on the same computer without emmulating. It's the computer I imagined when I was in primary school, except it doesn't have all the possible disk drive types. (Just the DVD and floppy.)
Oh, you meant switch to x86? BUAHAHAHAHA!
Ahem. The prize advantage would be significant.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Oh, you meant switch to x86? BUAHAHAHAHA!
What i MEANT to say was:
Oh, you meant switch to Windows? BUAHAHAHAHA!
The advantages there is that I can easily develop for the system that most people have. That would be moot on Windows/PPC untill a significant enough number of the machines are sold that the potential market justifies a switch.
The other advantage of Windows is that Windows XP/2000 is a lot better than that piece of **** Windows 95. Maybe a PPC would be even more stable, or maybe it would be as unstable as a psychotic sailor back from shore leave.
After using Amigas, it was kind of funny seeing the industry jumping on multitasking and GUIs after laughing at the concept a few years past.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
...And every processors which supported Windows had little endian capability (Intel was always little endian, Alpha had both capability, PowerPC was natively big endian but little endian was added to make Windows portable on it. Little endian support was dropped on the G5 (this is the reason why VirtualPC didn't supported the G5). So this would be a nearly impossible job for Microsoft to rewrite all their code produced for 20 years to make it endian-clean. We will probably never see Windows on a big-endian architecture. (although Mac OS X is probably endian-clean, at least Darwin is).
Mac OS X is 90% of the reason I have PPC.
Microsoft Windows is 100% of the reason I have PPC.
Why bother? I'd only ever run Windows to run the games, which probably wouldn't be able to run at full-tilt on Win/PPC. I think I'm better sticking with Linux/x86 and dual-booting.
Do you see what I did there?
That is a clear demonstration that Windows NT/XP is not being used because people love it so much technically; if they did, NT/XP on other hardware would have taken off. Instead, people run NT/XP because it runs the binaries they happen to have.
Mono, a free .NET implementation, runs on PPC, x86, Sparc, and other architectures. It will run on Linux, Solaris, OS/X, and other OSes.
.NET CLR is only availible for x86 Windows.
The _Microsoft_
anyone seen anything other than the screenshots?
have you noticed that nobody is trying to port windows to apple, yet everyone is trying to do the reverse?
or else!
The moniker "New Technology" was retrofitted onto Windows NT long after the product had been shipped. Originally the code was developped on the Intel i860 CPU, which was called N10 (N-Ten). The "NT" derived from this CPU. Windows 2000 says it is being "build on NT technology", which is utter nonsense, if you look at it as "New Technology technology".
The same goes with Windows CE, with CE standing for nothing. Some Microsoft guys just thought it sounded cool.
Why Windows for PPC won't appear:
- Because a whole class of bugs and performance issues linked to the compatibility with x86 code would appear and cause support costs (and new FUD on Windows);
- Because most applications won't be recompiled anyway for PPC, as the market is still mostly on x86 and compatibility with Windows/PPC must be ensured by MS,
- Because Intel and AMD would not like that at all, and would push Linux, or threaten to do it.
- Because what is good for PPC is good for Apple (lower processor costs) ; this is not in MS interest to have a mighty Apple. (It could be a move to strangle Apple by getting all PPC processors, but IBM is not stupid and in worst case Mac OS X could even appear on x86 Apple hardware... (with Intel/AMD help)).
- Because if Windows had to leave x86, it would not have failed before.
- Because MS has NO interest in doing it.
- Because MS culture is still basically "one platform, one OS, so we can control it" and not the geeky "it must run anywhere so customers can do everything they want with it."
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
What about the X-Box 2/Next SDK? The development kits are apparently Apple G5 towers running a modified Windows environment. With Virtual PC running on PowerPC (and now in Microsoft's hands) it's entirely possible they are adapting it to run on the new X-Box development platform. This would at least allow them to investigate the feasibility in providing backwards compatability with X-Box games on a platform with a core architecture radically different from the current console.
