By letting the greedy outlaw reverse engineering, is the US slitting its own throat?
The laws if the United States stop at the border. ALL of the imported goods, by definition, come from outside of the border.
The trend to employing manual labor "off shore" outside the borders, has been rampant for decades and industries are running out of things to shift offshore.
The use of H1-B visa's is plundering the high-tech workers from the very shores that are being exploited for manual labor. Their use is accelerating rather than being balanced through any attempt at educating the US populace.
But H1-B visa holders are treated like indentured slaves and sent packing at every corporate down-turn. They leave taking their knowledge extra territorially where the opportunities may be less but the stability is greater.
The DMCA applies ONLY to within the borders of the United States. The H1-B "deportees" are intelligent enough to reverse engineer solutions without concerning themselves with the stupidity hatched by the RIAA and the MPAA and other organizations which, in effect, produce nothing but law suits.
Is the United States going to end up on the short end of the stick for pursuing such short sighted policies?
As an H1-B worker myself, I don't give a rat's ass about the internal politics of the Unites States. If they wish to reduce themselves to ignorant groveling in front of imported television sets watching imported quality programs like those produced by the BBC or cheap home-made porn, so be it.
To paraphrase Newton (a Brit by the way:) "We see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants."
The DMCA is a great way to take the head from those shoulders and insure the giant doesn't bother anyone anymore. Its only a question of time.
The world's most profitable corporations paid no taxes. Why aren't I surprised? Those donations to politicians are definitely paying off. Pennies on the dollars and you just walk away...
The world's richest man did pay some though, I'm sure... Whatever wasn't reduced by all those charitable donations.
Given the structure of the law in this country, I think that we should ask for capital punishment for the infringer, or if the case brought to court fails, for the supposed infringee.
If you don't like a law, make it unenforcible.
Don't be reasonable, be outrageous. Be bold. Be daring. Be hostile and ridiculously vindictive.
Make the penalties so incredibly strick for the loser, either party, that nobody in their right mind will take this route. Knowing that if they lose, they DIE!
And don't think it can't be done... There are a few less Chinese software pirates around because they took the US at its word for trade concessions.
Yes, Bill Gates and his coterie of acolytes is responsable for firing squads and wooden markers. And I'm sure its not keeping him awake at night.
The first, "Slobbo," will drool, laze all over the couch, (see first activity and reflect on what your couch will look like in a month,)drink out of the toilet, eat your food out of your plate, drink your beer, fart, occasionally eat grass, blow chunks and then eat it, lick its balls, pop a stiffy at the person you hope might have become an S.O. (before they met "slobbo.")
The second, "The Howling", will greet all and sundry with deafening, siren like howls before jumping all over them while growling, baring its teeth and peeing on their chest.
Yes... There's a boys best friend is his mom and a man's best friend is his dog. Heart attack or cancer?
Patents are fundamentally non-cooperative and exclusionary. That is their purpose.
On the internet, an environment which depends on collaborative refinement and exposed technology, patents are counter productive and, if unchecked, would diminish the usefulness and usability of the internet in favor of granting privilege to a few.
The question is now: Will those enlightened enough to understand this prevail against the anal-retentive children who threaten to take their ball and go home.
We have such a wonderful choice of catastrophies. The planet will become inhabitable.
I think Hawkins may be off by an order of magnitude or two or five on this time scale (1k years, 100k years, even 100M years, big deal.)
Nobody gets out of here alive anyway. If only the good die young, I had a couple of candidates for eternity. They're worm cores now too.
If you really want to feel futile, on Hawkins time scales, the universe will either collapse back into a Big Crunch, which will just ruin real-estate prices, or it'll expand eternally and we'll end our miserable existences under a vast, empty dark sky flinging the occasional planet we can find into the occasional black holes in order to generate some energy.
Cheer up!:-) You could always die first from lightning strike, flood, fire, famine, earthquake, civil unrest, domestic discord or something as banal as old age.
Let's hope we get mankind off this planet, but klet do it for a real reason because ultimately, nobody gets out of here alive.
I just realized something. Corel had a Java version of their office suite out there years ago. PCs were too slow and the Java VMs were still crude but now you should be able to get acceptable performance out of a web browser.
M$ is doing it again. Buying out (or helping out and getting cross licences from the guy with the Vaseline on his butt,) an old competitor for their other IP and turning around and calling it their own invention.
