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

[xenocide2]

Well, a fuckload of people downloaded the Tiger beta when it found its way to bittorrent. I'd expect quite a few people to give it a try, especially since the hacks will be likely be well documented by the time Longhorn rolls around and everyone reformats for good measure anyways. Will these people try it for a week, love it and turn around and buy it outright? No. But I'm sure Apple will complain about a loss of money equal to shelf price times infringers.

People "seriously interested in the simplicity, stability, interface, and power of Apple products" already own Apples, and are far more likely to purchase a new one. I think you seriously overestimate the size of this group. Especially since the "too poor anyways" category makes up a good percentage of new computers sold to individuals.

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

[Waffle Iron]

I recently picked up a used G3 box running Panther so I could have a big-endian machine to test some cross-platform code on.

As a total Apple n00b, I haven't been able to figure out how to turn on sub-pixel font rendering for my LCD monitor. I get the impression that the OS is supposed to be smart enough to turn it on by itself, but nothing happens. The totally stripped-down control panel dialogs in OSX don't give me anything to work with to try to fix it.

Bottom line: for me, the Linux fonts look beautiful, the Apple fonts look like ass. Oh well.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[daviddennis]

Since 1998, when I bought a beige G3.

Perhaps I should not have said trouble-free, since computing always has its problems.

But it's a lot closer than Windows. No virii. No spyware. Beautifully designed hardware and software.

It's not a perfect world, no, but it's a better world.

D

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[jmorris42]

> If it's done outside Apple's licence, Dell would be easy prey for
> Apple's lawyers.

Not really. Once you have the lawyers to make the law work you can enforce the software is SOLD, not LICENSED reality. The only protection OSX has is it's copyright. If a boxed copy of OSX goes into the carton box Apple has zero leg to stand on except to try bankrupting the offending vendor. If Dell were willing to piss Bill off that bad Steve would just have to hold his ankles and take it like a man. But of course Dell, HP, etc. won't do any such thing for fear of Bill. Whether a smaller outfit will try is the more interesting question.

> Apple will be *very* keen to protect their IP. Expect all sorts of
> things to lock it down, not least of which will be custom ASICs with no
> documentation.

See other posts in this thread as to why the full monty XBox style DRM isn't likely. It eliminates Mac as a development platform and it is all about developer buyin. As for custom ASICs, no way. It would be a ball and chain around their neck as they try to rev new versions and frankly Apple no longer has the resources for that sort of thing, they outsource everything except software development these days.

> All they need is to ensure that the OS requires the hardware at key
> points in undocumented ways.

Can't even do that. Darwin is Open Source. Quartz is the only place they could play games of that sort and it would get patched fairly quick.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[Waffle Iron]

That's exactly what I tried first. I'm not as as stupid as the condescending black-turtleneck-wearing AC would assume. On this box, the setting has no effect whatsoever.

I've tried all the settings: Standard, light, medium, strong. All of them == the exact same fuzzy grayscale-only antialiasing. Maybe the settings on this machine somehow got hosed before I got it, but that's not supposed to happen on a Mac, right?

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[ChadN]

The more I think about it, the more I believe the Pentium M is the single most important chip technology released by any chip maker in the past decade. More important than the P4, more import than the AMD K7 or K8 (!), more important than the G3, G4, or G5. (I'll ignore the embedded market).

I'd sworn off Intel chips, especially w/ the P4 and Intel's other blundering and bullying. But you gotta have respect for the Pentium M, to so successfully fill an important market niche (lower power/lower heat) where Intel had essentially NO viable contender before. Think about it; Transmeta, Cyrix, VIA, AMD, even the various PowerPC makers all used to laugh at Intel's offering, and then the Pentium M came along. And now, Intel will probably own the laptop market for quite some time to come. Well, okay, they already did, but until the Pentium M, they never deserved to. :)

I'm still amazed at how versatile the descendants of the Pentium Pro have turned out to be, and as a Mac user, I'll probably end up with a Pentium M based Mac laptop in the future, and not have to cringe at the prospect.

