LinuxPPC will not die. Period. Don't just sweep LinuxPPC under the carpet and says it's going to die. As the article mentions not all user of LinuxPPC will rush out out to use OS X.
I own a PMac 7500 which was one of Apple's better desgins. I am on my 3rd processor in this computer. Not the number upgrades, but the number of processors (601, 604e, G3) and if I felt like spending the money I could upgrade to a G4. This computer has a decent amount of life left in it, but Apple doesn't plan to support OS X on this computer. There is a whole range of PPC hardware out there from Apple that they don't plan to have OS X run on. My read on OS X from Apple is: You should buy some of our new plastic with G4 processors to run OS X. LinuxPPC will continue to run on the hardware that Apple is leaving behind.
Now how will LinuxPPC development perist going forward? Support for newer hardware might not be as good as the abandoned hardware. User on the new hardware may stay in the Apple fold with OS X and reduce the number of users to test LinuxPPC. But as users upgrade, they may make these computers available for use with LinuxPPC.
I think everyone can agree that Apple priced the G4 cube wrong to begin with. My wife's mac was finally getting old enough that she wanted to get a new mac last year. She really didn't want an iMac as she wants a bigger monitor. So our choices from Apple were either a Power Mac G4 or a G4 Cube and I couldn't justify the extra $300 for less expandibility. Now if the G4 Cube had been $300 less than a Power Mac G4 we would have gotten one. The only thing that's been put in the PCI slots is a second video card for the 2nd monitor. So honestly, she could have lived without the expandibility, but not for more money.
Jobs/Apple can sell some nice plastic and Apple needs to evaluate the price points of their hardware better. The G4 Cube was better than an iMac and a bit less than the Power Mac G4. So Apple should have priced it between those two product from the start. If they had done that, then I think they would not have had the inventory problems they had with the Cube. Also they should not try to sell hardware to a niche market inside an existing niche market. Or if they really wanted to do that they should have done a better job at forcasting based on this and the initial price they planned.
Apple's been on the verge of going out of business for the last 20 years and will probably do so for at least the next 10 years.;-)
I run a BattleTech fan site, since I'm dealing with a lot of material that is based of of FASA's work I try to put this disclaimer on every page:
BattleTech is a Registered Trademark of FASA Corporation. Original
BattleTech material Copyright by FASA Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Used without permission. Any use of FASA Corporation's copyrighted
material or trademarks in this file should not be viewed as a challenge
to those copyrights or trademarks.
I don't have any government clearance and none was asked for. I made a detour to see the museum coming back a trip this spring. I just went right in, looked around at the exhibits, and bought a t-shirt. When I went, the enigma machine had a light burned out so I couldn't encrypt my name.:-/
Do you need to have permission to go into the library at the museum? It didn't seem like I could work into that section of the museum.
While I would like to see the x86 hardware go away, it gonna be around for a long time. I think the real issue is how you get your legacy code to run on different OSs. Your win9x/NT apps don't run on linux/x86 yet they have the same hardware. To solve this kind of problem, all the OS will need to do what the microcode is doing. That is have a low level OS that runs between the user OS and the hardware. Which pretty much sounds like a MACH microkernel. If MACH was more widespread then legacy might not be as big an issue, but code will always need to be updated to the latest User OS.
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LinuxPPC will not die. Period. Don't just sweep LinuxPPC under the carpet and says it's going to die. As the article mentions not all user of LinuxPPC will rush out out to use OS X.
I own a PMac 7500 which was one of Apple's better desgins. I am on my 3rd processor in this computer. Not the number upgrades, but the number of processors (601, 604e, G3) and if I felt like spending the money I could upgrade to a G4. This computer has a decent amount of life left in it, but Apple doesn't plan to support OS X on this computer. There is a whole range of PPC hardware out there from Apple that they don't plan to have OS X run on. My read on OS X from Apple is: You should buy some of our new plastic with G4 processors to run OS X. LinuxPPC will continue to run on the hardware that Apple is leaving behind.
Now how will LinuxPPC development perist going forward? Support for newer hardware might not be as good as the abandoned hardware. User on the new hardware may stay in the Apple fold with OS X and reduce the number of users to test LinuxPPC. But as users upgrade, they may make these computers available for use with LinuxPPC.
I think everyone can agree that Apple priced the G4 cube wrong to begin with. My wife's mac was finally getting old enough that she wanted to get a new mac last year. She really didn't want an iMac as she wants a bigger monitor. So our choices from Apple were either a Power Mac G4 or a G4 Cube and I couldn't justify the extra $300 for less expandibility. Now if the G4 Cube had been $300 less than a Power Mac G4 we would have gotten one. The only thing that's been put in the PCI slots is a second video card for the 2nd monitor. So honestly, she could have lived without the expandibility, but not for more money.
;-)
Jobs/Apple can sell some nice plastic and Apple needs to evaluate the price points of their hardware better. The G4 Cube was better than an iMac and a bit less than the Power Mac G4. So Apple should have priced it between those two product from the start. If they had done that, then I think they would not have had the inventory problems they had with the Cube. Also they should not try to sell hardware to a niche market inside an existing niche market. Or if they really wanted to do that they should have done a better job at forcasting based on this and the initial price they planned.
Apple's been on the verge of going out of business for the last 20 years and will probably do so for at least the next 10 years.
But I thought Emacs was a virus. :)
I don't have any government clearance and none was asked for. I made a detour to see the museum coming back a trip this spring. I just went right in, looked around at the exhibits, and bought a t-shirt. When I went, the enigma machine had a light burned out so I couldn't encrypt my name. :-/
Do you need to have permission to go into the library at the museum? It didn't seem like I could work into that section of the museum.
While I would like to see the x86 hardware go away, it gonna be around for a long time. I think the real issue is how you get your legacy code to run on different OSs. Your win9x/NT apps don't run on linux/x86 yet they have the same hardware. To solve this kind of problem, all the OS will need to do what the microcode is doing. That is have a low level OS that runs between the user OS and the hardware. Which pretty much sounds like a MACH microkernel. If MACH was more widespread then legacy might not be as big an issue, but code will always need to be updated to the latest User OS.
Just some random thoughts.