I really look forward to seeing what is going to happen with the next generation X-Box hardware and software.
Personally; I happily use a powerbook running OS X, and would rather not have Windows computers in my life. However, if there were a PowerPC version that would run natively on my Powerbook, there may be scenarios where I might consider dual-booting, depending on the software that became available to me by doing so.
This would be cool! :p
If someone found a way to run KDE over the MacOS GUI I'd have kept my iBook anyway. Call me a freak, but I find the MacOS GUI horribly user inefficient.
The reason is simple - x86 hardware is a nightmare to support. Just look at the hundreds (with dozens of clones/variants each) of devices the Linux kernel supports. And the chances are high that any PC config you care to mention contains at least one esoteric chipset or device that OS X would have to support to make it viable.
Then there is the dearth of software for your second-tier port. You only have to look at BeOS to see the problems a new OS faces. Who's going to bother with a new OS when it offers no compelling reason for software companies to write software for it? And BeOS shipped with a toolchain and still failed.
Besides, there is nothing in it for Apple to make it work - they don't sell x86 hardware and a ubiquitous run-anywhere OS X dilutes any reason to buy a Mac. There is a second reason which is OS X works off a subscription model - $130 upgrades every 12-18 months - with older releases becoming rapidly obsoelete. It would be a unusual for new software to runs on anything below 10.2 for example. A subscription model might work when you have a captive audience, trained (and expecting) to upgrade their OS every year. It wouldn't work on x86 where five years or more are the norm. Even MS have tried and given up on the idea.
Of course Linux users upgrade a lot, but what reason would they have to switch? Apple could ship a Linux compatibility layer (just like Solaris / SCO) I suppose, but that's even more work for them.
The closest you're ever likely to get to OS X on x86 is probably Linux running GNOME 2.8, an Aqua theme and X server with XDamage/XComposite. Give it a year or two and the resemblance might even be passable.
no.
^..^
"It's going to have to chose between AMD-64 and Intel-64..."Computer manufacturers such as IBM and HP are discontinuing IA64:
:-)
HP knifes Itanium, cans IA-64 workstations 09/24/2004 Although I can't back this one up for obvious reasons, I've seen an internal IBM roadmap for xSeries and IBM BladeCenter (there is btw a PPC blade, the JS20) which was hammered out with Intel to concentrate a while on IA32 Xeon until Intel finishes switching over to the AMD-64 model. In addition to this IBM uses AMD Opteron processors on certain blades.
The AMD-64 is a much better choice for the X86 world because it simply expands on the existing model by making registers 64 bits wide much in the same way the 16-bit 8086/80186/80286 registers ax-dx were expanded to 32-bit registers in the 80386 eax-edx. IA64 "Itanium" never really caught on in the X86 world because it did not really relate to the X86 model and in order to get any significant performance out of the chip Intel compilers and toolkits were needed.
You still however have to choose between AMD-64 and PPC, though
The fact that I have a mac is itself a rejection of windows. It's not like I run OSX on windows only because XP isn't available.
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
NT for PPC could run on third party (non-Apple) PowerPC systems as the clone PowerMac's were all CHRP/PReP compliant. They could run Mac OS and NT for PPC (and other OS's designed for CHRP/PReP including; OS/2 WARP, AIX, Solaris and Taligent).
I think it's sad CHRP didn't really take off beyond the short-lived clone Mac's.
Apple branded PowerPC systems were (annoyingly) not CHRP compliant, so you couldn't run any of the above on them (though you could still run Linux and one or more BSD based OS's). I think it would have helped CHRP (and would have helped Apple) if Apple systems had been CHRP compliant in the early days.
I remeber installing NT on a MIPS system too- an SGI (Indy). Results from Google say variously that that is 'impossible' or 'not possible with special software and hardware modifications', which is just plain wrong (or secrect MS ninjas snuk into our basement and modified it when we wern't looking). It ran okay, though the redraws were a little flakey.
