Win32 apps will likely NOT run on OS X for Intel, should it ever happen. Do Win32 apps, by default, run on your Linux box? Not without emulation software...
Beyond that, most of the magic of the Mac OS is the tight integration between hardware and software. Personally, I would prefer to keep my Mac *and* the Mac OS.
If something takes a G4/350 and 256MB of RAM to run "smoothly", that something is obviously bloated.
Alas... every version of OS X consumer that's seen the light of day has had full debugging enabled at the (micro?)kernel, slowing the OS down considerably. Note that the current DP (Developer Preview) releases are purely to allow developers to have devices and apps ready to run under OS X... Apple isn't providing them with a polished OS.
All things considered... Gnome and company may have these things as projected *goals*, but exactly how far along the path are they? Apple, on the other hand, has an almost completely finished product that will give that ease of use WITH a Unix system (OS X).
Goals are good things... but they don't pay the bills. I tried installing Window Maker on my SUSE box at home (*sigh*) and, to be frank, I still don't have it quite working right. I'm busy tracking down the right versions of half a dozen required packages and fudging with Makefile's where some things are too anal about version numbers. Gnome installed (relatively) painlessly, and KDE just plain sucks.
On another note, re: your off topic note... OS X is supposed to be almost completely POSIX compliant, so it reasons a guess that your standard/usr/bin/ping and such will work fine after recompiling... if they aren't installed by default.
The short answer is... MHz isn't a fair measure of a processor's speed when look across multiple platforms. I don't have bench marks to flaunt or anything, but up until last month I worked at an Advertising agency that used mostly macs, but had a few PCs laying around. We wrote up a scripted action for Photoshop 5.5 and ran it on a G4 @ 450MHz with 512mb of RAM, and then on a Pentium III 600MHz with 512mb of RAM. The G4 finished in a little less than half the time as the Pentium III.
It seems, <i>to me</i> that the G4 pretty much kicked the "faster" Pentium III's ass doing gaussian blurs, renderings, etc.
What this means in benchmarks and the "what's faster" war I don't really know. Nor do I care. It's all about having the right tool for the job.
All things considered, Darwin is NOT NEXTSTEP directly... Darwin is a very close descendant of NeXT's offering, but the 2 are not "equal" by any means.
But aside from that... the rumor is likely crap, as you say. The atmosphere at Apple is such that there is a <i>very good possibility</i> that someone in Engineering is toying around with other processors... but it is almost certain that he's not acting officially for Apple in any way.
I seem to recall that Apple sued Microsoft a while back, claiming that the "Look and Feel" of Windows was too close to their copyrighted MacOS.
Yes. And Apple won, back before Win 3 was released. Originally, Win 3 was almost a dead knock-off for the Mac OS ("System" 6 or 7, I don't remember which). Microsoft put out what we know as Windows 3, then made just enough changes for Windows 95 to makes the legal ground shakey for Apple.
open up the specs to some of their proprietary "standards"
Apple's hardware is no more proprietary than most Dell and Compaq computers. I mean REALLY... what major PC makers use standard, off the shelf parts?
Besides... while being "open" is certainly a good thing... it is not the very definition of Goodness. The market has two standards right now... IBM compats run an OS that has cludgy support for every circuit board ever designed, with comprimised stability. But you KNOW your hardware is supported.
Apple, on the other hand, picks one set of hardware, and ties the software so close to it that they get a more optimized, tighter system.
Pick one or the other. But don't try to turn one INTO the other.
welcome the cloners back with open arms
I hate Mac clones more than Microsoft itself. The clones produced crappy machines that give me 3 times more headaches than a standard Mac. Crappy parts, crappy support (now, none), crappy all around. Apple killed the clones for 2 reasons... the clones squeezed Apple in two very sensitive places... customer loyalty and bank book. The clones didn't deliver on the "Macintosh Experience" and alienated users who bought into Macs because of their reputation. . . And they were undercutting Apple's sales.
How many corporations do YOU know that would allow that kind of situation to even begin... much less allow it to continue?
Didn't Apple lose a case about the 'look & feel' of their GUI before? Isn't that why windows95 is allowed to.. uh.. borrow most of the GUI elements from System7 (MacOS7)?
I'm not completely certain... but I believe Apple sued and won on a Microsoft "look and feel" case (which, I'm sure, they're using as precedence for this) back in the days of Windows 3.x or so. Windows 3 was originally supposed to be more "Mac-ish"...