I'm surprised not to find any mention of the fact that M$ killed off WordPerfect by bundling Word (a proprietary and arguably inferior product,) and is once again in jeopardy of having evidently engaged in successful anti-competitive behavior.
If Corel dies, M$ find itself in deeper water with the anti-trust case back on again. If they don't play nice, like invest big in Corel, there'll be a courtroom full of Ottawans who will gladly make the trek to heckle the M$ lawyers.
Remember how Word '97 couldn't read some files from earlier Word versions? If you wanted to read '97 files you had to update. Whether you wanted to or not or needed to or not.
This coming on the heels of having to update to the previous version of Word, not bcause you wanted to but because they were bundling enough copies with big enough clients that you ended up needing to switch because you couldn't read the files.
If I tried M$s sales tactics, I'd be in jail. And deservedly so.
And its not coffee. Banks take this kind of thing very seriously. If you object to the cup, they'll take it out of your arm! Or they'll show you the door.
The drugs of choice in this town are coffee in the morning (and Starbucks does that for a few of us at this office,) and Bass ale (or DosEquis amber, or LaPhroig, or...) in the evenings when we get together and bitch about the day before diasporing home.
We're kept pretty clean living in the financial services industry...
The hardware producer manages to put out a decent OS of their own (Solaris, heard of it?) so its not as if the hardware was descending into the Windows arena no is it...
Too bad I missed it. (I was busy setting up my LinuxPPC box.)
I would have enjoyed asking him if any of the technologies that he and the other AAs out have opposed since the introduction of the player-piano roll there have, in fact, been prevented.
I would also have liked to ask him if he enjoys living in the kind of totalitarian regime where his will is enforced to protect his woefully inadequate preparations for the inevitable onslaught of intelligent attacks against his equally woefully inadequate encryption schemes.
I would also have liked to ask him is he actually thought he lived there? 'Cause I sure don't!
Then I might have asked the Luddite to kiss my ass.
The franchise on the children's series "Star Wars" has come to a pathetic end.
I didn't go see episode 1. I don't intend ot see episoede 2 or, should Lucas ever display the poor taste to produce it, episode three.
Episode 4, 5 and 6 were rehashes of every "war movie" ever shot but with fancy "future tech" weapons. Cute at the time but I've grown up in the intervening decades.
The cartoon which purported to be episodes 7, 8 and 9 of the neptology were trite and boring.
Face it guys... It was never anything more than a children's story. My interest ran out by the time it made it to network TV, never mind video releases. Its over.
There are some sectors of the industry that are tolerably served. There are a lot of C++ and VisualBasic programmers out there. (Not all great programmers, but there are some.)
However, the moment you stop dipping the ladle into what M$ oriented education system pours out of the pipeline (or sewer,) you run into some real shortages.
Also the geographic distribution leaves a lot to be desired. While I might find some Smalltalkers on the West coast, since the company is in New Yorl City, I'm sucking wind...
I have lived in Kansas city (cheap,) in Atlanta (not so cheap,) and many places in between and I have lived in Canada (the dollars less, the taxes comparable but the cost of health insurance won't kill you,) and in the 'States, (but I had to almost double my salary to get a decent fraction of the life style I had out in the mid-west.)
The disparity in salaries betwen the coasts and the center of the continent and across borders, never mind oceans, is responsible for a lot of false appearances and income estimates.
Yes, MIS (mis-)management is partly to blame, but they're also subject to the vagueries of geography, salary and expectations.
I'm sure that lots of people would envy my salary and immediately reconsider when they hear that I can't really afford a car here. (Then again in New York City, you can pretty much get away without ownning a car. We pity the commuters.)
Why should Apple fight turf wars with Intel? Wouldn't it be nice if Sun invited Apple to port a version of Aqua to this new killer chip to run on top of Solaris.
Can you imagine this chip on corporate desk tops? (Not Apple's market so no threat to the consumer base.)
The solution for the creation of digital books and their dissemination for profit is the same as for the creation and dissemination of any other content.
Some form of trusted cataloguing site, some form of storage site, some form of micro-payment to collect money from the receiver and send it to the producer and that's it.
The producer can control (own and pay for,) as much or as little of the data pipeline as he wants/cares to. And unlike unregulated peer-to-peer Napster-ish chaos, we get trustworthy, evaluated if not professionally edited, content.
The elimination of the copy mechanism, and its attendant 'resource allocation' lackeys, from the pipeline between content-provider and consumer truly puts "the power of the press" in the hands of the producers and "the power of the dollar" in the hands of the consumer.