Wasn't this intended to be an OSX on Intel? Apple have (alledgedly) been devloping a version of OSX that runs on i386, in the event that PPC doesn't cut the mustard. Little can be found on the internet about it though...
http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2002/08/20020830181 129.shtml
If I'd substitute your coffee for brown sludge, would you drink it?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I think this should be the next Slashdot poll. I vot for "No, I would still run Linux."
www.wavefront-av.com
I would not like to lose the stability, or the beauty of OS X.
Get a free ipod.
Hell no we won't go
Windows! I have intel and PPC hardware, it's Windows that sucks, bigtime!
There was an unknown error in the submission.
IF and ONLY IF you want precisely that set of "stuff". I don't want a built-in monitor on my desktop Mac, and I don't want a huge dual-capable tower with multiple cooling zones either. I already have a better monitor than Apple ships on the eMac or most of the G4 iMacs, and I can't afford a flat panel.
So to buy a new Mac to replace my Beige G3 (the last Mac Apple made that had the kind of tradeoffs I'm looking for) I would have to pay a huge premium for "stuff" I don't want.
for laptops, Apple actually seems to have the advantage these days
I can get a new 15" 1024x768 Windows laptop for under $1000. I can get one with a 15" screen that can display 1280x1024 for the same price as a 14" iBook with a 1024x768 screen. If you look at the 15" Powerbook I can get an IBM Thinkpad with the best keyboard on the market that'll display 1400x1050.
The advantage to Apple, and what keeps me using my upgraded Beige G3 (G4/466 + Radeon 7000) instead of the 1.7 GHz P4 Intel box I "downgraded" from (and that cost less than this pre-iMac Mac and its upgrades) is the OS. I can't imagine why anyone would want to run Windows on anything but an x86: the whole point to Windows is the applications, and even the best just-in-time recompilers aren't going to make anything but a real x86 cost-effective.
Trust me on this, I've still got an ARC-console Alpha in the lab at work. DEC's recompilation technology was insanely great, and the Alpha is a wonderful target for recompilation because of its low overhead instruction set and massive register bank, and it wasn't enough to make an Alpha run x86 code competitively.
I can't imagine buying a PPC-based machine to run a Windows desktop (the XboX 2 is a different story, of course, again because of the applications). Mac OS X makes the price premium (the very real premium) worth it, but spending more to run Windows slower? I don't think so.
IIRC motorola had some CHRP boxes designed and almost ready to ship, about the same times jobs came back and pulled the plug on cloning altogether.
With no MACos motorola never released the CHRP (although it was rumored Beos would run on it)
When I say I use Windows mainly because it plays popular games. I like the way MacOSX looks and runs, but I don't think I could do without that right-mouse button.
I would put windows on Mac hardware in some alternate dimention...That would be like squeezing diarrhea onto your pancakes!
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NT on Alpha didn't fail miserably
Did you try it? I did.
NT's x86 compatibility layer for the Alpha actually worked pretty damned good too- it ran 95% of the software on x86 and once you ran the apps enough, they ran pretty quickly.
It was AMAZINGLY good, but even amazingly good wasn't good enough. Because you could always buy an x86 box that would run x86 executables faster than the Alpha for less than the Alpha.
Very few people kept using NT/Alpha for very long. They either went to an OS with more open source software that could be recompiled for Alpha (Tru64, Linux) or had a growing pool of native commercial software (Tru64, VMS), or they went back to NT/Intel.
I would never switch to Windows on PPC, because Windows is just a crappy OS. The UI stinks, the OS isn't well thought out or laid out, the filesystem is in complete disarray, and the OS just constantly gets in my way.
With OS X, the system rarely gets in my way. I have a few minor issues with the UI, but pretty much the OS & UI just stay out of my way and let me do what I need to do. I call it "Computopia."