Quite a few people seem to think that Microsoft's large investment in Apple, not long after Windows 95 hit the market, may have been part of a settlement and/or agreement to keep Apple from suing again... but, I'm not sure I follow that line of thinking.
Why so many? Because now that Apple is back and competitive again, they want to prove it by swinging their legal stick at anything that may involve and iMac but not produced by Apple.
Yes. And No. Apple probably can't win some of these (the eMachine's suite is iffy), but what it does is set PRECEDENCE. Similar to when Sony sued Connectix over Virtual Gaming Station, the PSX emulator. Sony pretty much knew they couldn't win, but they also knew that by flexing their legal muscle a little bit, any company that writes another emulator will triple check their legal bounds.
IMHO, that pretty much spells out what Apple is doing here. There ARE other motives to a lawsuite than money and domineering control of one's property....
Apple is no better then MS. If they had MS's market share thay would be worse. God help you if you make anything for the Mac with out checking with Apple 1st. Remember the clones?
what does any of this have to do with the clones?
I'm not sure most of Slashdot was very in touch with the clones issue anyway. Clones in general are a Good Thing... But the MacOS clones were purely abismal. Power Computing, for instance, put out machines that had flakey hard drives, flakey CDROM drives, flakey... well, they were just plain flakey. And, unfortunately, Power Computing proved to be the rule, not the exception.
Problem was that the clones, in this case, weren't delivering on Apple's expectations for quality as well as taking sales figures away from Apple. They were gently squeezing Apple in the two areas where it hurts most... customer loyalty, and the wallet.
What did YOU do the last time one of you saw someone costing you (or your company) gross amounts of those two things? Encourage them to do more?
Let them build their communities. It will appeal to broad masses, and make them rich. Stuff like this is the ultimate evolutionary process for the internet anyway... like it or not, 90% of the general public isn't computer literate enough to check their mail by telnetting to port 110 and issuing POP3 commands... and teach as you may, most aren't ever going to learn to do it. You and I like the internet just fine the way it is now, but face it... we were the pioneers that built the foundation. The web is really only just now becoming truly useful for the everyday semi-computer-literate person. Most people can't get to websites unless they find them on Yahoo! If the internet is ever going to become the ubiquitous entity of our everyday lives that we see and dream of... it's going to have to appeal to more than just us techno-geeks. The innards we love and cherish will always be there, and most of us will always reside there...
All this chatter about the shortcomings of OS X, and how many of you have done more than just browse at the pretty pictures and actually read up on OS X? Above that, how many of you have even used OS X Server, much less been in the same room as an OS X Consumer machine? Reading your posts on/., I get the feeling that the answer to both questions is "very few".
The preview of OS X on wednesday was a fleeting glimpse at what OS X has in store. It wasn't a detailed, fine-tuned, in-depth demo, nor was it a finished product being shown. The incessent bitching about the GUI shows that very few of you know enough about Apple in general, nor OS X specifically, to know that "flexibility" is one of the things they're touting in the new OS... Virtually everything you've seen comes with enough options to (hopefully) make just about everyone happy.
As for Open Sourcing key parts of the OS... those of you that want all of this Open Sourced want it so that you can port it to Linux, not so that you can support Apple. What incentive is there for Apple (or Microsoft, or any number of other software giants) to Open Source their work, if the Open Source community isn't interested in working to better the project on the intended platform? Honestly... how many Open Source developers do you know that will get their hands on something like the Quicktime source and develop something for the MacOS? The long answer is "none".
128x128 icons were demoed, but the user has the ability to define the sizes of the icons they see on the screen.
Users also have the OPTION of whether to use the NeXTish file browser, or a motif/paradigm closer to the original Macintosh. Don't take what was demoed as being "this is what MacOS will force upon you". It was a fleeting glimpse into an unfinished product demoed at a trade show. It was not an in-depth, ultra-detailed, fine tooth unveiling of the thing.
Even beyond that... If you're really comfortable at using MacOS, you hardly use your mouse for positioning anyway... for example, when you are in Netscape and want to move into Outlook Express and hide Netscape at the same time, you can hold down option and click on any OE window that's open. Viola! You've hidden Netscape and moved into OE. I don't use the "collapse window" button on the current MacOS screen... I collapse by double clicking on the title bar anywhere. I don't close using the close box... I use command-w... One of the wonderful things about MacOS has always been that there's more than one way to do everything. One just hopes that this kind of cross-functionality/multiple ways to do things remains.