It will change publishing from a power base, a cotery and a choke point for information into a service industry.
If you want representative government, pick names out of the phone book, like a lottery where the, uh, winners have to go, and we all live with the result for the next four years. Then throw 'em all out for the next bunch.
All you/we have now are party systems filled by failed lawyers. And where they all tow the party line, which is to say whatever the other party is saying is crap. (They're both right.)
All they know how to do, more deeply ingrained than a knee-jerk reflex, is pass more and more laws. Some are hilarious, many are contradictory none can even claim to be representative.
Bet the lobbyists would hate that. They'd have to get real jobs instead of kissing lawyers' butts. (No elections, no pond scum running for office, no pond scum to sell your orifice out for a chance at office.)
Pondscum, sorry politicians, are failed lawyers who can be bought for a shag in the oval office.
By the time they get there, they are so compromised that they are virtually useless.
You want a representative government, pick the people out of the phone book. Until then all you're going to get are failed lawyers making even more laws.
That's all they know how to do in response to anything (and that's not exactly the right response to a shark attack...)
I'm glad to hear that. If M$ HAS to break out of the x86 straightjacket, they will. I don't want them to Metastasize. I want them to die with the x86.
M$ is ONLY on the x86, Linux is on EVERY other platform and Aqua (or an Aqua-like environment,) will give the leverage onto the desktop that Unix needs.
Once Intel gets a reliable OS running natively on the Itanium (and it now has one, Linux) and they can get a user friendly face on it (Aqua) look for the x86 instruction set to go so that their hardware can run free of the M$ anchor and fast as Hell!:-)
This would not be a problem if people weren't re-inventing the wheel all the time because one idiot was trying to hide "what the man did behind the curtain" from everybody else.
I hope they both are forced to put the code out for us to laugh at.
ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
There's 225 million American, 5.8 billion other people on this planet, most whom don't speak English and don't write in modified, vowel poor, aplhabets.
Can you say "ASCII is cutting us off from big potential markets?" Sure... I knew you could...
Bloat? Its not even out of beta yet! (Geez Louise, talk about knee-jerk griping.)
It will run on my iMac fine (G3/233 w 96MB RAM, 10GB HD...) And on my Beige (G3/300 w 128 MB RAM, 10GB HD...)
I run OS9 & LinuxPPC on my dual boot 7200/75 w/48MB RAM, 4.5 GB HD) and I still run System 7.0 on my 512ke (68k/8 w 2MB RAM, 20MB HD. Now THAT is long lasting hardware!)
Don't bitch about APIs unless you're the compiler writer who's got to write all those API docs into header files.
You remind me of a client I had who throught that structured code was just a fad and he was going to write his Fortran the same as he always did. (I think they, uh, forcably retired, yeah that sounds better, retired the guy.)
The (poorly researched and written) diatribe railing about the difficulty of emulating PowerPC instructions on Pentium class machines is just somebody's wake up call that hardware emulation only works as long as the processors are in equivalent classes. (Well, a duh....)
The G4 is not in the same class as the Pentium. AltiVec adds a vector processor. That means that while emulation is possible, it will run orders of magnitude more slowly. It runs orders of magnitude more slowly on G3s that don't have AltiVec either.
As for his rants on OS X... Yo! What does this have to do with hardware emulation? He's raggin' on the BSD Unix foundation (Sic 'em boys!:-) I don't even think much of his assessment of M$ and Intel either (granted Intel's having teething pains with Itanium.)
The introduction of the PowerPC saw the dissemination of hardware emulation so that the OS could be ported from the M68k architecture PDQ.
The PowerPC version of the OS is now entirely separately compiled binaries thanks to some fancy compiler writing by the people at MetroWorks.
(Fat apps carry M68k forks and PPC forks, same API, entirely different code for entirely different platforms.)
Slashdot Mirror
By letting the greedy outlaw reverse engineering, is the US slitting its own throat?
The laws if the United States stop at the border. ALL of the imported goods, by definition, come from outside of the border.
The trend to employing manual labor "off shore" outside the borders, has been rampant for decades and industries are running out of things to shift offshore.
The use of H1-B visa's is plundering the high-tech workers from the very shores that are being exploited for manual labor. Their use is accelerating rather than being balanced through any attempt at educating the US populace.
But H1-B visa holders are treated like indentured slaves and sent packing at every corporate down-turn. They leave taking their knowledge extra territorially where the opportunities may be less but the stability is greater.