Now, I haven't used Windows at all for 3 years (except at work, and even that is very rarely; most of my work is on a PowerBook G4 running Panther). I haven't used Windows much at all for over 10 years, and in the interim it was mostly for stuff like Quicken, things I couldn't get on Linux. With OS X I can have it all: Unix on the back end, and "real world" commercial apps on top. As I said, computopia.
I do still own one x86 box though; it's my lone Linux server. Everything else I have runs NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, Mac OS X Server, or Mac OS X. Well, except for my Plus & SE, that is...
However, I'm not totally anti-MS like most Slashdotters - their mice are the best (I have two Intellimouse Explorers, wireless at home and wired @ the office), and Office v.X is one of their best products ever, even better than its Windows counterpart. RDC is also better than the Windows solution.
Why?
Sorry, I mean "Windows has come to Itanium, who's switched"?
Think about it. Intel has spent YEARS pushing the Itanium architecture harder than anyone could possibly afford to spend pushing PPC. HP's Itanium boxes are finally getting to the point where the idea of them taking over from Alpha and Precision Architecture on UNIX servers isn't actually insane. How much impact are they making on the desktop, after all those years of aggressive promotion?
They've been so unsuccessful even getting people to think seriously about it that AMD's been able to steal a march on intel with a 64-bit extension to the x86 architecture.
Windows and the x86 are siamese twins. The only way to get people to switch from the x86 is if you can get an OS, chip, and emulation architecture that lets you run x86 code faster than the real x86, cheaper than the real x86, and cooler than the real x86... and if you do that, you'll sell it as a new implementation of the x86, as Intel, AMD, and everyone else who's built an x86 on a RISC/VLIW core has already done.
Mac/OS X users CAN run Windows on their Powerpc's, using Virtual PC. Now, most people use Virtual PC as little as possible, because Windows apps are absolutely unusuable when compared to most OS X apps. Even Windows ports such as Office 2004 are painful to use on the Mac. This is more than simply the question of what OS is available for what platform. This is all about platform "culture" and what people's priorities are when they use their PCs. Mac users have been shown many times to be more task oriented and less tool/program driven as Windows users. Being able to run Windows on a Mac is not something most Mac users would care about, unless it is because they were given a brand new G5 and really did not want one to start with ( you could send it to me if you want...).
NO! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOO!
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
I don't know why Microsoft decided to go with PPC
The obvious answer is that if the XBox isn't running the same processor as desktop PCs then people won't be able so easily to hack their XBox and use it as a cheap PC subsidised by Microsoft without Microsoft getting their money back on game licenses.
Thats like asking me to switch from a BMW 525 to a Kia Rio.
Ok, someone help me out here. An apple iMac 17" with 1.8gz cpu, it costs $1,499.00 (USD) in the 'global' apple store (http://store.apple.com). The same system costs 1.619,00 Euro on the Dutch part of the apple store, 1.619,00 Euro is $2,018.82 (USD) on the UK version of the apple store the system will cost you 1,049.00 Pounds wich equals $1,889.77 (USD). My question, where does this difference come from and how does Apple justify this ? If Apple wants me to switch they should sell their hardware at the same prices everywhere. Or am I just dumb ?
I want it to run on the Cell! Distributed processing, amazing graphics and media handling capabilties...
The processor would then be balanced within the architecture, where media handling is now a primary function. Your brain, hopefully, is not strictly a math processor.
I feel all special that my question was noticed!
Windows just isn't worth it.
I switched a year ago and couldn't be happier. No more pop ups, virus and guess what, it just works!
I am now getting everyone who's computer I support to switch as well since it means I will have little to do in supporting them.
Since Micros~1 maintained the PPC branch of NT for many years, and almost no one used it, I think the answer is a resounding "no." Why do you think W2k or XP would make any difference? They're essentially the same thing.
