I find there is a difference between trying to do a conscious cost-benefit analysis and simply envisioning different outcomes - the latter can be much easier and more direct.
For example in trying to balance my 401k portfolio it is tempting to attempt to balance risk and reward numerically. I think this can be done with a lot of effort, especially by the professionals who have all the tools and training. However as a first approximation, I found it rewarding to build a few extreme examples and just see how I feel about them. For example - US Equities take a massive hammering, US Equities have a 10 year bull run. Equities globally collapse vs. fixed income, cash etc. I discovered I was very upset in any scenario where I lost 30% or more of what I already have. I'm more risk averse than I thought, and not so ready to keep my money in assets that can simply disappear in some accounting scandal. So I moved half of my portfolio into cash and diversified international stocks. Now to lose 30% of my total holdings from one event is near impossible on the side of the assets I moved, and similarly the assets still in US stocks would have to go down 60%. And even if I got double whammied, the amount in cash would keep me off the streets for a good while when I retire.
Similarly, I bought a car a few years ago which was the sensible choice - it was new and therefore had plenty of warrany left, and was Japanese so the value on paper and feature were good. Thinking back, though, if I'd ever really envisioned myself owning that car, putting up with the looks, the flimsy feeling build quality etc, the turbo lag etc it might have been quite obvious to me I need to stick to what I like (namely german cars).
Several months ago there was an article on slashdot claiming that the algorithm for google news had a built in bias to favor politically conservative/right wing news sources?
What places do you go to where you are limited to analog dial-up? Most places I happen to end up at have cheap/free wireless, or I use my mobile for those moments where I need something immediatly.
I own a house with no choice in Broadband - it's either the local phone company's expensive slow DSL or nothing. We choose nothing, so analog dialup is all we get.
Cellphone choice is : GSM doesn't work at all, Verizon kind of works if you go up the hill and wave your phone around.
It is only our weekend place, but our internet capability is my powerbook which I take up there with me. Having to bring a USB modem would be hassle, and more cables and junk on the kitchen table. Definitely not my favourite apple move. Might push me into getting an airport extreme with modem up there. Let it dial for me and have cables and whatnot, then I can roam on wifi
I think this proposal is precisely the same thing as the Verizon plan you refer to. For an end-user serviced by Verizon, the "private broadband circuits" you refer to sound suspiciously like the upper tier of a 2-tier internet. Do you think video-heavy content providers NOT paying Verizon extra are going to be able to utilise that capacity?
Personally I'd say The Register is more about debunking Yellow Journalism and having a laugh than practicing media bias themselves. Witness the lampooning of Intel's "Industry Standard" servers that are 1. expensive 2. only worth using in specialised low-volume niche applications and 3. proprietary (for example, this was hilarious). Much less "yellow" than the garbage spewed by CNET on a regular basis about the wonder of their major shareholder Intel
Or on the other side of the fence, the Sun story about "Sun replaces network card with donkey" was again more about pure fun than media bias (see this). Satire, parody and mockery, with just enough actual reportage, that's what I get from The Register.
Here's a suggestion : when you call the Register "Yellow" why not refer to a particular story? It might make it more obvious which axe if any you have to grind...
Me, I've been quite enjoying the Register (on the whole) since it was a subscription only email list put out by Mike Magee and his mates.
For anyone who believes Slashdot is somehow a good platform from which to cast stones at the Register I have two words for you : John Katz.
It surprises me that "register level documentation" (RLD) is really expected. The supposition seems to be that whatever is built into a device should be subject to full disclosure. That would be nice, but I contend it's unrealistic. Imagine the RLD for a Radeon RFOO card. If it really were complete, there would be statements such as "this command uses hardware accelerated foobarpixelthing but don't use it for 24-bit color, we screwed up, all RFOO series cards have a really bad performance glitch doing this this way, instead do it as follows". In other words, hardware bugs. Then there are other issues such as entirely new types of rendering support. Imagine "this card actually has a complete MagicShaderWatchamcallit pipeline but we changed the API after the final silicon for this generation because it was basically crap and too hard to use, so had to push announcement of MagicShaderWatchamacallit support until the next generation and so that stuff is wasted in this card". Or even "the way we get excellent OpenGL performance is with this routine that we basically stole from SGI, don't tell them!". This is all made up and that's the point - even without knowing the details of any particular card, it's trivial to imagine why complete RLD is unrealistic for hardware such as 3d graphics which is so intensely competitive right now.
