Slashback: OS Xi, Sarge, Statistics

Slashback is back from vacation with updates on the Apple switch to Intel,a now-fixed glitch in the recent release of Debian 3.1, a hyper-efficient Honda, and the real numbers on online music networks. Read on for the details.

It still feels like a strange dream that they're really switching. An anonymous reader writes "With our latest Unix (MacOS-X) vendor's switch to x86, I figured now would be a fine time to revisit an old MIT Graduate Student Beer announcement from 2001."

Also, samchung writes "CoolTechZone has its latest article up that discusses the possibilities of Apple's protection on x86 hardware to prevent users from running the Mac OS X on non-proprietary hardware."

More fuel: Reality Master 101 writes "Michael Robertson, CEO of Linspire posted an editorial talking about his disappointment that Apple wasn't embracing generic hardware. But the really interesting part was that he states, "My sources say that Jobs is going to use Intel's cryptographic technology called LaGrande to make sure OS X will only boot on Apple-branded hardware. This is a similar technique to the one that Microsoft used to make sure Linux could not be loaded on Xbox..." I'm still not sure how they'll do this with an open source Kernel." They're clearly part of the Linspire marketing effort, but Robertson's messages, including this one, are usually pithy and worth reading.

Hey, you could always wait for a service pack. An anonymous reader submits "Because of an error in a configuration file, Debian Sarge, released June 6th, does not have security updating enabled by default. ZDNet Australia reports that after several years of testing, the release team's error caused a significant delay in deployment. Steve Langasek, of the release team, says, 'Whoops, don't go pressing those 10,000 copies of [3.1] just yet.' Fortunately, the error may be fixed quite easily, and an update is expected within several days. OSNews also covers the story.

Sticker shock alone could defeat the other drivers. josemunizn writes "Remember the Honda FCX, from a Slashdot article in '03? Well the New York Times has an automotive review of a week-long, unsupervised test drive of the Honda. Choice quote: 'In most important ways, the FCX feels ready for prime-time combat on the world's roads.'"

Carry the one, subtract 5, voila! An anonymous reader writes "WinMX and Limewire are the most popular P2P apps? That's what NPD group claims in its research on iTunes covered on Slashdot yesterday. But as Jon Newton points out on P2Pnet and MP3 Newswire, the entire premise that more people use iTunes over the file sharing networks is 'nonsense.' With sites like Slyck.com reporting eDonkey alone has over 4.5 million concurrent users and P2P research firm BigChampagne saying in the U.S. in May an average of 6,290,327 people were logged onto the p2p networks at any given moment, how can iTunes' 1.7 million downloads over an entire month put them anywhere near the top? Zeropaid has also chimed in on these claims and even CNET is now questioning the results it reported in its original article on the NPD research."

Catching up to the 3rd parties who have caught up with the competition. An anonymous reader writes "For the impatient or those few not ready to adopt Firefox, there is now another option to get tabs. BetaNews reports, 'Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser will not have to wait until IE7 to experience tabbed browsing. MSN has shipped a new build of its MSN Search Toolbar that adds basic tabbed browsing support to IE6. But the feature is not fully integrated into the browser, instead relying on the toolbar to create tabs.' Here's an article including a screenshot.

Comments

OSX on generic Intel HW

[jmorris42]

Apple with 'Intel Inside' is at best a wash. No more hype about being
faster than a Wintel box, but they get close to parity in the real world.
They might get a few more people buying Macs if they can dual boot them,
but will suffer a financial hit when someone gets it running on commodity hardware.

And make no mistake, it WILL happen as the linked article says. If
for no other reason than "because we can". Darwin already runs so if
nothing else someone will just extract the higher level functions from
the CD and drop them in, disabling the copy protection as required.
Removing copy protection is well understood and will pose no real
challenge. Macs aren't X-Boxes, developers who have not signed an NDA
must be able to use one, including the debugger, so hardware lockdown
isn't a real option.

And I'm not even sure this new practice of locking software to one's
own brand of PC is even going to be legal. The console world gets away
with it because a) the consoles sell at a loss so people cut em some
slack and b) nobody has waged a real legal war over it yet. But on the
PC, Compaq v IBM is settled law.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[torinth]

...but will suffer a financial hit when someone gets it running on commodity hardware.

Really? They're going to take a hit when some bored hobbyist cracks the protection scheme and puts the solution up on some P2P site? You really think that many people who are seriously interested in the simplicity, stability, interface, and power of Apple products are suddenly going to learn how to scrounge through P2P sites and use custom machines to save a couple hundred bucks? Of course some people will, but that'll probably be made up for just as well by people who do it to test OS X and then make their next purchase an Apple PC with it OS X pre-installed.

If Apple does much of anything to restrict OS X to run on specific hardware, that's enough to deter pretty much everyone who isn't some too-poor-anyway college student or a hobbyist who's going to recommend the retail system to all his or her friends. Too many people are way too lazy and honest for what you're predicting.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[That's Unpossible!]

[Apple] will suffer a financial hit when someone gets it running on commodity hardware.

They will? Prove it. You are only considering one outcome, that Apple will lose hardware sales to people that buy PCs and load OS X on them.