The DMCA applies ONLY to within the borders of the United States. The H1-B "deportees" are intelligent enough to reverse engineer solutions without concerning themselves with the stupidity hatched by the RIAA and the MPAA and other organizations which, in effect, produce nothing but law suits.
Is the United States going to end up on the short end of the stick for pursuing such short sighted policies?
As an H1-B worker myself, I don't give a rat's ass about the internal politics of the Unites States. If they wish to reduce themselves to ignorant groveling in front of imported television sets watching imported quality programs like those produced by the BBC or cheap home-made porn, so be it.
To paraphrase Newton (a Brit by the way:) "We see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants."
The DMCA is a great way to take the head from those shoulders and insure the giant doesn't bother anyone anymore. Its only a question of time.
Hey, wanna be safe?
... You get the idea.
:-)
Buy any machine built around the PowerPC or Sparc or MIPS or Alpha or ia64 or Cray or S390 or
M$ has nothing that can run on those.
Give Bill the finger.
Yes M$ paid $0.00 in taxes last year.
The world's most profitable corporations paid no taxes. Why aren't I surprised? Those donations to politicians are definitely paying off. Pennies on the dollars and you just walk away...
The world's richest man did pay some though, I'm sure... Whatever wasn't reduced by all those charitable donations.
Given the structure of the law in this country, I think that we should ask for capital punishment for the infringer, or if the case brought to court fails, for the supposed infringee.
If you don't like a law, make it unenforcible.
Don't be reasonable, be outrageous. Be bold. Be daring. Be hostile and ridiculously vindictive.
Make the penalties so incredibly strick for the loser, either party, that nobody in their right mind will take this route. Knowing that if they lose, they DIE!
And don't think it can't be done... There are a few less Chinese software pirates around because they took the US at its word for trade concessions.
Yes, Bill Gates and his coterie of acolytes is responsable for firing squads and wooden markers. And I'm sure its not keeping him awake at night.
The first, "Slobbo," will drool, laze all over the couch, (see first activity and reflect on what your couch will look like in a month,)drink out of the toilet, eat your food out of your plate, drink your beer, fart, occasionally eat grass, blow chunks and then eat it, lick its balls, pop a stiffy at the person you hope might have become an S.O. (before they met "slobbo.")
The second, "The Howling", will greet all and sundry with deafening, siren like howls before jumping all over them while growling, baring its teeth and peeing on their chest.
Yes... There's a boys best friend is his mom and a man's best friend is his dog. Heart attack or cancer?
Patents are fundamentally non-cooperative and exclusionary. That is their purpose.
On the internet, an environment which depends on collaborative refinement and exposed technology, patents are counter productive and, if unchecked, would diminish the usefulness and usability of the internet in favor of granting privilege to a few.
The question is now: Will those enlightened enough to understand this prevail against the anal-retentive children who threaten to take their ball and go home.
The remedy is of course to change the game...
We have such a wonderful choice of catastrophies. The planet will become inhabitable.
:-) You could always die first from lightning strike, flood, fire, famine, earthquake, civil unrest, domestic discord or something as banal as old age.
I think Hawkins may be off by an order of magnitude or two or five on this time scale (1k years, 100k years, even 100M years, big deal.)
Nobody gets out of here alive anyway. If only the good die young, I had a couple of candidates for eternity. They're worm cores now too.
If you really want to feel futile, on Hawkins time scales, the universe will either collapse back into a Big Crunch, which will just ruin real-estate prices, or it'll expand eternally and we'll end our miserable existences under a vast, empty dark sky flinging the occasional planet we can find into the occasional black holes in order to generate some energy.
Cheer up!
Let's hope we get mankind off this planet, but klet do it for a real reason because ultimately, nobody gets out of here alive.
Hey, let 'em cling to the x86 platform in a single monolithic block. (That's why I don't like the Corel deal. Corel Suite 8 was written in Java.)
They'll sink faster that way when people want something that doesn't need to run in a 'fridge or set fire to their desks and their wallets.
Meanwhile the lawyers will pick their bones clean and we can all move on to better things.
I just realized something. Corel had a Java version of their office suite out there years ago. PCs were too slow and the Java VMs were still crude but now you should be able to get acceptable performance out of a web browser.
M$ is doing it again. Buying out (or helping out and getting cross licences from the guy with the Vaseline on his butt,) an old competitor for their other IP and turning around and calling it their own invention.