With all due respect, Garfinkel is just wrong about Ariane 5. I read the report on the disaster at the time, and the software worked entirely according to spec. The spec was written for Ariane 4, but the software was reused for Ariane 5 without review. If a review had been undertaken it might have spotted that the potential velocity of Ariane 5 vastly exceeded that of Ariane 4. That was their first mistake. This is software related, but it is not a software bug.
The second problem is that the system which generated the floating point exception and therefore shut down was only needed before launch, but "crashed" after launch. The second mistake was not to shut down systems when they are no longer needed and which, if they fail, can terminate the flight. Not a software bug, more of a basic design flaw.
Stating this was a bug is very common, but is unsupported by the facts. Some commentators have gone further and blamed the language being used (Ada) as causing the rocket to fail, normally followed by a broad hint that some other language (C, Eiffel) would have done better.
This is much worse than simply calling it a bug. The spec for the system that failed said that out of range errors cause exceptions. Exceptions cause the system to shut down. The system shutting down mandates auto-self-destruct of the rocket. This is a matter of public record. Whether this was a good design, even for Ariane 4, is a separate question.
The only way some other programming language might have avoided the disaster is if the programmer violated the spec : in this condition, I am required to shut down, but hey that might be expensive, so I'll do something else instead. That might have been great, or it might have meant the rocket flew right into the ground and killed hundreds of people, we'll simply never know for sure.
No, the solution is NOT that simple. Sony may be overly fond of restricting user's rights, however they also have some essential and compelling products. For example simply giving up the Epic, Legacy, Sony-BMG etc music labels is not an option for me. Similarly I have two of their camcorders and they're great. Particularly the HDR-FX1 (high-def 3-ccd camcorder) is a great product and doesn't limit my rights in any discernable way. I also love my Playstation 2 and PSP. In the past i had a fancy cassette walkman which was also a great (if expensive) product.
Personally, I feel a company like Sony is going to be more persuaded by someone with a receipt in hand complaining about a product they purchased from them than anything else. If I were to always choose the competition, they might think it was due to features and/or price, not DRM type issues.
Hey, I mentioned this article to my wife who actually works for Sony-BMG right there at HQ on 550 Madison, and even she didn't reply to me. no kidding!
Those who don't know who he is, really have nothing interesting to say about his talk. It's not as intrinsically interesting if you think he's "just some guy".
Petzold discussing whether Visual Studio rots your brain is a bit like Yoda saying people need to cut down on all that Force nonsense.
I don't have the figures, but maybe we need to report this as "percentage of mean national monthly income per month
Good point - that occurred to me too...
As one data point, I pay over $110/month for my Speakeasy DSL (8Mb/768kb). Equalised for income though this might not be too bad as I earn above average income in the US and therefore above average compared to many other countries.
There is yet another variable to be accounted for, however - I have a
"servers-allowed" plan and 4 static IP addresses. From discussions with friends in the UK, for example, this kind of service doesn't exist AT ALL at "home broadband" prices over there.
As a concrete example,
Canalplan AC is actually hosted in my basement in Brooklyn, NY, because the guy who developed that service cannot get "servers-allowed" DSL in the UK.
Mind you, DSL in the US being not as atrocious as in the UK is not something to be overly proud of!
Sorry that got mangled, I wrote "simultanously announce routes connecting L3" less than sign, dash, greater than sign "Cogent". Also it's spelt "simultaneously". Sorry!
You don't need to masquerade anything, if you're connected to Level3 and Cogent, just configure your router to advertise your route to the Level3 network on the Cogent side and vice-versa.
Then watch your router melt under the hundreds of gigabits of traffic -- that you'll have to pay for both ways. Congratulation, you're the new peering agreement between Level3 and Cogent!
Very well explained, thank you sir!
I wonder if all the other Tier 1 providers together could simultanously announce routes connecting L3Cogent with equal metrics and survive. Then bill both Level 3 and Cogent for net transit on all their traffic. It seems to me that by their actions both L3 and Cogent are not currently Tier 1 and deserve not to be treated as such.
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?
on
Dell Dumping Itanium
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One has to wonder, outside the obvious explanation of Intel's anti-competitive trade practices, what is Dell's aversion to AMD 64-bit / dual-core processors?
I think that Intel gives a slightly better volume discount to Dell than anybody else. Partly this is because Dell's volume is bigger than most anyone else (I forget if they have exceeded HP yet), but the obvious suspicion is that there is also an "exclusivity bonus" - yet lower prices for a vendor who does not sell any of the competition's products. If Dell actually sold AMD Opteron based products, I suspect they would do very well on those products, but if they drove up their costs on every other system they sell, all still containing Intel cpus, then it might be a net loss, at least initially.