That said, I wish AMD the best of luck, because I truly think they helped Intel to reform its ways a little (my last Intel chip was the 300Mhz Celeron w/ onboard cache; nearly everything since, until the Pentium M, has been embarrasing, IMO) And hopefully, there will also be many an application for the IBM Power descendants as the years go by.

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.

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

[QuantumG]

Sigh. Clone makers then undercut Apple and people who previously would buy a Mac to feel special will no longer do so because they're cheap as chips and Apple's hardware business is in the toilet. When it becomes common to buy a clone instead of a Mac, people start looking at clones of Apple's other hardware (iPods) and thinking that, gee, maybe it is dumb of me to pay twice as much just so I feel special. Maybe Apple doesn't care and they think they can migrate from a hardware company to a software company this way, but I think more likely they think they can just attack clone makers and crush them legally.

Re:OSX on generic Intel HW

[SEE]

Apple has not said they will never license OS X to other PC manufacturers.

On Monday, answering questions about x86 Macs, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller said, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."

So, while there may be some question as to whether that means "We will take technical measures to prevent it from running on non-Apple computers", or just "our license agreements will prohibit it from running on non-Apple computers", it's pretty clear that Apple won't be licensing OS X to other PC manufacturers.

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.

Tabbing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be a function of the window manager, not the application. freedesktop.org should standardise a tabbing protocol for X11 apps.

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...

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.

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.

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

[Moridineas]

g5 isn't 64 bit the way AMD64 / Intel EMT64 is. OSX isn't a 64 bit operating system--parts of it are, but if you want a 64-bit os, run linux, freebsd, windows xp64, etc.

secondly, it's been said that shipping systems will not use p4's. Pentium D is the rumor.

Honestly, why do you care about the hardware? Why aren't you caring about the performance, etc? Can you tell a difference between a PC using an intel chip or an amd? no.

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

[TheRaven64]

g5 isn't 64 bit the way AMD64 / Intel EMT64 is.

Correct. PowerPC was designed as a 64-bit ISA from the start. The only difference between 64-bit and 32-bit PowerPC chips is the size of the registers, the MMU and some extra instructions for manipulating 64-bit integers natively.

x86-64, in contrast is a 64-bit hack built on top of a 32-bit cludge on top of a 16-bit ISA. As well as being 64-bit, AMD64 adds some extra registers (almost half as many as PowerPC, woohoo), which makes code faster, in spite of the 64-bit penalty (it takes longer to load a 64-bit value than a 32-bit one, and code with 64-bit pointers takes up more cache space).

OSX isn't a 64 bit operating system

OS X Tiger is a 64-bit OS. Because PowerPC64 was designed to be compatible with PowerPC32, it is possible to run 32-bit code on it. One of the most commonly used pieces of 32-bit code is the windowing system. This is 32-bit because graphical applications rarely need more than 4GB of address space[1], and so it makes no sense to slow all of them down for the few that do.

[1] They might, however, need to spawn compute processes which handle more than 4GB of data.

Fired!

[Pandaemonium]

Slashback should be fired-
it takes too much vacation.

Which of these will happen first?

[greg1104]

Anyone care to wager the correct order these events will happen in?

1) First mod-chip to bypass firmware limitations of Apple x86 hardware released

2) Linux distribution boots on new Apple-x86 hardware

3) Mac OS X for Intel boots on generic x86 hardware

4) Windows hacked to boot on new Apple x86 hardware

5) Mac OS X for Intel hacked to run in emulated virtual x86 machine

Tiebreaker question: estimate the date when OS X for x86 runs under Virtual PC on a G5 running the current OS X.

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

Re:Which of these will happen first?

[jericho4.0]

But Darwin is open source.

Re:Trusted Computing. Great.

[socialhack]

Perhaps owning computers is a privilege and not a right! Why else would they call it a software licenses.

Until OS X, Apple has always been a locked-up platform. One reason they chose BSD over Linux is because BSD allowed them to release altered versions of the kernel without being required to publicly release the source code. I'm not saying it's right, just that it is. If you want free computing use FreeBSD, Linux, etc. We'll have to wait to see what they do regarding privacy. I doubt it will be any different than it is now.