Supposedly, "power users" will have full access to the BSD layer, including shells and anything else you would typically find in/usr/bin and the like.
Word is that OS X is *not* POSIX compliant merely because they haven't bothered to have it certified as such, and that anything designed to compile on a POSIX compliant system should compile with only the typical hassle involved with porting from any number of *nix systems to any number of other *nix systems. (i.e. if it's a properly designed package, it should work fine).
I've successfully compiled eggdrop, mysql, and a few other things... I've not tried, but I'd be willing to be that the authors of some libs might have to exert a little elbow grease, especially graphics libraries that access hardware directly... but it shouldn't be too hard.
I see features that have been clearly taken from Squeak, Beos, and FreeBsd.
Most of what you see has been "taken" from NeXT and OpenStep, both of which were acquired by Apple when they purchased NeXT (thus bringing Steve Jobs back on board, as he was the founder and CEO of NeXT). OpenStep, by the way, was a BSD derivative. That would make MacOS X a cousin of FreeBSD, not a sibling.
However, my older 604e/PCI box (upgraded to a G3) will probably NOT see a version of MacOS X ported to its architecture.
You apparently read MacOSRumors, so you should be aware that most sources are reporting that OS X will run on anything that was on the market when Rhapsody. A 604e/PCI box, especially with a G3 upgrade in it, I would think would fall into that category.
I think it would explode within the Linux and Free software community if they would release source to a quicktime client.
All things considered... this represents a rather Linux-centric view of the universe. OSS is GREAT. I love OSS. But one of the serious drawbacks to OSS is that there's so little OSS out there for non-Open Source Operation Systems. Programmers that are involved in Open Source projects are very involved in the Linux (and BSD to a lesser extent) communities, are a pre-disposed to Linux and/or BSD developement.
In short, if Apple open sourced what they could of Quicktime, a small number of Linux projects would sprout, which would benefit a small number of Linux users. Until the OSS community more openly embraces (or at least acknowledges) non-Open systems, big software companies will be pre-disposed not to release code for them.
Apple is the first major computer company to make open source development a key part of its ongoing software strategy
That sounds about right to me. If you ask about 99% of the general population, they'll identify "major computer companies" as such:
Microsoft
Compaq
IBM
Apple
Dell
Microsoft
Gateway
Microsoft
Which of these companies is using OSS as a key part of their business? Certainly not Microsoft... A few of the others are quietly giving consumers the choice of OSS or Windows, but when is the last time you saw an advertisement from any of those (except Apple) where they actually pushed an OSS product? You can't, because you haven't.
I've had floppy-less Macs since their inception, both at home and at work. I also own a USB Zip drive. I couldn't tell you where it is though (i'm assuming packed in storage somewhere with the rest of my stuff), because I haven't even needed it in quite a while. The only floppy issue I've ever had was re-installing an old version of QuarkXPress, which requires both a floppy and a CD to install... I chalk that up to Quark, Inc, stupidity and rigidity though.
Why did Jobs do this? Is he buddy-buddy with Bill Joy?
Jobs returned to Apple when they acquired NeXT. NeXT is (was?) BSD based. MacOS X is merely a severely updated and revamped OpenStep with a more user-friendly interface (we hope).
It's not a matter of competition and such... It's Apple using technologies they already have (OpenStep) to create new technologies (MacOS X).
The "big icons" people are complaining about at the bottom of the screen are the Dock, a Launcher/Task bar type desktop enhancement. Nothing I've seen yet actually showed any icons floating around on the desktop in true MacOS fashion.
It should be possible to port Darwin to run on non-Apple PowerPC systems, and then run the rest of Mac OS X on top of that, thus paving the way for the return of Mac clones
This would be a little more difficult than you would think, considering that binaries tend to be both kernel- and archetecture-dependant. Need I remind you that you can't take a working binary from an i386 Linux system and run it on a PPC Linux system. This is one reason that RPM and the other small handful of binary distributions are used, but slightly suppressed.... I can't install mysql-x.xx.x-3.i386.rpm on my LinuxPPC machine, and you can't install mysql-x.xx.x-3.ppc.rpm on your i386 machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Incorrect, sir.
Win32 apps will likely NOT run on OS X for Intel, should it ever happen. Do Win32 apps, by default, run on your Linux box? Not without emulation software...