Re:What in heaven's name is he talking about?
on
Bill Gates Speaks Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
What in heaven's name is he talking about?
[SNIP]
Of course software was set up for networked communication. Most UNIX (including *BSD and Linux) systems since the late 1970s have been network-aware in some form or another. And they have experienced nowhere near the problems that Microsoft's software has.
I assume this is a mistake, surely you meant to say "and experienced a huge number of security problems because UNIX was never designed with security as a prime consideration, and neither was the internet".
For example, off the top of my head, there was the Morris Worm, remote root exploits in hundreds of versions of sendmail, similar problems with DNS. Default email relaying in SunOS and Solaris for many years. The list is endless.
Now, it's true, a lot of progress has been made and lots of unix systems can be fairly secure now in skilled hands - a far more modest claim than yours.
I'm a long-time user of Linux, but for movie editing I've just recently accumulated the full Apple setup - 23" screen, dual 2.7GHz G5, Final Cut Express HD, DVD Studio Pro
Can someone who knows both systems compare the strengths and weaknesses? If Cinelerra is good enough to compete, I'll definitely consider a dual-dual-core Opteron for my next film setup in a coupla years. As much as I love my Macs, it would be nice to combine commodity priced hardware and open-source software if it would do the job adequately.
My source is the Sony HDR-FX1 - does Cinelerra handle 1080i HDV well, for example?
Actually, these new machines run Solaris, Linux and Windows - they are even on WHQL. They are the second-gen of Sun's AMD based x86-64 machines, and there were some intel x86-32 based systems before that, so arguably they are on their 3d or 4th gen of machines which can run Windows, if you like.
Compare and contrast this with Sun and HP who basically say "service, hey, you bought it, the check cleared and if it stops working then come see us about a service contract (which we will charge you up the wazoo for)".
Sun always quotes multiple service contract prices right there on the web page when you order the hardware (different levels of service).
I would have rpefered Apple going with AMD opteron's or contracting one of their other beefy 64 bit chips. Why intel?
Currently Steve Jobs is using Intel to beat IBM over the head. Officially PowerPC is out of the picture, but it hasn't been announced just when G5 will stop - will it go dual-core? How about low-voltage?
Similarly, when Apple is largely x86 at some time in the future, Steve will have AMD to keep Intel honest.
I expect we will see regular rumors of Apple switching to AMD, followed by nice price cuts on Intel/Apple kit. Maybe even the Dell trick of "accidentally" leaking product code and spare parts pages for AMD based product. Makes the claim that AMD is being seriously considered look very credible when going to the regular meetings with Intel to negotiate extremely good volume discounts (Dell can't afford to sell AMD products, it would cause Intel to inrease its prices that it charges Dell, and at this point Dell is addicted to rock-bottom Intel prices - it's practically their entire business model).
Will this be a problem for support? They'll now have to support this much more hardware, and will have to have a fork of their OS X code; or will all code be done for Intel procs now, and 'just work (tm)' via the rosetta on powerpc procs?
I doubt very much there is a fork in OS X. Much more likely they keep the code that absolutely must know things like sizeof and endianness to an absolute minimum, and just use utility routines to convert architecture dependent data formats to platform independent formats, and then use clean portable coding techniques to write most of the rest of the code oblivious to the underlying machine.
After five years or more of Mac OS X's "secret double life" it is likely that they are, even, quite good at this portability strategy.
Furthermore, I doubt if the development managers over at Apple will even allow new "intel-isms" to infect the code going forward. Where appropriate, sure, but fancy tricks just because someone has a pentium programming manual, hell no. Steve Jobs would be furious if OS X lost the ability to run really well on PowerPC before the last drop of bargaining power had been squeezed out. He also might be keeping one eye open on all those hot console processors IBM is designing. With a truly portable OS, he can make sure Apple rides the hardware waves of the future and not just this one.
But consider that the Cray X1E can have up to 64 cabinets, each of which can use 65kW (see this), so it's still "fiddling small change" to paraphrase Douglas Adams.
Slashdot Mirror
I find there is a difference between trying to do a conscious cost-benefit analysis and simply envisioning different outcomes - the latter can be much easier and more direct.