Same crap they've pulled since QDOS.
I'm surprised not to find any mention of the fact that M$ killed off WordPerfect by bundling Word (a proprietary and arguably inferior product,) and is once again in jeopardy of having evidently engaged in successful anti-competitive behavior.
If Corel dies, M$ find itself in deeper water with the anti-trust case back on again. If they don't play nice, like invest big in Corel, there'll be a courtroom full of Ottawans who will gladly make the trek to heckle the M$ lawyers.
Remember how Word '97 couldn't read some files from earlier Word versions? If you wanted to read '97 files you had to update. Whether you wanted to or not or needed to or not.
This coming on the heels of having to update to the previous version of Word, not bcause you wanted to but because they were bundling enough copies with big enough clients that you ended up needing to switch because you couldn't read the files.
If I tried M$s sales tactics, I'd be in jail. And deservedly so.
And its not coffee. Banks take this kind of thing very seriously. If you object to the cup, they'll take it out of your arm! Or they'll show you the door.
The drugs of choice in this town are coffee in the morning (and Starbucks does that for a few of us at this office,) and Bass ale (or DosEquis amber, or LaPhroig, or...) in the evenings when we get together and bitch about the day before diasporing home.
We're kept pretty clean living in the financial services industry...
The hardware producer manages to put out a decent OS of their own (Solaris, heard of it?) so its not as if the hardware was descending into the Windows arena no is it...
Too bad I missed it. (I was busy setting up my LinuxPPC box.)
I would have enjoyed asking him if any of the technologies that he and the other AAs out have opposed since the introduction of the player-piano roll there have, in fact, been prevented.
I would also have liked to ask him if he enjoys living in the kind of totalitarian regime where his will is enforced to protect his woefully inadequate preparations for the inevitable onslaught of intelligent attacks against his equally woefully inadequate encryption schemes.
I would also have liked to ask him is he actually thought he lived there? 'Cause I sure don't!
Then I might have asked the Luddite to kiss my ass.
The franchise on the children's series "Star Wars" has come to a pathetic end.
I didn't go see episode 1. I don't intend ot see episoede 2 or, should Lucas ever display the poor taste to produce it, episode three.
Episode 4, 5 and 6 were rehashes of every "war movie" ever shot but with fancy "future tech" weapons. Cute at the time but I've grown up in the intervening decades.
The cartoon which purported to be episodes 7, 8 and 9 of the neptology were trite and boring.
Face it guys... It was never anything more than a children's story. My interest ran out by the time it made it to network TV, never mind video releases. Its over.
Thank the Heavens.
Then a Mac with 2 G4 chips 512MB RAM 12GB HD and OS X will seem cheap. Good...
What a friggin moron...
Barring consumer revolt, the only direction prices ever take in a monopoly is UP.
Except with Linux. 110% of $0.00 is still $0.00...
There are some sectors of the industry that are tolerably served. There are a lot of C++ and VisualBasic programmers out there. (Not all great programmers, but there are some.)
However, the moment you stop dipping the ladle into what M$ oriented education system pours out of the pipeline (or sewer,) you run into some real shortages.
Also the geographic distribution leaves a lot to be desired. While I might find some Smalltalkers on the West coast, since the company is in New Yorl City, I'm sucking wind...
I have lived in Kansas city (cheap,) in Atlanta (not so cheap,) and many places in between and I have lived in Canada (the dollars less, the taxes comparable but the cost of health insurance won't kill you,) and in the 'States, (but I had to almost double my salary to get a decent fraction of the life style I had out in the mid-west.)
The disparity in salaries betwen the coasts and the center of the continent and across borders, never mind oceans, is responsible for a lot of false appearances and income estimates.
Yes, MIS (mis-)management is partly to blame, but they're also subject to the vagueries of geography, salary and expectations.
I'm sure that lots of people would envy my salary and immediately reconsider when they hear that I can't really afford a car here. (Then again in New York City, you can pretty much get away without ownning a car. We pity the commuters.)
I just had a horrible idea.
Why should Apple fight turf wars with Intel? Wouldn't it be nice if Sun invited Apple to port a version of Aqua to this new killer chip to run on top of Solaris.
Can you imagine this chip on corporate desk tops? (Not Apple's market so no threat to the consumer base.)
Just a thought.
The solution for the creation of digital books and their dissemination for profit is the same as for the creation and dissemination of any other content.