Beyond that, most of the magic of the Mac OS is the tight integration between hardware and software. Personally, I would prefer to keep my Mac *and* the Mac OS.
If something takes a G4/350 and 256MB of RAM to run "smoothly", that something is obviously bloated.
Alas... every version of OS X consumer that's seen the light of day has had full debugging enabled at the (micro?)kernel, slowing the OS down considerably. Note that the current DP (Developer Preview) releases are purely to allow developers to have devices and apps ready to run under OS X... Apple isn't providing them with a polished OS.
What really wound up happening, BTW, is that Connectix is selling a version of Virtual PC (the PC emulator for Mac) with RedHat preinstalled.
Connectix Press Release
All things considered... Gnome and company may have these things as projected *goals*, but exactly how far along the path are they? Apple, on the other hand, has an almost completely finished product that will give that ease of use WITH a Unix system (OS X).
/usr/bin/ping and such will work fine after recompiling... if they aren't installed by default.
Goals are good things... but they don't pay the bills. I tried installing Window Maker on my SUSE box at home (*sigh*) and, to be frank, I still don't have it quite working right. I'm busy tracking down the right versions of half a dozen required packages and fudging with Makefile's where some things are too anal about version numbers. Gnome installed (relatively) painlessly, and KDE just plain sucks.
On another note, re: your off topic note... OS X is supposed to be almost completely POSIX compliant, so it reasons a guess that your standard
I think the $16k PC to do what you're doing on a $4k Mac is a bit extreme
Not as extreme as you think, although we experienced something closer to $5k-to-$10k in the Ad Agency I worked at previous to the New Year.
The iMac (and, indeed, the G4's) can indeed be thin clients, netbooting from a properly equipped Mac OS X Server machine.
The short answer is... MHz isn't a fair measure of a processor's speed when look across multiple platforms. I don't have bench marks to flaunt or anything, but up until last month I worked at an Advertising agency that used mostly macs, but had a few PCs laying around. We wrote up a scripted action for Photoshop 5.5 and ran it on a G4 @ 450MHz with 512mb of RAM, and then on a Pentium III 600MHz with 512mb of RAM. The G4 finished in a little less than half the time as the Pentium III.
It seems, <i>to me</i> that the G4 pretty much kicked the "faster" Pentium III's ass doing gaussian blurs, renderings, etc.
What this means in benchmarks and the "what's faster" war I don't really know. Nor do I care. It's all about having the right tool for the job.
Darwin is NEXTSTEP.
All things considered, Darwin is NOT NEXTSTEP directly... Darwin is a very close descendant of NeXT's offering, but the 2 are not "equal" by any means.
But aside from that... the rumor is likely crap, as you say. The atmosphere at Apple is such that there is a <i>very good possibility</i> that someone in Engineering is toying around with other processors... but it is almost certain that he's not acting officially for Apple in any way.
I seem to recall that Apple sued Microsoft a while back, claiming that the "Look and Feel" of Windows was too close to their copyrighted MacOS.
Yes. And Apple won, back before Win 3 was released. Originally, Win 3 was almost a dead knock-off for the Mac OS ("System" 6 or 7, I don't remember which). Microsoft put out what we know as Windows 3, then made just enough changes for Windows 95 to makes the legal ground shakey for Apple.
open up the specs to some of their proprietary "standards"
Apple's hardware is no more proprietary than most Dell and Compaq computers. I mean REALLY... what major PC makers use standard, off the shelf parts?
Besides... while being "open" is certainly a good thing... it is not the very definition of Goodness. The market has two standards right now... IBM compats run an OS that has cludgy support for every circuit board ever designed, with comprimised stability. But you KNOW your hardware is supported.
Apple, on the other hand, picks one set of hardware, and ties the software so close to it that they get a more optimized, tighter system.
Pick one or the other. But don't try to turn one INTO the other.
welcome the cloners back with open arms
I hate Mac clones more than Microsoft itself. The clones produced crappy machines that give me 3 times more headaches than a standard Mac. Crappy parts, crappy support (now, none), crappy all around. Apple killed the clones for 2 reasons... the clones squeezed Apple in two very sensitive places... customer loyalty and bank book. The clones didn't deliver on the "Macintosh Experience" and alienated users who bought into Macs because of their reputation. . . And they were undercutting Apple's sales.
How many corporations do YOU know that would allow that kind of situation to even begin... much less allow it to continue?