For example in trying to balance my 401k portfolio it is tempting to attempt to balance risk and reward numerically. I think this can be done with a lot of effort, especially by the professionals who have all the tools and training. However as a first approximation, I found it rewarding to build a few extreme examples and just see how I feel about them. For example - US Equities take a massive hammering, US Equities have a 10 year bull run. Equities globally collapse vs. fixed income, cash etc. I discovered I was very upset in any scenario where I lost 30% or more of what I already have. I'm more risk averse than I thought, and not so ready to keep my money in assets that can simply disappear in some accounting scandal. So I moved half of my portfolio into cash and diversified international stocks. Now to lose 30% of my total holdings from one event is near impossible on the side of the assets I moved, and similarly the assets still in US stocks would have to go down 60%. And even if I got double whammied, the amount in cash would keep me off the streets for a good while when I retire.
Similarly, I bought a car a few years ago which was the sensible choice - it was new and therefore had plenty of warrany left, and was Japanese so the value on paper and feature were good. Thinking back, though, if I'd ever really envisioned myself owning that car, putting up with the looks, the flimsy feeling build quality etc, the turbo lag etc it might have been quite obvious to me I need to stick to what I like (namely german cars).
Several months ago there was an article on slashdot claiming that the algorithm for google news had a built in bias to favor politically conservative/right wing news sources?
Is this still true?
Yes, the article is still on Slashdot.
Chris (ever helpful)
I find is odd that Intel keeps backtracking to its 20 year old Pentium Pro design.
Come on, 20 year old? I make it just over 10 since the processor was released...
What places do you go to where you are limited to analog dial-up? Most places I happen to end up at have cheap/free wireless, or I use my mobile for those moments where I need something immediatly.
I own a house with no choice in Broadband - it's either the local phone company's expensive slow DSL or nothing. We choose nothing, so analog dialup is all we get.
Cellphone choice is : GSM doesn't work at all, Verizon kind of works if you go up the hill and wave your phone around.
It is only our weekend place, but our internet capability is my powerbook which I take up there with me. Having to bring a USB modem would be hassle, and more cables and junk on the kitchen table. Definitely not my favourite apple move. Might push me into getting an airport extreme with modem up there. Let it dial for me and have cables and whatnot, then I can roam on wifi
Recall Brian Kernighan's famed Trojan Horse speech.
Are you referring to this? That was Ken Thompson.
I think this proposal is precisely the same thing as the Verizon plan you refer to. For an end-user serviced by Verizon, the "private broadband circuits" you refer to sound suspiciously like the upper tier of a 2-tier internet. Do you think video-heavy content providers NOT paying Verizon extra are going to be able to utilise that capacity?
Personally I'd say The Register is more about debunking Yellow Journalism and having a laugh than practicing media bias themselves. Witness the lampooning of Intel's "Industry Standard" servers that are 1. expensive 2. only worth using in specialised low-volume niche applications and 3. proprietary (for example, this was hilarious). Much less "yellow" than the garbage spewed by CNET on a regular basis about the wonder of their major shareholder Intel
Or on the other side of the fence, the Sun story about "Sun replaces network card with donkey" was again more about pure fun than media bias (see this). Satire, parody and mockery, with just enough actual reportage, that's what I get from The Register.
Here's a suggestion : when you call the Register "Yellow" why not refer to a particular story? It might make it more obvious which axe if any you have to grind...
Me, I've been quite enjoying the Register (on the whole) since it was a subscription only email list put out by Mike Magee and his mates.
For anyone who believes Slashdot is somehow a good platform from which to cast stones at the Register I have two words for you : John Katz.
No, I still haven't let that one go.
It surprises me that "register level documentation" (RLD) is really expected. The supposition seems to be that whatever is built into a device should be subject to full disclosure. That would be nice, but I contend it's unrealistic. Imagine the RLD for a Radeon RFOO card. If it really were complete, there would be statements such as "this command uses hardware accelerated foobarpixelthing but don't use it for 24-bit color, we screwed up, all RFOO series cards have a really bad performance glitch doing this this way, instead do it as follows". In other words, hardware bugs. Then there are other issues such as entirely new types of rendering support. Imagine "this card actually has a complete MagicShaderWatchamcallit pipeline but we changed the API after the final silicon for this generation because it was basically crap and too hard to use, so had to push announcement of MagicShaderWatchamacallit support until the next generation and so that stuff is wasted in this card". Or even "the way we get excellent OpenGL performance is with this routine that we basically stole from SGI, don't tell them!".