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.

You are SO right. Mac is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

It is total utter complete FANTASY that Apple's locked out platform strategy for OS X is going to work.

And you know what ? I agree it may well be illegal and anti-competitive as well and really there is going to be no way on Earth for Apple to cling on to brand prices on the hope that a few Mactel sheep will buy enough of their boxes. It is just a nonsense.

Mac OS X WILL be on generic PC boxes. Apple have done an amazingly stupid move of killing of their brand when they announced they are going with Intel.

This may sound rough to some but Macintosh as we effectively know it is dead now. It is finished. The dream is over.

I urge everyone to brace themselves for the next few years when Mac OS X will be become unrecognizable to what it is today and bloated up with more and more tacky useless halfbaked features like Dashboard and so on. Innovation and excellence is dead. Mac OS is ALL about converting people from Windows. To do that it will BECOME another Windows.

Re:You are SO right. Mac is dead

[BitGeek]

Where's the insight? Come on.... you guys have been saying that Apple is dead every other year like clockwork-- every time they make a change we see dozens of posts like this one claiming that Apple is dead.

Its been 20 years that you've been predicting their demise.

Furthermore, your entire premise if flawed. Apple didn't say they were going to take people to court to stop them from running OS X on other hardware-- they just said that they would only support it on their own hardware.

Apple is not a premium seller of PCS. Apple sells inexpensive powerful computers with a better UI. There's no margin that needs to be protected! They make as much on each iPod sold as on the mac, and they make more selling an OS X upgrade than selling a Mac

This business model has worked fine for Microsoft-- why does it spell doom for Apple? They clearly have a superior product and their sales are growing, while other manufacturers sales are shrinking.

Did you finally wake up to reality?

[aCapitalist]

after posting this http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152036&cid=127 59477

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.

Re:openfirmware...

[xenocide2]

My understanding is that they've hired a guy who wrote some of the ACPI BIOS internals within Linux. Apple's openly admitted that they've been running OSX on x86 for some time just in case. I believe that Darwin on x86 is available right now, if you're interested. Unless you're claiming they built a PC with openfirmware, I dont see how the presence of a BIOS throws a wrench into anything.

Coupled with their own admission that users could theoretically dual boot Windows and OSX, the evidence clearly indicates that OSX does not need openFirmware to operate. I really don't see what they plan to do to enforce this; perhaps the secret plan is that they aren't and you're just supposed to buy one of their expensive toys to play with, but they'll take your money anyways if you're on to them.

Re:Debian 3.1 Sarge fixed already?

[Rob_Ogilvie]

. now where's that irony key on my keyboard ...

To the left of the any key.

Re: debian3.1"the error may be fixed quite easily"

[AFCArchvile]

The note at the top of every 3.1 download page:

Note: 3.1_r0 CD image problem
A bug has been discovered in the 3.1_r0 CD/DVD images: new installs from these images will have a commented-out entry in /etc/apt/sources.list for "http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates" rather than an active entry for "http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates", and thus will not get security updates by default. This was due to incorrect Release files on the images.

If you have already installed a system using a 3.1r0 CD/DVD image, you do not need to reinstall. Instead, simply edit /etc/apt/sources.list, look for any lines mentioning security.debian.org, change "testing" to "stable", and remove "# " from the start of the line.

If you installed other than from a CD or DVD (for example, netboot, or booting from floppy and installing the base system from the network), you are not affected by this bug.

These new 3.1_r0a images correct this flaw. We apologise for the inconvenience.

On another note, I wanted to start downloading the 3.1 ISO set for Sparc, but none of the US mirrors have 3.1 ISO sets, and the root server is giving out 404's. Perhaps they're all still busy updating? At this point, I don't think bit-torrent is propagated well enough to be faster than HTTP/FTP, and jigdo only puts the load on your workstation by opening 9,000 connections on your box to go download little bits of Debian.