You are ignoring many other possible outcomes:

- Millions of people with existing PC hardware may plunk down $129 to purchase OS X that would never have bought Apple hardware in the first place. Would this not be practically pure profit for Apple? How much other Apple software will these people then buy? How many more iTunes converts will there be?

- People will buy OS X, install it on their existing PC, and when it comes time to upgrade their hardware, may now consider buying Apple hardware where they would never have done so before.

It is all about mindshare. Before the move to Intel processors, Apple was not in a position to win mindshare from the Windows crowd, because it required an investment in hardware to switch.

Perhaps Steve Jobs is thinking further ahead than you give him credit for. After all, he had them make OS X work on Intel for the past 5 years. Do you really think he has not considered every path in the future?

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[ArcticCelt]

And I will also say that most normal people (we are not, sorry to break the news) are not able to install a simple driver and even less a complete operating system. If they also have to hack it and find instruction on H4x0r web sites, in don't think that the "impact" will be much bigger than the one I create on the ocean water level when I take a pee in it.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[daviddennis]

Of course a lot of people want to see Tiger and so they downloaded it illegally.

And a lot of people are going to want to see Leopard run on their PC.

But Leopard isn't going to include drivers for anything but Apple hardware, which makes it much less of a casual download for Intel fans.

I think Apple's wisest strategy is to allow people to do the reverse engineering and run it on foreign hardware, but offer no support for that. That way, the curious get to try the system, but the bulk of Apple users will still buy computers designed and tuned for Apple's software. Why? Because we like its style and design, and because we don't like hassle.

The days when I struggled with Linux distributions trying to get readable fonts are over. I have too much money and too little time to make that kind of effort. Now I want a total solution, and Apple's there to sell it to me.

I think the main reason Apple does not want to officially allow their software to run on non-Apple hardware is not vendor lock-in. It's the desire to give users a trouble-free experience. Liberating the MacOS so it would run on non-Apple hardware would create a support nightmare Apple's ill-equipped to handle.

RIght now, the Apple brand stands for a trouble-free computing experience, or as close to that as is possible in this world. Trying to support every generic PC on the planet would be impossible(*), and attempting to do so would cost the company it's hard-earned reputation.

D

(*) Microsoft does it primarily by delegating driver development to vendors. They have the clout to require this, but Apple does not.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[fsterman]

I mean, come on-- what company doesn't want to sell their software?

One who makes most of their money on hardware.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[Rasta Prefect]

Next, the virus doesn't exactley need to run inside the system. It just needs to exploit somethign in the system. Nothign in this needs a mac to acomplish either. The virus could just feed the processor jumbo and cause the MAC to crash after a couple seconds or something. Exploits that could allow this can be found easily with security advisories.

In order "feed the processor jumbo" whatever thats supposed to mean, it would first have to be _running on the system_. Requires either 1. An exploit, or 2. The user to bring the program in and run it. Either of these two things is OS specific. Changing the processor doesn't change anything. You might see a few more exploits from othe UNIX-on-Intel systems that run without modification for OS X, but the Unix world is not exactly rife with viral infections.

Intel assembly code isn't the issue here. It is the little endian big endian processor extentions as well as some basics. Code writen for an intel X86 machine will not runn on a mac g4 processor because of this. Now with wintel it is portable. Virus can be basicaly recycled from one operating system to another.

What is the hell is a "big endian/little endian processor extension". Big Endian/Little Endian refers to the byte order used to store integers in memory - Nothing about it could be considered an "extension". Code written for a Windows machine _still_ won't run on a Mac unless it doesn't use any system calls at all - In which case, it can't do anything useful because in these modern, enlightened post-DOS days we don't let every peice of code on the system do whatever it wants to the hardware. I mention X86 Assembly code because if you're writing to that level of bare metal, you'll probably have to use some.

Could a boot sector virus still infect a Intel based Mac? Maybe. But boot sector viruses went out with warez trading on floppy disks. You have to boot the machine off removable, writable storage (no CD's, unless the virus was placed in the image pre-burn) to get a boot sector virus, and how often do you actually do that? Any installation of a boot sector virus post-boot would require compromise of OS security, and the use of OS specific system calls.

If just being on Intel exposed an OS to crossovers from Windows viruses, Linux, FreeBSD, etc would be having virus problems. Nothing going on there.

By far the most annoying thing about the Mac/Intel switch IMO is the amount of bullshit being spewed by people who obviously know squat about computer architecture. Just putting an Intel processor in it doesn't make it a Windows PC with all the failings thereof anymore than the XBox is going to be a Mac or the Nintendo 64 was an SGI workstation.

MSN Toolbar & Tabs

[Sv-Manowar]

The MSN search bar tabs seem interesting, but I wonder if it will establish precedents that might carry into final builds of IE7. The possibility of bugs or issues with this implementation may also help the adoption of firefox, as people who like the concept of tabbed browsing but find this implementation lacking may seek out other browsers, or ask those 'in the know' around them for recommendations.

