"Today, I'm going to talking about Mac OS 10.3 and a big part of OS 10.3 is our clustering software.... [blah, blah]...Apple has long prided itself on the easy of use of our products... [blah, blah] (the tv screen behind jobs shows a room with twenty people wearing apple t-shirts and a stack of X-Serve boxes)...my friends here have several of our next-generation power-4 based X-Serves running OS 10.3... during this keynote they are going to unpack all of the servers and set up a cluster......by the end of the keynote we'll give the cluster a spin and see if we can make it into one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world"
The court could have imposed a real penalty that was more than a slap on the wrist. Our system is broken, because if any one part is incompetant or corruptable it fails.
however, I think the real solution wasn't in the court's scope, but here's how to really solve the problem
reduce the length of copyrights. reduce the length of patents. more protection for small patent holders. no more software/algorithm/math patents. no more biology patents.
our patent law never protected philo farnsworth or most other real innovators. our patent laws just protects the research investment of big corps like microsoft and rca who want to dominate an industry.
the problem is, that once a big corp dominates an industry the best way to maintain control is to slow the pace of innovation to something that the large corp's bureaucracy can handle.
we saw this with rca and television, we see this with microsoft and operating systems, we see this with the riaa and mpa.
I think antitrust laws try to stop this from happening with good intentions, but in the wrong way. essentially these laws just penalize success. rather, i think the root problem lies in the very concept of intellectual property.
our laws fence off realms of intellectual exploration as property to be owned and forbid 'squatters' from thinking about and improving these fenced off ideas. this notion is killing our civilization. it is evil, sick, and wrong. microsoft's biggest sin is its promotion and expansion of intellectual property.
What I don't like about broadcasts is that I have to listen to whatever is being played, even if I don't like it... and I always seem to miss the beginnings of songs that I really do like.
I'd much prefer to be able to download playlists and stream individual songs from a server and then be able to skip through any songs that I didn't like.
I think music on the net should be done as big ol' databases. Since there's not a good way to put ads in a random access database, I'd be happy to pay a subscription fee for the database... say about $100 a year (if it came bundled with features)
I noticed that.Mac has a 'FreePlay Music' folder and it made me wonder if maybe Apple might be planning to go into the internet radio business... Say leasing access to a massive music library through iTunes and.Mac...streaming the music like Jobs demoed at MacWorld... if I really liked a song and wanted to download it for my iPod, I think $.25 a song is a good price... and for that $.25 I ought to be able to use my copy of that song at home or in an iPod or burned on a CD for my car.
Oh well, here's to hoping that my.Mac subscription will be worth spending $100 next year:)
mp3.com has a lot of bands in various levels of quality. How do I find one that I like? Sure CowboyNeal could make a site with his picks, but what if I don't like his kind of music.
I think the problem of matching a band with an audience that likes their music is the key problem for internet music distribution to solve. If a band that 99% of the people on the net hate can reach the 1% of people that likes their music, they can still be a success. And this 1% of people will be very happy to finally find a band that they like.
So far my strategy for find music that I like is to find a local band that I like, then do a google search for any positive reviews for the band I already like... then I look and I see what else the reviewer recommends and go try their music out. This has let me find a few great bands that will probably never get played on the radio: (Breech, OO-Soul, and Powder) This works, but it takes a long time to find new music.
I'd love to have a site where I can easily find more bands and buy their mp3's to download directly into my iTunes. And maybe even have their shows added to my iCal. (I wish my.Mac subscription would give me a service like this).
Since, I'm feeling cynical today... I'll dig my hole a little deeper...
I think the law may have originally been intended as a barrier between the people and injustice, but it seems like it also is a barrier between the people and justice. Our laws are obfuscated layers of inane babble that make justice inaccessible to people without the money to pay a lawyer to open a hole in the wall to give them access to justice (or injustice).
Why are so many laws intentionally vague? Why are the judges and the courts way up on a high pedestal inaccessible to ordinary citizens??
Mr. Rosen is coming off as an apologist for the broken legal system. Just my impression maybe, but he seems to be sidestepping questions and trying his darndest not to say anything that offends the legal establishment.
My impression is that this whole trial was a joke, and served only to line the pockets of many, many J.D.'s. Maybe I'm wrong and this decision really will stop Microsoft's efforts to squash any innovations that it doesn't own...