Didn't Apple lose a case about the 'look & feel' of their GUI before? Isn't that why windows95 is allowed to.. uh.. borrow most of the GUI elements from System7 (MacOS7)?
I'm not completely certain... but I believe Apple sued and won on a Microsoft "look and feel" case (which, I'm sure, they're using as precedence for this) back in the days of Windows 3.x or so. Windows 3 was originally supposed to be more "Mac-ish"...
Quite a few people seem to think that Microsoft's large investment in Apple, not long after Windows 95 hit the market, may have been part of a settlement and/or agreement to keep Apple from suing again... but, I'm not sure I follow that line of thinking.
Why so many? Because now that Apple is back and competitive again, they want to prove it by swinging their legal stick at anything that may involve and iMac but not produced by Apple.
Yes. And No. Apple probably can't win some of these (the eMachine's suite is iffy), but what it does is set PRECEDENCE. Similar to when Sony sued Connectix over Virtual Gaming Station, the PSX emulator. Sony pretty much knew they couldn't win, but they also knew that by flexing their legal muscle a little bit, any company that writes another emulator will triple check their legal bounds.
IMHO, that pretty much spells out what Apple is doing here. There ARE other motives to a lawsuite than money and domineering control of one's property....
Apple is no better then MS. If they had MS's market share thay would be worse. God help you if you make anything for the Mac with out checking with Apple 1st. Remember the clones?
what does any of this have to do with the clones?
I'm not sure most of Slashdot was very in touch with the clones issue anyway. Clones in general are a Good Thing... But the MacOS clones were purely abismal. Power Computing, for instance, put out machines that had flakey hard drives, flakey CDROM drives, flakey... well, they were just plain flakey. And, unfortunately, Power Computing proved to be the rule, not the exception.
Problem was that the clones, in this case, weren't delivering on Apple's expectations for quality as well as taking sales figures away from Apple. They were gently squeezing Apple in the two areas where it hurts most... customer loyalty, and the wallet.
What did YOU do the last time one of you saw someone costing you (or your company) gross amounts of those two things? Encourage them to do more?
Let them build their communities. It will appeal to broad masses, and make them rich. Stuff like this is the ultimate evolutionary process for the internet anyway... like it or not, 90% of the general public isn't computer literate enough to check their mail by telnetting to port 110 and issuing POP3 commands... and teach as you may, most aren't ever going to learn to do it. You and I like the internet just fine the way it is now, but face it... we were the pioneers that built the foundation. The web is really only just now becoming truly useful for the everyday semi-computer-literate person. Most people can't get to websites unless they find them on Yahoo! If the internet is ever going to become the ubiquitous entity of our everyday lives that we see and dream of... it's going to have to appeal to more than just us techno-geeks. The innards we love and cherish will always be there, and most of us will always reside there...
All this chatter about the shortcomings of OS X, and how many of you have done more than just browse at the pretty pictures and actually read up on OS X? Above that, how many of you have even used OS X Server, much less been in the same room as an OS X Consumer machine? Reading your posts on /., I get the feeling that the answer to both questions is "very few".
The preview of OS X on wednesday was a fleeting glimpse at what OS X has in store. It wasn't a detailed, fine-tuned, in-depth demo, nor was it a finished product being shown. The incessent bitching about the GUI shows that very few of you know enough about Apple in general, nor OS X specifically, to know that "flexibility" is one of the things they're touting in the new OS... Virtually everything you've seen comes with enough options to (hopefully) make just about everyone happy.
As for Open Sourcing key parts of the OS... those of you that want all of this Open Sourced want it so that you can port it to Linux, not so that you can support Apple. What incentive is there for Apple (or Microsoft, or any number of other software giants) to Open Source their work, if the Open Source community isn't interested in working to better the project on the intended platform? Honestly... how many Open Source developers do you know that will get their hands on something like the Quicktime source and develop something for the MacOS? The long answer is "none".
128x128 icons were demoed, but the user has the ability to define the sizes of the icons they see on the screen.
Users also have the OPTION of whether to use the NeXTish file browser, or a motif/paradigm closer to the original Macintosh. Don't take what was demoed as being "this is what MacOS will force upon you". It was a fleeting glimpse into an unfinished product demoed at a trade show. It was not an in-depth, ultra-detailed, fine tooth unveiling of the thing.