This is all made up and that's the point - even without knowing the details of any particular card, it's trivial to imagine why complete RLD is unrealistic for hardware such as 3d graphics which is so intensely competitive right now.
With all due respect, Garfinkel is just wrong about Ariane 5. I read the report on the disaster at the time, and the software worked entirely according to spec. The spec was written for Ariane 4, but the software was reused for Ariane 5 without review. If a review had been undertaken it might have spotted that the potential velocity of Ariane 5 vastly exceeded that of Ariane 4. That was their first mistake. This is software related, but it is not a software bug.
The second problem is that the system which generated the floating point exception and therefore shut down was only needed before launch, but "crashed" after launch. The second mistake was not to shut down systems when they are no longer needed and which, if they fail, can terminate the flight. Not a software bug, more of a basic design flaw.
Stating this was a bug is very common, but is unsupported by the facts. Some commentators have gone further and blamed the language being used (Ada) as causing the rocket to fail, normally followed by a broad hint that some other language (C, Eiffel) would have done better.
This is much worse than simply calling it a bug. The spec for the system that failed said that out of range errors cause exceptions. Exceptions cause the system to shut down. The system shutting down mandates auto-self-destruct of the rocket. This is a matter of public record. Whether this was a good design, even for Ariane 4, is a separate question.
The only way some other programming language might have avoided the disaster is if the programmer violated the spec : in this condition, I am required to shut down, but hey that might be expensive, so I'll do something else instead. That might have been great, or it might have meant the rocket flew right into the ground and killed hundreds of people, we'll simply never know for sure.
No, the solution is NOT that simple. Sony may be overly fond of restricting user's rights, however they also have some essential and compelling products. For example simply giving up the Epic, Legacy, Sony-BMG etc music labels is not an option for me. Similarly I have two of their camcorders and they're great. Particularly the HDR-FX1 (high-def 3-ccd camcorder) is a great product and doesn't limit my rights in any discernable way. I also love my Playstation 2 and PSP. In the past i had a fancy cassette walkman which was also a great (if expensive) product.
Personally, I feel a company like Sony is going to be more persuaded by someone with a receipt in hand complaining about a product they purchased from them than anything else. If I were to always choose the competition, they might think it was due to features and/or price, not DRM type issues.
Hey, I mentioned this article to my wife who actually works for Sony-BMG right there at HQ on 550 Madison, and even she didn't reply to me. no kidding!
Those who don't know who he is, really have nothing interesting to say about his talk. It's not as intrinsically interesting if you think he's "just some guy".
Petzold discussing whether Visual Studio rots your brain is a bit like Yoda saying people need to cut down on all that Force nonsense.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever do stuff like this?
Too much work. Requires actual writing, as well as skilled disassembly of a device, photography, not to mention spending money to get the device.
Anyway, the iPod is "lame", why bother?
I don't have the figures, but maybe we need to report this as "percentage of mean national monthly income per month
Good point - that occurred to me too...
As one data point, I pay over $110/month for my Speakeasy DSL (8Mb/768kb). Equalised for income though this might not be too bad as I earn above average income in the US and therefore above average compared to many other countries.
There is yet another variable to be accounted for, however - I have a "servers-allowed" plan and 4 static IP addresses. From discussions with friends in the UK, for example, this kind of service doesn't exist AT ALL at "home broadband" prices over there. As a concrete example,
Canalplan AC is actually hosted in my basement in Brooklyn, NY, because the guy who developed that service cannot get "servers-allowed" DSL in the UK.
Mind you, DSL in the US being not as atrocious as in the UK is not something to be overly proud of!
Sorry that got mangled, I wrote "simultanously announce routes connecting L3" less than sign, dash, greater than sign "Cogent". Also it's spelt "simultaneously". Sorry!
You don't need to masquerade anything, if you're connected to Level3 and Cogent, just configure your router to advertise your route to the Level3 network on the Cogent side and vice-versa.
Then watch your router melt under the hundreds of gigabits of traffic -- that you'll have to pay for both ways. Congratulation, you're the new peering agreement between Level3 and Cogent!
Very well explained, thank you sir!
I wonder if all the other Tier 1 providers together could simultanously announce routes connecting L3Cogent with equal metrics and survive. Then bill both Level 3 and Cogent for net transit on all their traffic. It seems to me that by their actions both L3 and Cogent are not currently Tier 1 and deserve not to be treated as such.
One has to wonder, outside the obvious explanation of Intel's anti-competitive trade practices, what is Dell's aversion to AMD 64-bit / dual-core processors?