Unanswered question about AMD mobile chips

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of posts answer that AMD does not have a viable competitor to the Pentium M (which is possibly the best mobile chip out there) for being one of the reasons whgy Apple went with Intel.

But my question and which has not been answered anywhere is, "Why can't AMD come out with a competitor to the Pentium M?"

AMD had dual-core before Intel, AMD is likely to have very capable people as well as Intel, AMD has most likely studied Pentium M. So, what is taking AMD so long to come out with a viable competitor? Sure, AMD is smaller than Intel but it is by no means a small company.

Therefore, I can only think of several reasons, of course there could many other plausible reasons too.

(1) AMD does not want to challenge Intel in the mobile, at least not yet. (2) AMD is already working on a mobile chip and will only release it when they are confident that it will blow Pentium out of the water.

To not want to compete in the mobile market is commerical folly because the mobile is growing more than the desktop market. So, the most plausible reason is most likely (2). Remember when AMD first came onto the scene and challenged Intel. Their chips weren't very fantastic and therefore they were only thought of "the other player" and religated to playing second fiddle. They competed mainly on price and with a poorer branding too. But when their dual-core and 64bit processors came out way before Intel's, their status changed rapidly. Suddenly, they were a serious competitor with better technology.

I think that's their strategy for the mobile market. When they release their mobile chip, it's going to make people sit up and listen.

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:openfirmware...

[Strepsil]

There's no Open Firmware on the new machines. The developer docs say that apps requiring it won't be supported, and the developer systems from Apple just have a Phoenix BIOS on board. See http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ for a breakdown.

Apparently, the machines boot Windows just fine. No hacking required to install it at all, it seems.

Re:Debian 3.1 Sarge fixed already?

[ScoLgo]

". now where's that irony key on my keyboard ...
"

It's right there between the 'goldy' and 'bronzy' keys, of course!

Hey!

[FunWithHeadlines]

"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."

Oh, so you're the one. Cut it out!

Re: debian3.1"the error may be fixed quite easily"

[maswan]

Sorry about that, one mirror that ran out of space at the middle of syncing. Thanks for the report, I've fixed it now.

Please tell me if there are any other problems, this was the first time I heard about these 404s. Btw, saying which links will help even more, in this case I'm guessing at the powerpc isos?

/Mattias Wadenstein, admin of cdimage.debian.org

No Openfirmware?

[rsborg]

There's no Open Firmware on the new machines. The developer docs say that apps requiring it won't be supported, and the developer systems from Apple just have a Phoenix BIOS on board. See http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ for a breakdown.

Wow, talk about a step backwards. Isn't openfirmware the reason powerbooks sleep and come out of standby immediately (unlike my windows laptops... all of them take approx 5-15 seconds to wake up)

Apparently, the machines boot Windows just fine. No hacking required to install it at all, it seems.

Does this mean they can dual-boot also? If so, the developer box sounds VERY interesting (ie, no iLife, but hey).

I'm no hardware guy but...

[soft_guy]

Isn't there more to a computer than simply a processor?
Wouldn't there be hardware componenets in a Macintosh that might be different from "standard" x86 hardware that keeps MacOS X from booting on it?

Besides, Apple already does a pretty good job of limiting what computers an OS can run on. For example, if you buy a computer and then try to use its disks to install an OS on a different model of Mac, you usually get an error message. Whereas with an OS disk that was bought separately, it will install on all supported machines.

Can't Apple just have its installer check to make sure you are on their hardware before installing?

I'm not saying it will be impossible to fool, but most people won't bother since it won't run on standard x86 hardware anyway. If there were someone out there creating specific "mac clones", I would think Apple would just sue them.

Will go back to having proprietary ROMs in the computer?