Windows on PPC? Now why would anyone do something that mean to perfectly good hardware?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No! I will not switch to Windows. Debian works great on PPC, thank you very much. I can switch my underlying architectures like there was no tommorow, switching back and forth not only between Intel and PPC but also M68k, SPARC, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, IA-64--hell, even S/390!--just from the top of my head. Oh, and by the way, I can use different kernels if I don't like Linux. Have I already mentioned security? To make the long story short, I will never switch Debian to Windows, no matter what are they going to port it to. Period. So, please stop asking.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I already have Linux on PPC if I want it, so why would I want to downgrade to MS Windows? It's the *hardware* that offers little choice in PPC-land: every PPC motherboard comes with a Macintosh wrapped around it.
The problem with this idea is that the people who are interested in Thinking Outside the Intel Box are also, by and large, the people who are interested in thinking outside of the Microsoft box. And they already have a choice of solutions. One more is no big deal.
Microsoft would also have to overcome the ill will they generated for themselves with their last foray into PPC territory, which ended with many customers left twisting slowly in the wind. How long will we be supported *this* time, will be the question of the hour.
Sure, if I was running on PPC and Windows came my way I'd find something else immediately.
If I could run windows on mac hardware as well as on my amd then I would switch to mac hardware. Then I could enjoy windows, mac osx and Linux. I think it would be nice to use all three. Then again I would also switch if Mac would run stably on amd hardware. I guess switch isnt the word but I would buy it.
"We can no longer live as rats... we know too much." -Secret of NIMH
I'd rather see a PPC CPU which allows code morphing like Transmeta, has SMT and virtualized CPUs. I still want to run Mac OSX, but use a keyboard combination to toggle to Win XP for those few applications that I still need on the XP platform. This would be a better solution than having Windows ported to PPC, which has been tried and it didn't work.
microsoft already makes "power PC" which allows the installation of any flavor of windows on macOSx. It's emulation, but it's good enough to run a 2kserver on a g4 1.4. I've tried it, it's usable, not bad really, speed is the major issue.
I pay more money for expensive hardware so that I don't have to use Windows. Why would I infect my system now?
You can kiss a nun... Just don't get into the habit.
...for the exact same reason that I'd buy a Ferrari and run it on sump oil.
There is one good reason why Microsoft might want to make windows for PPC: .NET. If they made windows for PPC (or any other cpu for that matter) the only way to make windows applications that ran on both x86 and PPC would be to write them in .NET exclusively. And since MS wants everybody to use .NET, this would be one way to do it.
.NET applications.
And I'm sure it bugs them that Apple is still around, an albeit small thorn in their side. What if MS made a slick looking stylish PC running windows on a PPC? Something to compete on the same level with iMacs? They're already doing hardware with the XBox. Aside from the DRM issues, what if they made an "X-PC" that was a suped-up XBOX with PPC (isnt the new xbox using PPC already?) but meant as home media / pc combo? Put it in a pretty box, make it play xbox games, and run Windows and
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
PPC is a vastly better platform for Linux than Intel is. I say this as a programmer, not a user. Being able to run Windows on PPC would mean that instead of having a seperate Windows gaming box and a PPC Linux box, I could just dual boot and save myself some money.
thats what I said, dumbass. Screw x86, I'm on a G4 right now.
Ten years ago, the PowerPC was fresh, and injected some much-needed innovation into a market dominated by old, CISC designs both at the high-end (VAX, etc) and the low-end (x86, 68000).
Unfortunately, the result is the PowerPC platform today has absolutely no inherent advantages. Nearly every modern processor available for the desktop has integrated optimized pipelines and superscalar execution units, plus a whole slew of other advanced features designed to streamline execution flow.
PowerPC, in that same timeframe, has also borrowed many features from the market, and is now much changed from when the first cores were released. But this is not an attempt to revolutionize, so much as it is an attempt to keep pace and stay competitive.
The end result: you have a whole range of chip selections to choose from today, and they're quite varied in what they offer. The PowerPC 970FX stays strictly in the midrange: it has competitive but not leading performance, good multi-CPU scalability, and has a combination of slightly lower power usage and on-the-fly frequency and voltage adjustments.