Thank you for your interest in Movielink. We want you to take part in the powerful Internet movie rental experience that Movielink delivers; however, you currently do not meet our minimum system requirements.
You will need to adjust the following:
You Need Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
Sorry, but I don't want to see Rollerball badly enough to ditch my Mac. What a lame site.
I mean if artists can sell enough CDs to make a good living, it would be worthwhile for them to sell their own CDs. Right now, web pages don't work well enough and artists really need to be signed by somebody.
It costs from $8000-$10000 to record a CD in a studio. Most bands sell their own CDs for $10 a pop. That means they need to sell about a thousand CDs before they can break even.
From talking to people (and I'm not in the industry so I might be wrong here), my understanding is that labels will deduct whatever they spent to promote your cd and to put you on tour from whatever money you make. Usually if a first album does well, its just enough to pay back the label and you need a second successful album to start making money. I think most artists make money from concerts and from ticket sales because royalties just go to paying the record company back.
I heard numbers for shareware authors that a successful app can sell about 10,000 copies a year. If musicians could successfully sell 10,000 CDs a year through the web, they pull in $90,000... which split between a 5 person band is only $18,000 before taxes... but if your day job is at Wal*Mart, that $18,000 would help a lot.
We need some alternative for artists if the RIAA's lock on music is ever to be broken. We need some internet version of musicians playing on the street corner and selling their CDs to passers-by.
The problem with this is that the concert and radio businesses are monopolies. Any artist seen as anti-business will soon be a street artist.
Then buy music from unsigned musicians and street artists!! There's a lot of good original stuff out there that you can find if you look for it. Any more most bands have a web page where you can sample their music, buy a cd, and find out about a show.
Here are some great unsigned bands that I've found: Breech,OO-Soul, and Powder. Go to the sites, try out their music and if you like it buy the CDs direct from the band!
This music isn't free as in Napster, but it's close to being free as in freedom:) If artist can sell music through their own web pages, why would they sign their souls away to a big label?
Here's the reality: a principled few may boycott. But can there said to be competition for music? If people like Band X's music, and Band X's music comes out on Label A, then a boycott of Label A is going to mean nothing for fans of Band X, and that's the end of the story.
There's a lot of truth in that. I think the key is to get to new musics before some label signs them.
Record labels really screw artists over, if there was a mechanism for artists to be successful without being signed, the RIAA would die.
Here are some unsigned bands in LA: Breech,OO-Soul, and Powder. Go to there sites, try out their music and if you like it buy the CDs direct from the band!
I can't imagine why you'd want to input greek symbols manually, or even believe that the software in the near future could do it effectively. When I'm writing equations on the familiar pen and paper I can barely tell the difference between my "v"s and my "nu"s or "pheta" and "phi" or "del"s and "d"s and "dirac delta"s or "x" and "xi" etc etc etc. And you want some software to do it?
I invested a lot of time when I should've been doing homework to get my delta's and sigma's looking just plain cool...:) Besides, I find it easier to think when I handwrite equations... I can never derive anything using LaTex... do you actually start solving equations by writing them: \sqrt{x+2} = 2 x + 0.3 x^\frac{1}{2}?
Sorry, but I'd rather just write it out and have the computer turn it into LaTex for me:)
The stylus has two buttons that can be programmed, one of which would presumably be a right-click.
Does this mean the stylus has a battery? Is there some sort of RF signal from the stylus to the machine telling if a button is pressed... or is this done clevely just with magnets?
Also, I assume the stylus only works with a tablet pc or a special monitor... is that right?
I can't wait until someone writes a unicode handwriting recognition tool that lets me input greek letters and funky math symbols and also lets me input equations... And then imagine interfacing all of that with something like mathematica:)
Oh and it would be cool to draw a rough sketch and have the software automatically clean it up into a nice publication-quality diagram.
Sure I can do this stuff now with latex and canvas... but a tablet computer would make this so much easier... and more fun:)
I'm sure there would be use in non-technical stuff too... how about networking these things to a white board during a meeting or teleconference where everyone can draw on the same white board? Or what about drawing charts and diagrams for reports?
Also drawing could be a form of data input. Say for playing starcraft and drawing out a path for a unit....and if you like mouse gestures, you could do even more with a stylus, right?