Trusted Computing. Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

The last thing the world needs is another locked-up platform But there's no other way I can think of for Apple to resist cloned/virtualized Macs running in other OSs. It has to be signed apps, right? And that takes us down the road to the end of free computing as we know it.

This may be a reason to stop buying Macs. What this could represent may change the entire spirit of computing from "buy/own" to "borrow/rent". And forget privacy and being able to do whatever you want on your own machine.

Re:Which of these will happen first?

[aCapitalist]

I guess you haven't been following the news in the past few days.

Apple PCs will run Windows. This has already been confirmed by one of Apple's VPs. They will not be using OpenFirmware. You'll be able to triple boot windows, OSX and Linux.

If I was Kreskin I would say that this is part of the master plan. Let people dual-triple boot and compare the desktops. They're guessing that they'll always go back to the OSX partition and they get to sell premium-priced hardware

pfft...

[Cryptnotic]

it's only a matter of time before my own Mac is useless because the newer applications will no longer be compiled for G4. Fsck.

You're worried that your new Mac will one day be obsolete? Bzzt. That's going to happen anyway. There's nothing you can do about it. Anyway, you're going to be buying a new machine in a couple of years anyway.

Running old programs on new machines is what having source code is for.

OS X on a standard PC: a matter of time. So?

[garote]

The army of cr4ck3rs and h4x()rs out there will surely find some way to circumvent whatever protection Apple devises to keep OS X off a standard PC. In fact, they've already succeeded . It's just a matter of speeding things up.

Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel is only feasible because of the work that Transitive Technologies has done in creating a dynamic recompiler. But that technology, too, is actually old news. Check out this PC Nintendo 64 emulator, from 2001, for example.

It's pretty clear that, even if Apple didn't make it easier for h4x0rs by moving to Intel chips, we would all eventually be able to emulate OS X in software no matter what. It would be a bit slower, perhaps, but it would be possible.

So what?

Apple is still a hardware company. If they can produce a great looking low-end box, a great looking mid-range box, and a great looking high-end box, where will the attack on their revenue stream come from? The only market segment they would lose by rampant piracy of their OS is the segment of "switchers", and though I don't have hard data, I suspect that group is tiny compared to the group of people who buy new computers year by year.

We all wail menacingly about a future where John Q. Public buys a Dell machine, downloads a cracked copy of OS X with a bunch of open-source driver patches and a dongle emulator, burns it, and wipes his machine with it, thereby completely divesting himself of all warranty service and tech support from either Dell or Apple. How likely is this, really? (If you DON'T factor yourself, as the helpful nerd-on-hand, into the picture?) Is the couple of hundred dollars saved worth the extra trouble, present and future? Just how many end-users, as a percentage, are willing to deal with that?

Does Apple really produce superior hardware, and do people really care enough about superior hardware? In two years we'll find out once and for all.

Re:Tabbing...

[John Whitley]

WTF? Tabs in browsers and other apps are often are heavily dependent on the semantics of that particular application. Tabs can and have been made part of UI/Application frameworks, as the app can interact with those frameworks in a manner that makes the tabs sensible. The X11 window manager protocols are worlds removed from being UI/App frameworks. The protocols deliberately set up some uniform and non-intrusive ground rules to keep WMs from interfering with apps.

Moreover, look at the differences in use and presentation between "tabs" in most browsers today and apps such as spreadsheets, e.g. the multiple "sheets" model in Excel or Gnumeric. Likewise consdier tabs from the SWT toolkit used in Eclipse, Azureus (Java Bitorrent client), etc. These all have quite different uses and interaction models. Your proposal essentially amounts to "all tabs in all apps in all contexts should work just alike, and their visual display should no longer be controlled by the app." Doesn't seem like a very good idea to me...

Re:Street-ready and $1mil? Uh huh

[hey!]

I dunno. Your model for pricing seems naive. Sure, vegetable oil costs on the same order of magnitude crude now. But we also use over twenty million barrels of oil a day. Some quick back of the envelope calculations show this is is probably an order of magnitue greater than the total vegetable oil production in the world. What would ramping up vegetable oil production to the scale needed look like?

You always have to factor in scale in enviornmental issues. Traditional Innuit made clothing out of natural materials -- animal skins. However to clothe hundreds of millions people this way would be an environmental disaster. Petroleum derived polypropylene fleece is much more benign -- and recyclable.

Meanwhile, there are no realistic ways of storing more than a dozen pounds of hydrogen in a vehicle..

Well, sure at present, but there are some short and long term solutions. Ammonia is promising. It's already one of the most highly produced chemicals in the world, many agricultural areas would have very little trouble converting to ammonia because the world uses over a hundred million metric tons of this stuff annually for fertilizer. It's also not hard to imagine worldwide production increasing by an order of magnitude. NH3 undergoes a phase transition to liquid at normal temperatures at 8 bar, so you can pack a lot of hydrogen into a tank this way if it's in the form of ammonia, which would mean it would have a volumetric energy density closer to gasoline.. The hydrogen can be released by a device like a catalytic converter, or in some designs the cracking takes place inside a specially deisgned fuel cell.

I'm not saying that it's going to work, certainly not precisely on anyone's timetable. But you are being unreasonably pessimistic.