I think that Intel gives a slightly better volume discount to Dell than anybody else. Partly this is because Dell's volume is bigger than most anyone else (I forget if they have exceeded HP yet), but the obvious suspicion is that there is also an "exclusivity bonus" - yet lower prices for a vendor who does not sell any of the competition's products. If Dell actually sold AMD Opteron based products, I suspect they would do very well on those products, but if they drove up their costs on every other system they sell, all still containing Intel cpus, then it might be a net loss, at least initially.
What in heaven's name is he talking about?
[SNIP]
Of course software was set up for networked communication. Most UNIX (including *BSD and Linux) systems since the late 1970s have been network-aware in some form or another. And they have experienced nowhere near the problems that Microsoft's software has.
I assume this is a mistake, surely you meant to say "and experienced a huge number of security problems because UNIX was never designed with security as a prime consideration, and neither was the internet".
For example, off the top of my head, there was the Morris Worm, remote root exploits in hundreds of versions of sendmail, similar problems with DNS. Default email relaying in SunOS and Solaris for many years. The list is endless.
Now, it's true, a lot of progress has been made and lots of unix systems can be fairly secure now in skilled hands - a far more modest claim than yours.
I'm a long-time user of Linux, but for movie editing I've just recently accumulated the full Apple setup - 23" screen, dual 2.7GHz G5, Final Cut Express HD, DVD Studio Pro
Can someone who knows both systems compare the strengths and weaknesses? If Cinelerra is good enough to compete, I'll definitely consider a dual-dual-core Opteron for my next film setup in a coupla years. As much as I love my Macs, it would be nice to combine commodity priced hardware and open-source software if it would do the job adequately.
My source is the Sony HDR-FX1 - does Cinelerra handle 1080i HDV well, for example?
Suns don't run Windows and they don't run Linux
Actually, these new machines run Solaris, Linux and Windows - they are even on WHQL. They are the second-gen of Sun's AMD based x86-64 machines, and there were some intel x86-32 based systems before that, so arguably they are on their 3d or 4th gen of machines which can run Windows, if you like.
Compare and contrast this with Sun and HP who basically say "service, hey, you bought it, the check cleared and if it stops working then come see us about a service contract (which we will charge you up the wazoo for)".
Sun always quotes multiple service contract prices right there on the web page when you order the hardware (different levels of service).
I would have rpefered Apple going with AMD opteron's or contracting one of their other beefy 64 bit chips. Why intel?
Currently Steve Jobs is using Intel to beat IBM over the head. Officially PowerPC is out of the picture, but it hasn't been announced just when G5 will stop - will it go dual-core? How about low-voltage?
Similarly, when Apple is largely x86 at some time in the future, Steve will have AMD to keep Intel honest.
I expect we will see regular rumors of Apple switching to AMD, followed by nice price cuts on Intel/Apple kit. Maybe even the Dell trick of "accidentally" leaking product code and spare parts pages for AMD based product. Makes the claim that AMD is being seriously considered look very credible when going to the regular meetings with Intel to negotiate extremely good volume discounts (Dell can't afford to sell AMD products, it would cause Intel to inrease its prices that it charges Dell, and at this point Dell is addicted to rock-bottom Intel prices - it's practically their entire business model).
As I recall it's "take off and nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"
Will this be a problem for support? They'll now have to support this much more hardware, and will have to have a fork of their OS X code; or will all code be done for Intel procs now, and 'just work (tm)' via the rosetta on powerpc procs?
I doubt very much there is a fork in OS X. Much more likely they keep the code that absolutely must know things like sizeof and endianness to an absolute minimum, and just use utility routines to convert architecture dependent data formats to platform independent formats, and then use clean portable coding techniques to write most of the rest of the code oblivious to the underlying machine.
After five years or more of Mac OS X's "secret double life" it is likely that they are, even, quite good at this portability strategy.
Furthermore, I doubt if the development managers over at Apple will even allow new "intel-isms" to infect the code going forward. Where appropriate, sure, but fancy tricks just because someone has a pentium programming manual, hell no. Steve Jobs would be furious if OS X lost the ability to run really well on PowerPC before the last drop of bargaining power had been squeezed out. He also might be keeping one eye open on all those hot console processors IBM is designing. With a truly portable OS, he can make sure Apple rides the hardware waves of the future and not just this one.
But consider that the Cray X1E can have up to 64 cabinets, each of which can use 65kW (see this), so it's still "fiddling small change" to paraphrase Douglas Adams.