Whenever these things take off, I'm sure there will be all sorts of cool new applications for them... I'm just not sure if they'll take off just yet.
Ya know, no one answered my original message... there has just been arguments over mac ROMS should be called open firmware and Aqua and other silly little nits....and a whole bunch of people pretending to be experts and just talking out of their ass.
Sometimes Mac people are really assholes.
I'm sure some Mac Zealots will now mod me down to -30 for this comment... I wish they would all just go back to macslash and stop destroying the discussions over here at slashdot. Enough with the mindless cheerleading already!
From Apple: "Aqua is the new user interface introduced with Mac OS X. Mac OS X builds on the ease-of-use tradition of Mac OS 9, while providing a simpler, superior user experience. Aqua is the "spirit" of Mac OS X. It's a fresh and fun complement to Apple's innovative hardware design. Aqua makes use of color, transparency, and animation to enhance usability. It also delivers some new behaviors that make using a Macintosh even more fun and satisfying for all users, from computer novices to professionals."
Aqua is the OS X user interface which to me means that it includes the windowing system.
Quartz is part of the graphics system and includes a window manager, but OpenGL, Quicktime, and Quickdraw are also still there in the graphics system. It's possible to do graphics in OS X without using Quartz.
Sorry for not being ulta-precise in my original message, but I still mean to refer to Aqua. Aqua is the entire user interface (the windowing system is a subset of the user interface). I do not mean to refer to Quartz because I do not wish to exclude Quicktime, OpenGL, the Application Kit, and other useful parts of OS X.
1) Aqua is not code. It's a human interface specification.
Aqua is the OS X windowing system. There are Aqua human interface guidlines, but that is not Aqua. Aqua includes the window manager + the compositor + several frmeworks... all of which are in nicely compiled PPC binaries.
2) Nothing interacts with Open Firmware. OF is turned off once the kernel is loaded. 3) How the hell would anything running in user-space interact with any hardware directly?! 4) It is possible provided Apple's binaries don't check for a specific machine type. If it does you'll have to pretend to be that machine type. I'm running OS X on an unsupported clone so currently I doubt it does any such check. However if everybody were to do this I doubt Apple would survive and Mac OS X would die.
"Apple's binaries" checking for "the machine type" would involve something in "user space" interracting with hardware directly, most probably with open firmware. If any checks for machine type were done through Darwin, these could easily be overridden since Darwin is open source.
There is *NO* Mac ROM!!! This has been repeated over and over again on Slashdot, and yet still people don't get it. There hasn't been a Mac ROM since the first iMac came out. They all use Open Firmware to boot.
ok.. sorry
Does OS X access the Mac PROMS directly or does it go through Darwin?
Does Aqua interact with Open Firmware directly, or does it go through Darwin?
If got a fully functioning Darwin system running X-Windows on a PPC, couldn't you just copy the binary files for the Aqua windowing system over? (This would violate the OS X EULA -- but is it possible in theory?)
As per running Aqua on such a system, I would assume that Aqua needs to interact with the Apple ROM chips. In the past, part of the OS has been stored in the ROM chip, and it would make sense that OSX would continue to do so.
I'm wondering about how OS X uses the ROMs for two reasons:
1) A big part of the design philosophy behind the Mach microkernal that Darwin uses is that only the kernal gets to interact directly with the hardware. So if Aqua interacted directly with the ROMs that would seem to violate this philosophy.
2) OS X runs on systems whose ROM's were burned years before anyone started work on OS X so it would be weird for OS X to use any executable code in the ROMS.
yeah, but what if you wrote a powerPC emulator to run on Darwin-x86. Could you then run Mac OS X with the emulator even though you didn't have the Mac ROMs?
Does OS X access the Mac ROMS directly or does it go through Darwin?
If you could get Darwin running on such a homemade PowerPC (not made from old Mac parts, but built from 'scratch')... could you then take the pre-compiled parts of aqua out of Mac OS X and run this on your homemade powerpc computer?
Doesn't darwin handle all of the interaction directly with the hardware? If the aqua binaries can run on your homemade powerpc, shouldn't everything work just fine?
And a related question... what if you got Darwin running on an x86 chip with a PowerPC emulator? Could you, theoretically, get aqua to run on such a system?
