If you're coming from a company environment, you may find yourself in for a bit of a shock (your university may vary).
The bureaucrats are political parasites. The faculty are egomaniacs. You are their meat puppet and when something goes wrong, and it will, when there is any blame to be shared you are the paper-towel boy to soak it up.
You can be brilliant, and carve yourself a nitch in a rare environment, or get bitter. You'll see lots of bitter employees and they'll want you to join the club. They're your peers, and if you're brilliant you're going to make them look bad. Its a micky-mouse club with rat teeth and knives in the dark, depending on your coworkers.
If it were a business, it would be dead. Nothing in any other environment could survive that much incompetence, miss that many deadlines, or be so far over budget that you could smile at the end and call it a success. Some days you're not going to have high expectations, your expectations are going to be so low that you're going to trip over it dragging your feet.
Set against that post-apocolyptic world, there are a few rebel groups trying to make a difference. For computers, that will probably be CSCI, hard sciences (math, chem) or business. They probably won't have much of a budget, but they're probably doing something cool & trendy and it is greasing the wheels.
I fail to see why a real programmer cares about the CPU. They care about the compiler and the support libraries. About the only thing that OSX is going to impact is the GUI.
Unless Apple can get their hardware costs down so they can compete with a free OS on a generic cheap (and possibly old) PC, they're not going to push out any existing hobby desktops. If they sharpen their pencil a bit and get around to fixing kernel inefficiences, maybe they can compete in the server market. I don't see the situation changing for the professional desktop.
This isn't M$. If you can code, you can develop on linux now and port easily enough to OSX, and you can just as easily do it the other way. If you need a GUI, that is where you'll get your split. OSX may support X11, but I doubt KDE & Gnome with all the trainload of dependencies will work too well in a subservient mode.
If I am allowed to come out with a product 3 years down the road and use an existing product as an example, of course I'm going to make something more robust or give up and not release something at all.
If longhorn came out at the same time as tiger, then we might be comparing, um, oranges-to-oranges. Showing up late to the show just proves once again that M$ is the better parasite, re-innovating the wheel.
"Oooh, my bottled air is better than yours because I waited until after you rolled your product, made my bottle slightly larger, and copied your marketing strategy." Innovation, NOT.
Replacing ELF would be a huge pain for transitioning between old and new format, for anybody that remembers the old a.out vs ELF days.
It can be done, it wouldn't slow the hobbyists down but it would mean some late nights for the distribution folks trying to make the transition painless, plus having to deal with the shrink-wrap folks to get them to release a new binary.
Linux/UNIX/*BSD -- i'm going to lump them all together for simplicity. We're going to enjoy our security until we get popular enough for people to write M$-"quality" code and tip the security/convenience teeter-totter the wrong way.
It would probably take only one port of outlook to UNIX (with badly written support enivronment) before we had almost all of the same problems that we do today, even if it is much harder for the actual operating system to be damaged. The damage the rest of us see in SPAM and network congestion would be about the same.
M$ gets tared with a big brush because they've bundled their OS with buggy applications. I don't know if the distinction is clear enough for your virus-happy media channels, especially since some business will inevitably bundle/support it if the "killer app" is popular enough.
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If you're coming from a company environment, you may find yourself in for a bit of a shock (your university may vary).
The bureaucrats are political parasites. The faculty are egomaniacs. You are their meat puppet and when something goes wrong, and it will, when there is any blame to be shared you are the paper-towel boy to soak it up.
You can be brilliant, and carve yourself a nitch in a rare environment, or get bitter. You'll see lots of bitter employees and they'll want you to join the club. They're your peers, and if you're brilliant you're going to make them look bad. Its a micky-mouse club with rat teeth and knives in the dark, depending on your coworkers.
If it were a business, it would be dead. Nothing in any other environment could survive that much incompetence, miss that many deadlines, or be so far over budget that you could smile at the end and call it a success. Some days you're not going to have high expectations, your expectations are going to be so low that you're going to trip over it dragging your feet.
Set against that post-apocolyptic world, there are a few rebel groups trying to make a difference. For computers, that will probably be CSCI, hard sciences (math, chem) or business. They probably won't have much of a budget, but they're probably doing something cool & trendy and it is greasing the wheels.
Find that wave and surf it.
Dvorak is smoking a few things, at least.
I fail to see why a real programmer cares about the CPU. They care about the compiler and the support libraries. About the only thing that OSX is going to impact is the GUI.
Unless Apple can get their hardware costs down so they can compete with a free OS on a generic cheap (and possibly old) PC, they're not going to push out any existing hobby desktops. If they sharpen their pencil a bit and get around to fixing kernel inefficiences, maybe they can compete in the server market. I don't see the situation changing for the professional desktop.
This isn't M$. If you can code, you can develop on linux now and port easily enough to OSX, and you can just as easily do it the other way. If you need a GUI, that is where you'll get your split. OSX may support X11, but I doubt KDE & Gnome with all the trainload of dependencies will work too well in a subservient mode.
If I am allowed to come out with a product 3 years down the road and use an existing product as an example, of course I'm going to make something more robust or give up and not release something at all.
If longhorn came out at the same time as tiger, then we might be comparing, um, oranges-to-oranges. Showing up late to the show just proves once again that M$ is the better parasite, re-innovating the wheel.
"Oooh, my bottled air is better than yours because I waited until after you rolled your product, made my bottle slightly larger, and copied your marketing strategy." Innovation, NOT.
Perhaps they're just proactive regarding April Fools day.
Replacing ELF would be a huge pain for transitioning between old and new format, for anybody that remembers the old a.out vs ELF days.
It can be done, it wouldn't slow the hobbyists down but it would mean some late nights for the distribution folks trying to make the transition painless, plus having to deal with the shrink-wrap folks to get them to release a new binary.
Linux/UNIX/*BSD -- i'm going to lump them all together for simplicity. We're going to enjoy our security until we get popular enough for people to write M$-"quality" code and tip the security/convenience teeter-totter the wrong way.
It would probably take only one port of outlook to UNIX (with badly written support enivronment) before we had almost all of the same problems that we do today, even if it is much harder for the actual operating system to be damaged. The damage the rest of us see in SPAM and network congestion would be about the same.
M$ gets tared with a big brush because they've bundled their OS with buggy applications. I don't know if the distinction is clear enough for your virus-happy media channels, especially since some business will inevitably bundle/support it if the "killer app" is popular enough.