The Value of the G5

[miyako]

Apple announcing that they are going to Intel I think has significantly lowered the value of the current line of iMacs and PowerMacs.
I'm currently running an older (900mz) G3, and I've been saving up for a new Dual G5 PowerMac. One of the things that I've always liked about the Macs was that they had a great value. Although people say that Apple hardware is expensive, if you price a PC of comperable specs to a PowerMac, the PowerMac isn't much more expensive, and they keep their value for a long time.
The problem is, regardless of whatever promises Apple has made about both x86 and PPC being supported, I don't have faith that, if I buy a new PowerMac now that it will retain the value for as long, because I'm not sure how long it will be until the platform is no longer supported. Sure, XCode may generate binary that runs on both processors, but will Adobe and Quark and Alias support that, if the commercial vendors for software that I use are going to jump ship and support x86 macs exclusively, then the value for a PPC PowerMac now drops significantly.

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.

Re: debian3.1"the error may be fixed quite easily"

[maswan]

Not really, but with rsync or jigdo you can reuse most of the data.

Otherwise, the "patch" would be to manually add the security.debian.org line in sources.list after installation. Just like it says in the errata in the grandparent to this comment.

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.

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.

MPK?!

[alexburke]

The FCX carried a federal combined city-highway economy rating of 57 miles per kilogram

But how many decimeters per troy ounce does it get?

Come on, America. Get off your lazy ass and switch to the metric system. (That goes for you too, the UK -- finish the job you started!)

Re:openfirmware...

[enosys]

When I first saw that I thought that maybe they did it this way so the development machines can be ready sooner and the x86 Macs that are sold to consumers will probably have Open Firmware. However, later on in that page there's a link to an Apple page that says "Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware." Apple also says that disk partitioning will be different. I guess the "Mac" will have a PC BIOS and the standard PC partitioning scheme.

OT: Personal questions

[Darby]

I have a couple of questions for you, mainly unrelated to this, instead based off of reading your website and some links off of it.

You say:

I believe Saddam Hussein is a very bad man indeed, and that he and his evil sons fully deserved what they got. And I'm proud of the fact that Iraq is now a much better place than it was before we invaded.

You don't provide any evidence for this so called fact and you state the one actual fact in that paragraph as a belief.
Why is that?

Also, you link to free republic who I'm not that familiar with.
When I clicked the link, the main topic was Deep Throat. All of the links there were violently against one of if not the greatest hero in American history who single-handedly saved Democracy (for a few years at least). One of the first links was from Ann Coulter saying, "Felt leaked details of the Watergate investigation to The Washington Post only because he had lost a job promotion -- making him the Richard Clarke of the Watergate era."

So, while you do say that you agree "There are many people there who are mean-spirited, prejudiced, intolerent, and - worst of all! - illiterate", it seems that at least in this limited view of the site that they are promoting the foremost examples of hatred of freedom and a totally Orwellian view of reality.

I guess my point is I'd like to hear some sort of rational defense of these views as they seem diametrically opposed to your stated beliefs of
"people should be allowed as much freedom as possible. The freedom to win, and the freedom to lose. The freedom to try, the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail."

The people that you seem to support want to remove the freedom to fail from those in power by removing truth and all accountability for their actions. I mean, Ann Coulter?!? Sure, she has the right to spew hate based vitriolic lies and even make money off of the books filled entirely with them, but lending any legitimacy to that anti-freedom rhetoric is contrary to your stated beliefs, and my deeply held ones as far as I can see.

Am I mistaken in this somehow?

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:Apple's next claim to be proved false...

[2nd Post!]

CPUs advanced.

At the time the Pentium was a snail.

Just like AMD can claim the P4 is a snail.

But come this time next year, perhaps Intel can claim Athlons are 'snail like'.

Now they don't need to claim the P4 is a snail because they'll be using Intel's latest and greatest. And if AMD is better, well, they always have the option of selling those too.

And... where do you get that Apple claims that OS X never crashes? Can you link? Because I can't find it.

Would if they could but they cant so they wont

[SuperKendall]

Anyway, doubling the number of CPU's to test on just made life 2x nastier for developers. Let me tell you, any developer with a brain will want to drop the "ancient" platforms ASAP.

Possibly, but the thing is that it will be many years before it's pratical to do so...

And there will be a lot more G4/G5 computers around to test on for a long time, so it will more more the issue of getting smaller apps to do that testing on the Intel boxes than the G4/G5!!