Slashdot Mirror
2004, Jobs WWDC Keynote...
...Apple has long prided itself on the easy of use of our products... [blah, blah] (the tv screen behind jobs shows a room with twenty people wearing apple t-shirts and a stack of X-Serve boxes) ...my friends here have several of our next-generation power-4 based X-Serves running OS 10.3... during this keynote they are going to unpack all of the servers and set up a cluster... ...by the end of the keynote we'll give the cluster a spin and see if we can make it into one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world"
"Today, I'm going to talking about Mac OS 10.3 and a big part of OS 10.3 is our clustering software.... [blah, blah]
I did a search for 'ascii' and didn't find one. Could you give a link to the other story?
The court could have imposed a real penalty that was more than a slap on the wrist. Our system is broken, because if any one part is incompetant or corruptable it fails.
however, I think the real solution wasn't in the court's scope, but here's how to really solve the problem
reduce the length of copyrights. reduce the length of patents. more protection for small patent holders. no more software/algorithm/math patents. no more biology patents.
our patent law never protected philo farnsworth or most other real innovators. our patent laws just protects the research investment of big corps like microsoft and rca who want to dominate an industry.
the problem is, that once a big corp dominates an industry the best way to maintain control is to slow the pace of innovation to something that the large corp's bureaucracy can handle.
we saw this with rca and television, we see this with microsoft and operating systems, we see this with the riaa and mpa.
I think antitrust laws try to stop this from happening with good intentions, but in the wrong way. essentially these laws just penalize success. rather, i think the root problem lies in the very concept of intellectual property.
our laws fence off realms of intellectual exploration as property to be owned and forbid 'squatters' from thinking about and improving these fenced off ideas. this notion is killing our civilization. it is evil, sick, and wrong. microsoft's biggest sin is its promotion and expansion of intellectual property.
What I don't like about broadcasts is that I have to listen to whatever is being played, even if I don't like it... and I always seem to miss the beginnings of songs that I really do like.
.Mac has a 'FreePlay Music' folder and it made me wonder if maybe Apple might be planning to go into the internet radio business... Say leasing access to a massive music library through iTunes and .Mac ...streaming the music like Jobs demoed at MacWorld... if I really liked a song and wanted to download it for my iPod, I think $.25 a song is a good price... and for that $.25 I ought to be able to use my copy of that song at home or in an iPod or burned on a CD for my car.
.Mac subscription will be worth spending $100 next year :)
I'd much prefer to be able to download playlists and stream individual songs from a server and then be able to skip through any songs that I didn't like.
I think music on the net should be done as big ol' databases. Since there's not a good way to put ads in a random access database, I'd be happy to pay a subscription fee for the database... say about $100 a year (if it came bundled with features)
I noticed that
Oh well, here's to hoping that my
mp3.com has a lot of bands in various levels of quality. How do I find one that I like? Sure CowboyNeal could make a site with his picks, but what if I don't like his kind of music.
.Mac subscription would give me a service like this).
I think the problem of matching a band with an audience that likes their music is the key problem for internet music distribution to solve. If a band that 99% of the people on the net hate can reach the 1% of people that likes their music, they can still be a success. And this 1% of people will be very happy to finally find a band that they like.
So far my strategy for find music that I like is to find a local band that I like, then do a google search for any positive reviews for the band I already like... then I look and I see what else the reviewer recommends and go try their music out. This has let me find a few great bands that will probably never get played on the radio: (Breech, OO-Soul, and Powder) This works, but it takes a long time to find new music.
I'd love to have a site where I can easily find more bands and buy their mp3's to download directly into my iTunes. And maybe even have their shows added to my iCal. (I wish my
Since, I'm feeling cynical today... I'll dig my hole a little deeper...
I think the law may have originally been intended as a barrier between the people and injustice, but it seems like it also is a barrier between the people and justice. Our laws are obfuscated layers of inane babble that make justice inaccessible to people without the money to pay a lawyer to open a hole in the wall to give them access to justice (or injustice).
Why are so many laws intentionally vague? Why are the judges and the courts way up on a high pedestal inaccessible to ordinary citizens??
Character assassination is a pretty ugly thing, amigo.
"Character Assassination" is a pretty loaded term, amigo.