The thing is, you can find the same features in x86 processors, they're just spread out differently. You can typically get more performance for your dollar from chips from Intel or AMD. AMD has also seen similar improvements in power consumption in the move to 90nm as IBM has seen for the 970FX, so there's more than one competitor offer a good balance of power and performance. The Opteron also offers the most efficient multi-processor bus subsystem ever to grace a low-end server, so there's definitely still competition there. Finally, both Intel and AMD offer chips with on-the-fly voltage and frequency scaling, although it's still not an easy task to find a desktop board for the Pentium M (that will change soon).
So basically, with no performance advantage, Windows on PowerPC would flounder...and hey, it did flounder, way back in the NT 4 days. Funny that, the RISCy Pentium Pro was the final nail in the NT 4 PowerPC's coffin.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Would you eat a nice, juicy steak (sorry vegans) out of the bottom of a trash can? Same thing.
Well, come to think of it, if it came down to Lich Nixon or Dubya Bush....
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Back around the middle 70's (don't remember the exact year -- we had good drugs back then), I remember a friend of mine, a great programmer, looking at the instruction set of the 80x86. He called it an abortion.
My view was that the engineers hated the programmers and went "segment registers! That will really piss them off!".
Over the decades we have seen Intel argue that "no, really, NOT having a linear address space is a GOOD thing" then eventually switch to a linear address space because they were wrong. Revise how segment registers REALLY work, etc.
Folks wonder why PPC, if it is better, doesn't take off (since the x86 is really on its last legs). Because, in this world, the best product doesn't always become the dominant product.
I like Macs, but have been using PC's since DOS 1.0. So there ya go.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Blasphemy
In this house we obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
A: No. See my sig. Next question.
Nathan's blog
I remember having an alpha server under my desk at a workplace (someone ordered it and did not pay)
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... i keep it in that virtual place where it belongs to ...
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... I just loved that system :(
while my pc ran linux, for fun I had the alpha for NT and some stuff...
it was relatively old (2-3 years older than the new pc's) still it was busting all the others with any application speed....
While I would use linux/unix on pc, I would really enjoy running it on "exotic" architecture
i would keep windows on the pc, as personally i only use it for gaming (i would if i did not have a ps2 and an xbox) and for stuff that does not run on windows (some idiotic apps for idioticly crippled protocols, and some devices with a windows only driver and software)
actually I am on the track for years to eliminate windows even from my virtual machine window, but since some service providers are so retarded that they require windows (eg my banking only works in IE, not moz, ff or opera)
So running it on a "nice hardware" ? NO WAY
if some new plane sims come out, I might get a gaming PC, and run a stripped minimal install of w2k on it
those OS/2 days
Oh please don't lecture me about capitalisation issues. I have two OPENSTEP machines here ( http://homepage.mac.com/mouser/PhotoAlbum6.html ) so I know about that. But let's keep things simple here.
Also, if you review your history, Jobs demonstrated OPENSTEP on PPC hardware in 96, just when Apple was about to buy BeOS. That's what turned the table.
Right now, the only PPC machines shipping in serious quantities are from Apple, and they already have a better OS, so why would they preload Windows? It just doesn't make sense.
So what PPC machines are there that would/could come with Windows preloaded? No big producers that I can think of, just fringe stuff like AmigaOne, etc.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Windows NT4, at release, supported MIPS R4000, PowerPC, Alpha 21064, and i386. Support for MIPS and PPC was dropped after Service Pack 2. Windows 2000 had Alpha support until beta 3.
Maybe to 68000. There's isn't a version of Windows for that is there?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The only reason to run windows on any platform is because some vital piece of software requires windows to run.
So, if I only had a PPC-based computer, and I had a piece of software that I absolutely must use, and this software only runs on windows (and is available for winPPC), then, and only then would I run winPPC.
If I had a PPC-based computer that wasn't a Mac, I would run linux or freeBSD, except if the above scenario required me to run windows.