So for many years to come the G4/G5 computers will enjoy a nice spot as ALL apps work on them, while apps are being ported to universal Intel compatible binaries. That's why I don't think sales will suffer much, and people should not be afraid to buy now - because now is a great time to buy when the platform is at the peak of its stability curve. The G5 is still damn fast and will be good to go for many years to come while enjoying the 100% software support that will take some time to ramp up on the new Intel boxes.

I know what you'r saying about testing because I've done that kind of full-platform testing before, but I think people have it really backwards and the hard part will not be getting developers to avoid Intel-only binaries but instead to make the bulk of people offer Intel-aware universal binaries ASAP for the new boxes coming out next year! I ahve to say Apple has been very sporting with a year to prepare, I think it's as good as they could do.

Re:Apple switching to IA-32, not 64?

[Animats]

Only the ignorant are claiming that Apple isn't switching to IA-32. Read Apple's Introduction to Universal Binary Programming Guidelines for developers. It's good old IA-32.

If your Mac Tiger app is 64 bits, you're screwed. Won't even run in the emulator. Say goodbye to "Mac OS X Tiger delivers the power of 64-bit computing to your Mac. Build and run a new generation of 64-bit applications that address massive amounts of memory, without compromising the performance of your existing 32-bit applications."

64 bits just got "Steved".

Re:Well that was pretty stupid

[SuperKendall]

The main problem will be the cost of producing software for multiple platforms. It's not as easy as Steve wants you to believe. Plus, when you add another platform your QA cost DOUBLES. It's not like Mac-only development businesses are bathing in money right now.

Yes, that is indeed a bit of a problem for the Intel Macs - but not the G5/G5 compuers since developers already have those computers. Again, why did you drop your current Mac?

New developers next year and a few years after will have no choice but to also test and deploy on G5/G4 boxes as well as Intel unless they want to drop 70% of the Mac market.

The next thing that will happen is folks who have been using AltiVec heavily (maybe even Apple themselves) will rip it out and replace it with plain ol' C code that they can simply recompile for Intel. When Apple rolls out Intel machines, these same folks will start optimizing for SSE/SSE2/SSE3/MMX and Power PC versions will only have slow C versions of the same functions. Therefore P4 versions will fly, and Power PC versions will crawl.

That is a more interesting concern, but again a reason to own a G5 now instead of wondering how that problem is solved later. Perhaps intel will bake something into chips for Apple to help allevate that problem to some extent.

Then, perhaps in 2008, you will see binaries targeting solely Intel machines. And you'll be SOL with your good looking G5 dualie. You won't be able to sell it for much either, who needs a machine that can't run contemporary software AT ALL.

I don't see why developers in 2008 would choose to eliminate half the Mac market (an assumption as to total market at that point) when it's pretty easy to at least cross compile, if not fully test.

Many Mac buyers consider their purchases as investments. They buy a machine, work on it for a couple of years, then put it on ebay and buy something else. This is precisely the category of Mac userbase that's getting the shaft this time around.

Long term that will happen to some extent but not as bad as I think you are thinking it will be. The computers will still be supported for years and for at least as long universal binaries will be a rule rather than an exception.

The final paradox is this - if Mac computers are about to fall terribly in price, then it will be super easy for developers to have one to test on for years to come. If Apple computer do not drop in price then it will be harder for small developers going forward to keep them on hand and test against.

So, as usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle - I'm betting on a shallow decline in value of macs even after the Intel macs arrive.

You raise a good point though that perhaps now is a good time to pick up Macs on ebay before the market self-corrects from the panic.

Re:OS X on non-Apple hardware

[Guy Harris]

...but why would apple NOT just use openfirmware like on the PPC Apple hardware?

One could speculate on why they didn't, but they didn't, as the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines document (which anybody who wants to speculate on whether Apple's switching to x86 or, to use a favorite wrong guess of many folk, licensing Intel to make PowerPC chips, or on whether they're using OpenFirmware in the x86 machines, or..., should read before they speculate in public) says.