I criticized, Mr. Rosen's answers to the questions, not his character. I criticized the outcome of the trial as a farse, not Mr. Rosen.
I don't know Mr. Rosen, let alone play D&D with him - why would I assassinate his character?
Mr. Rosen is coming off as an apologist for the broken legal system. Just my impression maybe, but he seems to be sidestepping questions and trying his darndest not to say anything that offends the legal establishment.
:)
My impression is that this whole trial was a joke, and served only to line the pockets of many, many J.D.'s. Maybe I'm wrong and this decision really will stop Microsoft's efforts to squash any innovations that it doesn't own...
I'm wrong all of the time
Here's what I got:
Thank you for your interest in Movielink. We want you to take part in the powerful Internet movie rental experience that Movielink delivers; however, you currently do not meet our minimum system requirements.
You will need to adjust the following:
You Need Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
Sorry, but I don't want to see Rollerball badly enough to ditch my Mac. What a lame site.
I mean if artists can sell enough CDs to make a good living, it would be worthwhile for them to sell their own CDs. Right now, web pages don't work well enough and artists really need to be signed by somebody.
It costs from $8000-$10000 to record a CD in a studio. Most bands sell their own CDs for $10 a pop. That means they need to sell about a thousand CDs before they can break even.
From talking to people (and I'm not in the industry so I might be wrong here), my understanding is that labels will deduct whatever they spent to promote your cd and to put you on tour from whatever money you make. Usually if a first album does well, its just enough to pay back the label and you need a second successful album to start making money. I think most artists make money from concerts and from ticket sales because royalties just go to paying the record company back.
I heard numbers for shareware authors that a successful app can sell about 10,000 copies a year. If musicians could successfully sell 10,000 CDs a year through the web, they pull in $90,000... which split between a 5 person band is only $18,000 before taxes... but if your day job is at Wal*Mart, that $18,000 would help a lot.
We need some alternative for artists if the RIAA's lock on music is ever to be broken. We need some internet version of musicians playing on the street corner and selling their CDs to passers-by.
The problem with this is that the concert and radio businesses are monopolies. Any artist seen as anti-business will soon be a street artist.
:) If artist can sell music through their own web pages, why would they sign their souls away to a big label?
Then buy music from unsigned musicians and street artists!! There's a lot of good original stuff out there that you can find if you look for it. Any more most bands have a web page where you can sample their music, buy a cd, and find out about a show.
Here are some great unsigned bands that I've found: Breech,OO-Soul, and Powder. Go to the sites, try out their music and if you like it buy the CDs direct from the band!
This music isn't free as in Napster, but it's close to being free as in freedom
Here's the reality: a principled few may boycott. But can there said to be competition for music? If people like Band X's music, and Band X's music comes out on Label A, then a boycott of Label A is going to mean nothing for fans of Band X, and that's the end of the story.
There's a lot of truth in that. I think the key is to get to new musics before some label signs them.
Record labels really screw artists over, if there was a mechanism for artists to be successful without being signed, the RIAA would die.
Here are some unsigned bands in LA: Breech,OO-Soul, and Powder. Go to there sites, try out their music and if you like it buy the CDs direct from the band!
Anyone else have unsigned bands to recommend?
I can't imagine why you'd want to input greek symbols manually, or even believe that the software in the near future could do it effectively. When I'm writing equations on the familiar pen and paper I can barely tell the difference between my "v"s and my "nu"s or "pheta" and "phi" or "del"s and "d"s and "dirac delta"s or "x" and "xi" etc etc etc. And you want some software to do it?
:) Besides, I find it easier to think when I handwrite equations... I can never derive anything using LaTex... do you actually start solving equations by writing them: \sqrt{x+2} = 2 x + 0.3 x^\frac{1}{2}?
:)
I invested a lot of time when I should've been doing homework to get my delta's and sigma's looking just plain cool...
Sorry, but I'd rather just write it out and have the computer turn it into LaTex for me
The stylus has two buttons that can be programmed, one of which would presumably be a right-click.
Does this mean the stylus has a battery? Is there some sort of RF signal from the stylus to the machine telling if a button is pressed... or is this done clevely just with magnets?
Also, I assume the stylus only works with a tablet pc or a special monitor... is that right?
