Maybe I'm just not being open minded...
on
iMac Linux
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· Score: 1
Unix was designed to take advantage of the new and amazing magnetic core memory that was avaliable in the early 1970s. It ran just fine on the Motorolla 68000 series chips in the 80s, it runs fine on PowerPC chips now.
A lot has changed since then; UNIX has become essentialy a set of interfaces instead of a specific implementation and portability has been really great. But why not? Unix has been with us since the days of 8-bit address spaces, the central design ideas have proved to be almost immutable.
Well designed software should really not care about the platform it's running on at all (see also: Java), so what does it matter if Linux runs on i386 chips or PPC chips or MIPS chips (like in the Cobalt Qube servers) or Alpha chips (like Compaq sells with Linux on them) or even Sparc chips on Sun hardware (which *is* expensive)? I like to think of Linux running on the iMac (but not my iMac, I need to run Office;-) as a really good thing.
The chain of idea theft in this space is long... Xerox/probably/ stole this from Apple, who/definatly/ stole the idea from the work of a couple of MIT Media Lab Researchers, Lisa Strausfeld and some other guy. They went on to form a company called Perspecta www.perspecta.com which has strayed far from the visualization fold since it was founded (they now do this OLAP for the web thing).
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Unix was designed to take advantage of the new and amazing magnetic core memory that was avaliable in the early 1970s. It ran just fine on the Motorolla 68000 series chips in the 80s, it runs fine on PowerPC chips now.
;-) as a really good thing.
A lot has changed since then; UNIX has become essentialy a set of interfaces instead of a specific implementation and portability has been really great. But why not? Unix has been with us since the days of 8-bit address spaces, the central design ideas have proved to be almost immutable.
Well designed software should really not care about the platform it's running on at all (see also: Java), so what does it matter if Linux runs on i386 chips or PPC chips or MIPS chips (like in the Cobalt Qube servers) or Alpha chips (like Compaq sells with Linux on them) or even Sparc chips on Sun hardware (which *is* expensive)? I like to think of Linux running on the iMac (but not my iMac, I need to run Office
The chain of idea theft in this space is long... Xerox /probably/ stole this from Apple, who /definatly/ stole the idea from the work of a couple of MIT Media Lab Researchers, Lisa Strausfeld and some other guy. They went on to form a company called Perspecta www.perspecta.com which has strayed far from the visualization fold since it was founded (they now do this OLAP for the web thing).