If I had a PPC-based computer that is a Mac, I would dual-boot MacOS and linux.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
If windows came to PPC, would you switch
a) Would you (as an existing PPC hardware owner) switch from MacOS/Linux to windows. But hey, you can already run it albeit slowly through virtualPC.
b) If you were a windows on x86 user, and a PPC version became available, would you switch to PPC hardware.
Right now my money is on AMD64 and x86 architecture... but I do admit it would be interesting to see how fast windows applications would run if there were a native build on PPC, assuming that one could find a video card that wasn't dated from last year (which you could if many people started to switch).
I have a friend who had been scouting for laptops recently. She looked through several X86 brands but found that with the recent models there were heat issues. If the laptop itself wasn't getting hot, it was running the fan a lot.
Being that the laptop was intended for use in class, the loud fan could be rather distracting/embarrasing. So instead she switched over entirely and got an Apple. It surprised me that she was so willing to switch to a different OS (and one-button mouse etc), but she's doing rather well. Still, I'd imagine that if windows were available for mac she would have gone with that for familiarity, as would many others in a similar situation.
Still, this gives me hope for alternate desktop OSs. If a student is willing to swap architecture and OS just because of noisy fans, perhaps with improvements the alternatives (Linux,BSD, etc etc) may gain more support. Certainly though, many would regard a switch to OSX as an improvement from XP - regardless of the change in design/use.
Crap running on different iron is still crap.
Actually, as far as laptops go, I'd take Linux on PPC over x86 any day. The CPU is more efficient, Apple's PMU is _much_ better under Linux than ACPI or APM, and the Apple series of laptops are excellent quality machines with good components at a fair price. In fact, when using Linux on my G3 iBook, the only things I ever miss are Flash and a good, recent JDK from Sun.
Seriously, in my opinion, Apple makes the nicest laptops period. I easily get over 4 hours of battery life under Linux on my iBook. The ThinkPad and Vaio don't come close in Linux or Windows. If Broadcom would relase specs for/make drivers for the Airport Extreme, I'd be inclined to get a new PowerBook.
For desktops though, you're bang on. I can throw together a good Linux box for under $500CDN.
Homer: It will have the loyalty of a cat, and the cleanliness of a dog!
Love the Third Amendment?
NT 3.00+ (at least) came for i386[+], MIPS, PPC and Alpha. MIPS and PPC didn't have enough interested buyers to maintain the platform. Alpha held out a bit longer and actually had some followers. Microsoft wasn't stupid, they lost money on the platforms, saw no way to recover it and cancelled non x86 NT.
Just to add a little detail, it, on PPC at least, went up to NT4 SP2. Microsoft didn't cancel it - they told Motorola they needed to take over development, and Motorola declined, so according to Microsoft, Motorola canceled NT4 PPC. See, it's all in the nuance.
It's too bad - the company I was at was looking to get a thousand copies to run on new PReP Macs. Another "if only" in computing...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Add some of the wrapped Mplayer codecs to that mix as well.
switch what, OS? And, h/w, too? Its hard enough maintaining Windows on x86. PPC would dillute the quality of windows further beyond recognition. Oh, wait! That's the idea, here. Make windows even worse than it is, so, it dies a quicker death. If this wasn't a flame bait post, I have never seen one. Please!
You jest, but I just had to go from a SPARC (risc) programming course to an EE course on the Motorola 68HC11 (cisc). I SO miss the consistent naming of the risc instructions, and I'm having to completely rethink all of my logic as a result of only really having two registers to play with.
Sun just announced that it will have a PPC version of Solaris 10 available. No idea why, other than they will have an alternative to Sparc that is non-Intel. This is not the first version, either, it was available back in the Solaris 2.5 release as well. Marc
But I would duel-boot OS X and Windows on the same machine.
In fact, I wouldn't care if the box was PPC or on x86: simply running both OSes on the same box at full speed would kick ass.