Re:EROEI

[hey!]

It takes more energy to make the stuff than you can get out of it, in which case you might as well use the energy used to make Hydrogen directly in whatever appliance that you're making the hydrogen for.

You've given the waggish part of me a bit of irresistable bait here.

Every process takes energy -- energy that is turned into entropy and gone forever. So, if you look at the energy production as a black box into which you put your energy stock, some additional energy, and get energy in some more usable form, then you always put in more energy than you get out. You put more energy into electricity than you get out, but it's a lot more convenient to transport and power devices than petroleum or natural gas. For that matter if you count the energy content of crude oil, the same can be said of gasoline.

Hydrogen is more like electricity than it is like oil; it is not an energy stock, it is a way of carrying and storing energy, not an energy source. It's not an answer to everything, and of course processes to produce and use it at this stage are not commercially efficient. Technological improvements, market changes or both are needed to make it practical. But it has attractive properties as, for example, a gasoline replacement, provided the volumetric density problem is solved. Gasoline comes from a single energy source: crude oil. Biodiesel of course may address this limitation to some degree, if internal combusion has to be the only solution we consider. But Hydrogen could be produced by a number of sources, many of which are renewable but not easily storable (e.g. tidal power, solar, wind). In that case, conversion efficiency may not be as important as getting the energy into storable and transportable form before it disappears.

Naturally higher efficiency is better, and as these problems are solved, hydrogen could also be produced by non-renewable energy stocks if you think that's a good thing.

Hydrogen is a Bad Idea.

Looking for a single magic bullet is a Bad Idea. Researching better ways of doing things is a Good Idea. If you know how all the problems you're facing can be solved, it's not research.

I know Bush is talking up plans for Hydrogen. He's also talking up plans Mars exploration. I also happen to think he's a lousy president. But it doesn't mean that I have to automatically oppose the goals of every initiative he proposes.

Re:Apple switching to IA-32, not 64?

[laird]

"If your Mac Tiger app is 64 bits, you're screwed. Won't even run in the emulator."

Two points.

First, there aren't any Mac app's that I know of that _require_ 64-bit CPU's, because they won't run on G3's and G4's, which means most Mac's, all laptops, etc. So app's that take advantage of 64-bit instructions also have a 32-bit version of the code.

Second, while the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines do only talk about the IA-32 instruction set, but it clearly supports 64-bit data types, and MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE3, and I'd be stunned if it weren't possible to run 64-bit code on 64-bit x86's. Admittedly the 64-bit picture on Intel is a bit more complicated than on PPC (since the various x86 chip companies had different 64-bit stragies), but Apple's got a year to work it out. And, for what it's worth, rumor has it that Apple got MacOS X to compile on the Alpha at one point, which should have cleared up the dependencies on 32-bit code.

Re:Apple switching to IA-32, not 64?

[argent]

If your Mac Tiger app is 64 bits, you're screwed.

Hands up everyone with a 64-bit app on Tiger. Not just "I built $thing for 64-bit OS X", but "This app requires 64-bit OS X to work" or "This app's a dog if it's not compiled 64-bit". If there's more than a couple in the world, I'll be very much surprised. If there's even one that won't compile right up on Linux-64 I'll be amazed.

OK, now hands up everyone with a 64-bit app on Windows, same caveat. There may be a few more, because Win32 has more of an address space bottleneck than other 32-bit environments.

And finally... 64-bit Linux, with the same restriction. This is where I expect to see the most hands.

Because, you know, we've been using Alpha for 10 years now, and there's very little code that really needs or even benefits from it. If you're not sure, without trying it, that your code's going to crater going "back" to 32-bit then your code was almost certainly not really using 64-bit mode.

Re:openfirmware...

[NutscrapeSucks]

The problem is you then have OpenFirmware emulation baked into system years after Mac users stopped caring about OF. And by 2006, EFI will be mainstream, so other than these developer boxes, BIOS is a non-issue for Mac users.

I actually expect driver code to change quite a bit, if only because vendors will want to keep their Windows and Mac drivers closer together.