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

I really wonder why Apple didn't go with AMD

[MarcoAtWork]

I'd have thought that especially the Opteron line would've been a good fit with Apple, and by using those at least they could've mantained some semblance of being 'different' and justify the premium cost for their systems.

Not to mention that AMD's dual core offerings seem a lot better than Intel's, and with apps on the mac already fairly SMP-aware (due to all the dual-G5 boxes Apple sold) I'd have bet that OS/X on a dual dual-core Opteron 275 would've been a much stronger proposition.

Re:I really wonder why Apple didn't go with AMD

[cowscows]

This has been discussed in jsut about every post about Apple and Intel so far, but I'll repeat it here.

Intel has more to offer in terms of lower power chips, important for Apple because their powerbook line is really stagnating. Secondly, Intel is far less likely to have any sort of production rate problems, because they're just plain a much bigger company.

But don't think that Apple won't consider AMD an option somewhere down the line.

Apple x86 copies will happen. So?

[mblase]

Apple's computers have always been about ease-of-use. It doesn't matter that they're the only ones making PPC hardware now, because OS X will only run on "good" Apple hardware anyway.

The same will happen with OS X on Intel. Inevitably, someone will find a way to build their own Intel box that can run OS X. I predict Apple's response will be: (1) You can't publish how to do this on the Internet, or if they are legally unable to stop them: (2) Refuse to support that hardware.

And that will be enough. Some OS X user will call Apple, somewhere along the line, and say that they're running OS X on non-Apple hardware, at which point Apple will decline to help them on the grounds that they don't support BYO hardware.

Sure, people out there will be building their own OS X boxen, but Apple won't help them do it. And if anyone tries to make a business out of selling boxen that are explicitly marked as "OS X compatible", Apple will bring their lawyers in, force them to remove whatever's making them compatible, and that will be the end of that.

Street-ready and $1mil? Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, if a car costs $1mil, it is not street-ready. It's something you can drive around, but it's something that only 0.1% of the population can afford to own and drive. From that point of view, I could say, "private jets are now a viable transportation solution!" Yeah, they are, for 0.1% of the population.

We all need to get through our heads: hydrogen cars are a boondoggle. The hydrogen economy is a code-word for "the biggest subsidies (tax dollar give-aways) the fossil fuel industry has ever dreamed of."

Biodiesel is cost-competitive with plain old oil RIGHT NOW. A barrel of food-grade vegetable oil costs about $50, and unlike a barrel of crude oil, vegetable oil needs only minimal processing to use it.

Electric cars are almost competitive with ICE cars also, and will be more than competitive long before hydrogen fuel cell cars show up in any show rooms. It's simple math. A lithium-battery electric vehicle could have a range of about 300 miles. That's all we need. The battery packs for such a vehicle would cost about $100k right now. That's (obviously) too much, but there's nothing inherently so expensive in lithium battery production, so it should be possible to bring the price down to make it cost-competitive.

Meanwhile, there are no realistic ways of storing more than a dozen pounds of hydrogen in a vehicle, and guess what, fuel cells still rely on metals like palladium, which last time I checked, isn't something that just grows on trees (unlike biodiesel, which does in fact grow on (palm) trees).

Oh and guess where hydrogen comes from, and probably will come from for the forseeable future? It comes from oil, natural gas, or other fossil fuel sources! It just happens to be almost the least energy-efficient way to use those fuels that you can imagine. Yes, it is possible to produce hydrogen by electrolysis of water, using solar electricity... but again, the process is so inefficient that it's never going to happen.

History repeats itself

[WhiteWolf666]

Let me quote: http://www.macintouch.com/pchistory.html

Mitch Stone is quite right to call the "opening" of the IBM PC architecture an urban myth. IBM clearly had no intention of doing so. IBM successfully used litigation techniques to shut down a number of early PC cloners.

However, it is Phoenix and Lloyd's of London, not Compaq, which deserves the credit for first making PC clones possible.

Prior to Phoenix, IBM threw the weight of their enormous legal muscle against anyone who cloned the BIOS in their PC. Phoenix did a clean room design. None of the programmers working on the Phoenix BIOS had ever seen the IBM PC BIOS. In fact, Phoenix went out of their way to hire programmers who had never even worked on the 8088/8086 processor chips used in early IBM PCs.

But that alone might not have sufficed. IBM could have tied them up in legal restraining orders, etc. and watched them go bankrupt while the case inched its way through the US court system.

The real genius, was the Phoenix had a huge legal insurance policy through Lloyd's of London. This gave Phoenix the ability to survive such an attack. As a result IBM didn't sue Phoenix and once the proverbial cat was out of the bag, they didn't sue most other BIOS clone produces unless they were outright copies.

Of course Gates and Microsoft were right there eager to sell DOS and Basic to any clone maker who had an interest.