Even beyond that... If you're really comfortable at using MacOS, you hardly use your mouse for positioning anyway... for example, when you are in Netscape and want to move into Outlook Express and hide Netscape at the same time, you can hold down option and click on any OE window that's open. Viola! You've hidden Netscape and moved into OE. I don't use the "collapse window" button on the current MacOS screen... I collapse by double clicking on the title bar anywhere. I don't close using the close box... I use command-w ... One of the wonderful things about MacOS has always been that there's more than one way to do everything. One just hopes that this kind of cross-functionality/multiple ways to do things remains.
Supposedly, the latest developer release of OS X (DP2) includes Java2 support.
Supposedly, "power users" will have full access to the BSD layer, including shells and anything else you would typically find in /usr/bin and the like.
Word is that OS X is *not* POSIX compliant merely because they haven't bothered to have it certified as such, and that anything designed to compile on a POSIX compliant system should compile with only the typical hassle involved with porting from any number of *nix systems to any number of other *nix systems. (i.e. if it's a properly designed package, it should work fine).
I've successfully compiled eggdrop, mysql, and a few other things... I've not tried, but I'd be willing to be that the authors of some libs might have to exert a little elbow grease, especially graphics libraries that access hardware directly... but it shouldn't be too hard.
I see features that have been clearly taken from Squeak, Beos, and FreeBsd.
Most of what you see has been "taken" from NeXT and OpenStep, both of which were acquired by Apple when they purchased NeXT (thus bringing Steve Jobs back on board, as he was the founder and CEO of NeXT). OpenStep, by the way, was a BSD derivative. That would make MacOS X a cousin of FreeBSD, not a sibling.
However, my older 604e/PCI box (upgraded to a G3) will probably NOT see a version of MacOS X ported to its architecture.
You apparently read MacOSRumors, so you should be aware that most sources are reporting that OS X will run on anything that was on the market when Rhapsody. A 604e/PCI box, especially with a G3 upgrade in it, I would think would fall into that category.
I think it would explode within the Linux and Free software community if they would release source to a quicktime client.
All things considered... this represents a rather Linux-centric view of the universe. OSS is GREAT. I love OSS. But one of the serious drawbacks to OSS is that there's so little OSS out there for non-Open Source Operation Systems. Programmers that are involved in Open Source projects are very involved in the Linux (and BSD to a lesser extent) communities, are a pre-disposed to Linux and/or BSD developement.
In short, if Apple open sourced what they could of Quicktime, a small number of Linux projects would sprout, which would benefit a small number of Linux users. Until the OSS community more openly embraces (or at least acknowledges) non-Open systems, big software companies will be pre-disposed not to release code for them.
That sounds about right to me. If you ask about 99% of the general population, they'll identify "major computer companies" as such:
Which of these companies is using OSS as a key part of their business? Certainly not Microsoft... A few of the others are quietly giving consumers the choice of OSS or Windows, but when is the last time you saw an advertisement from any of those (except Apple) where they actually pushed an OSS product? You can't, because you haven't.
I've had floppy-less Macs since their inception, both at home and at work. I also own a USB Zip drive. I couldn't tell you where it is though (i'm assuming packed in storage somewhere with the rest of my stuff), because I haven't even needed it in quite a while. The only floppy issue I've ever had was re-installing an old version of QuarkXPress, which requires both a floppy and a CD to install... I chalk that up to Quark, Inc, stupidity and rigidity though.
Why did Jobs do this? Is he buddy-buddy with Bill Joy?
Jobs returned to Apple when they acquired NeXT. NeXT is (was?) BSD based. MacOS X is merely a severely updated and revamped OpenStep with a more user-friendly interface (we hope).
It's not a matter of competition and such... It's Apple using technologies they already have (OpenStep) to create new technologies (MacOS X).
The "big icons" people are complaining about at the bottom of the screen are the Dock, a Launcher/Task bar type desktop enhancement. Nothing I've seen yet actually showed any icons floating around on the desktop in true MacOS fashion.
It should be possible to port Darwin to run on non-Apple PowerPC systems, and then run the rest of Mac OS X on top of that, thus paving the way for the return of Mac clones
This would be a little more difficult than you would think, considering that binaries tend to be both kernel- and archetecture-dependant. Need I remind you that you can't take a working binary from an i386 Linux system and run it on a PPC Linux system. This is one reason that RPM and the other small handful of binary distributions are used, but slightly suppressed.... I can't install mysql-x.xx.x-3.i386.rpm on my LinuxPPC machine, and you can't install mysql-x.xx.x-3.ppc.rpm on your i386 machine.