Some form of trusted cataloguing site, some form of storage site, some form of micro-payment to collect money from the receiver and send it to the producer and that's it.
The producer can control (own and pay for,) as much or as little of the data pipeline as he wants/cares to. And unlike unregulated peer-to-peer Napster-ish chaos, we get trustworthy, evaluated if not professionally edited, content.
The elimination of the copy mechanism, and its attendant 'resource allocation' lackeys, from the pipeline between content-provider and consumer truly puts "the power of the press" in the hands of the producers and "the power of the dollar" in the hands of the consumer.
It will change publishing from a power base, a cotery and a choke point for information into a service industry.
Leibnitz would be proud...
If you want representative government, pick names out of the phone book, like a lottery where the, uh, winners have to go, and we all live with the result for the next four years. Then throw 'em all out for the next bunch.
All you/we have now are party systems filled by failed lawyers. And where they all tow the party line, which is to say whatever the other party is saying is crap. (They're both right.)
All they know how to do, more deeply ingrained than a knee-jerk reflex, is pass more and more laws. Some are hilarious, many are contradictory none can even claim to be representative.
Bet the lobbyists would hate that. They'd have to get real jobs instead of kissing lawyers' butts. (No elections, no pond scum running for office, no pond scum to sell your orifice out for a chance at office.)
Pondscum, sorry politicians, are failed lawyers who can be bought for a shag in the oval office.
By the time they get there, they are so compromised that they are virtually useless.
You want a representative government, pick the people out of the phone book. Until then all you're going to get are failed lawyers making even more laws.
That's all they know how to do in response to anything (and that's not exactly the right response to a shark attack...)
I'm glad to hear that. If M$ HAS to break out of the x86 straightjacket, they will. I don't want them to Metastasize. I want them to die with the x86.
:-)
M$ is ONLY on the x86, Linux is on EVERY other platform and Aqua (or an Aqua-like environment,) will give the leverage onto the desktop that Unix needs.
Once Intel gets a reliable OS running natively on the Itanium (and it now has one, Linux) and they can get a user friendly face on it (Aqua) look for the x86 instruction set to go so that their hardware can run free of the M$ anchor and fast as Hell!
Let M$ win the battle and lose the war.
This would not be a problem if people weren't re-inventing the wheel all the time because one idiot was trying to hide "what the man did behind the curtain" from everybody else.
I hope they both are forced to put the code out for us to laugh at.
ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
There's 225 million American, 5.8 billion other people on this planet, most whom don't speak English and don't write in modified, vowel poor, aplhabets.
Can you say "ASCII is cutting us off from big potential markets?" Sure... I knew you could...
Unicode will spread because it's NEEDED.
Bloat? Its not even out of beta yet! (Geez Louise, talk about knee-jerk griping.)
It will run on my iMac fine (G3/233 w 96MB RAM, 10GB HD...) And on my Beige (G3/300 w 128 MB RAM, 10GB HD...)
I run OS9 & LinuxPPC on my dual boot 7200/75 w/48MB RAM, 4.5 GB HD) and I still run System 7.0 on my 512ke (68k/8 w 2MB RAM, 20MB HD. Now THAT is long lasting hardware!)
Don't bitch about APIs unless you're the compiler writer who's got to write all those API docs into header files.
You remind me of a client I had who throught that structured code was just a fad and he was going to write his Fortran the same as he always did. (I think they, uh, forcably retired, yeah that sounds better, retired the guy.)
The (poorly researched and written) diatribe railing about the difficulty of emulating PowerPC instructions on Pentium class machines is just somebody's wake up call that hardware emulation only works as long as the processors are in equivalent classes. (Well, a duh....)
:-) I don't even think much of his assessment of M$ and Intel either (granted Intel's having teething pains with Itanium.)
The G4 is not in the same class as the Pentium. AltiVec adds a vector processor. That means that while emulation is possible, it will run orders of magnitude more slowly. It runs orders of magnitude more slowly on G3s that don't have AltiVec either.
As for his rants on OS X... Yo! What does this have to do with hardware emulation? He's raggin' on the BSD Unix foundation (Sic 'em boys!
The introduction of the PowerPC saw the dissemination of hardware emulation so that the OS could be ported from the M68k architecture PDQ.
The PowerPC version of the OS is now entirely separately compiled binaries thanks to some fancy compiler writing by the people at MetroWorks.
(Fat apps carry M68k forks and PPC forks, same API, entirely different code for entirely different platforms.)
Give this kid's term paper a C-