There was a large company, with a powerful staff of lawyers, who tried very, very, hard to keep other companies from running PC OSs on clone systems.

That didn't work out very well for the large company (IBM), whom I believe is/was far more sophisticated/powerful in terms of its legal staff.

There is a difference this time, of course; Apple's EULA. My guess is, however, that there will be some way to challenge the 'Apple branded machine' requirement in court. If there wasn't, I suspect Apple would have sued the emulator designers by now (PowerPC (pearpc) and 68k (basilisk)).

Honestly, I believe this will happen:
1. Intel Macs will be cheap. Not Dell cheap, but maybe midrange HP cheap.
2. Apple will grab marketshare.
3. Apple will license Mac reference designs to other manufacturers, possibly with Microsoft's blessing. How? They'll buy a Microsoft license to something or other.
4. Once a sufficent marketshare is reached, Apple will sell un-tied versions of Mac OS. These will only be OEM, and will have to be supported by OEM PC manufactuers. Apple will only support the 'Apple' experience.

Forget dual-booting - virutalize instead

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Lots of people talking about the possibility of dual-booting windows and osx.
But they are missing a key part of the puzzle - virtualization.

Imagine VMware, SoftPC, etc but running at the full speed of the native hardware with full isolation between running OSes. In a year, that's the way any serious virtualization will work. The hardware assist that Intel's VT and AMD's Pacifica doohickies provide is what it will take to do it.

So, it will be entirely possible to run both OS-X and Windows and Linux simultaneously on the same cpu with no performance hit. Heck, with multi-cores becoming so popular you'll be able to give each OS it's own processor so they can all run in true parallel if that's what you want.

Sure, Intel and AMD are talking like this virutalization stuff is only for servers - but they always say that about the new toys right up to the point when they start releasing it on the consumer-grade systems too.

TCPA /Palladium tech cannot be ignored

[0111 1110]

The article mentioned the dongle-on-motherboard idea, but it didn't mention the TCPA/Palladium issue. AFAIK, TCPA is not dead. And with Intel promising to deliver on this tech in the future, all it will take is for apple to produce their own version of Palladium for Leopard and their own custom motherboard to make it very difficult for crackers, at least in theory. Maybe Leopard will end up even more locked down and DRM enabled than Longhorn.

I'm not saying that it will be impossible to release a cracked version of Leopard that doesn't require a TCPA enabled system, but I don't think anyone can say for certain at this stage how easy it will be to get around. After all it is new tech, a whole new scheme. I realize that it will be considered the ultimate challenge to crack Leopard and there will be lots of people working on it, but it may not be as easy or as automatic as everyone seems to be assuming.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[BitGeek]

A point which everyone in this thread seems to be ignorant of.

Apple will release Mac OS X so that it only works on Mac hardware.

Two weeks later some darwin hackers will report that with their custom kernal, you can install OS X from your DVD onto generic hardware.

People who don't want to buy Macs ,but do want to run OS X, will go out, buy the DVD for $100 or so, and install it on non-apple hardware.

Some of these people will report it to slashdot, and some poster in the forums will go "In your face Steve Jobs! HAHAHAHAA!!!!"

And Apple will count the $100 they got from that sale, and put it in the bank without a complaint.

I mean, come on-- what company doesn't want to sell their software? Sure, Apple doesn't want to support an infinite variety of hardware combinations-- and so they will only officially support OS X on their hardware.

Everybody wins. The hackers can run it on commodity hardware, Apple sells more OS, and doesn't ahve to worry about supporting the garbage that most fly by night PC companies put out-- and on better quality hardwware like Dell or HP, all these customers of Dell and HP running Mac OS X only makes it more likely that Dell and HP will come to Apple to license the OS.

Probably Apple will do something to make it difficult to pirate OS X, and that strategy will likely be to make the install too big to distribute via P2P. (Maybe 4G is not too big, but its too big for me, and for anyone but the most dedicated pirate.)

Eventually, some PC manufacturer is going to sign a deal with Apple and sell machines with OS X installed... Apple doesn't have a problem with clones, contrary to popular belief. Apple has a problem with low quality clones, and a BIG problem with subsidizing a clone market. The previous Mac design was such that Apple lost money on every clone sold... the new business model will have Apple making an OS license fee on every clone sold.

OS X on generic hardware is a non-story. Apple won't care-- all they care about is not having to support crap hardware, and making their license fee for selling the software.

The iPod's margins are close the the margin on a mac. The OS Upgrade cost for OS X is probably equal to or better than the margin on selling a macintosh.

Therefore, the Microsoft model will work fine for Apple-- the only difference is that Apple will produce its own hardware. IT will compete with its customers, but it will still have customers signing up, happy with those terms.