I can't wait until someone writes a unicode handwriting recognition tool that lets me input greek letters and funky math symbols and also lets me input equations... And then imagine interfacing all of that with something like mathematica :)
:)
...and if you like mouse gestures, you could do even more with a stylus, right?
Oh and it would be cool to draw a rough sketch and have the software automatically clean it up into a nice publication-quality diagram.
Sure I can do this stuff now with latex and canvas... but a tablet computer would make this so much easier... and more fun
I'm sure there would be use in non-technical stuff too... how about networking these things to a white board during a meeting or teleconference where everyone can draw on the same white board? Or what about drawing charts and diagrams for reports?
Also drawing could be a form of data input. Say for playing starcraft and drawing out a path for a unit.
Whenever these things take off, I'm sure there will be all sorts of cool new applications for them... I'm just not sure if they'll take off just yet.
I have a few questions for anyone out there with access to one of these machines...
1. How do these tablet PCs recognized input from the stylus... do they have a touch screen?
2. Is the Tablet PC handwriting recognition better than OS X's inkwell?
3. How do you 'right-click' with the stylus? Is it something like control-click on the macs? Is there anything like a scroll wheel?
Thanks for helping out my curiosity.
**RANT**
...and a whole bunch of people pretending to be experts and just talking out of their ass.
Ya know, no one answered my original message... there has just been arguments over mac ROMS should be called open firmware and Aqua and other silly little nits.
Sometimes Mac people are really assholes.
I'm sure some Mac Zealots will now mod me down to -30 for this comment... I wish they would all just go back to macslash and stop destroying the discussions over here at slashdot. Enough with the mindless cheerleading already!
harumph!
From Apple: "Aqua is the new user interface introduced with Mac OS X. Mac OS X builds on the ease-of-use tradition of Mac OS 9, while providing a simpler, superior user experience. Aqua is the "spirit" of Mac OS X. It's a fresh and fun complement to Apple's innovative hardware design. Aqua makes use of color, transparency, and animation to enhance usability. It also delivers some new behaviors that make using a Macintosh even more fun and satisfying for all users, from computer novices to professionals."
Aqua is the OS X user interface which to me means that it includes the windowing system.
Quartz is part of the graphics system and includes a window manager, but OpenGL, Quicktime, and Quickdraw are also still there in the graphics system. It's possible to do graphics in OS X without using Quartz.
Sorry for not being ulta-precise in my original message, but I still mean to refer to Aqua. Aqua is the entire user interface (the windowing system is a subset of the user interface). I do not mean to refer to Quartz because I do not wish to exclude Quicktime, OpenGL, the Application Kit, and other useful parts of OS X.
1) Aqua is not code. It's a human interface specification.
Aqua is the OS X windowing system. There are Aqua human interface guidlines, but that is not Aqua. Aqua includes the window manager + the compositor + several frmeworks... all of which are in nicely compiled PPC binaries.
2) Nothing interacts with Open Firmware. OF is turned off once the kernel is loaded.
3) How the hell would anything running in user-space interact with any hardware directly?!
4) It is possible provided Apple's binaries don't check for a specific machine type. If it does you'll have to pretend to be that machine type. I'm running OS X on an unsupported clone so currently I doubt it does any such check. However if everybody were to do this I doubt Apple would survive and Mac OS X would die.
"Apple's binaries" checking for "the machine type" would involve something in "user space" interracting with hardware directly, most probably with open firmware. If any checks for machine type were done through Darwin, these could easily be overridden since Darwin is open source.
There is *NO* Mac ROM!!! This has been repeated over and over again on Slashdot, and yet still people don't get it. There hasn't been a Mac ROM since the first iMac came out. They all use Open Firmware to boot.
ok.. sorry
Does OS X access the Mac PROMS directly or does it go through Darwin?
Does Aqua interact with Open Firmware directly, or does it go through Darwin?
If got a fully functioning Darwin system running X-Windows on a PPC, couldn't you just copy the binary files for the Aqua windowing system over?
(This would violate the OS X EULA -- but is it possible in theory?)
As per running Aqua on such a system, I would assume that Aqua needs to interact with the Apple ROM chips. In the past, part of the OS has been stored in the ROM chip, and it would make sense that OSX would continue to do so.
I'm wondering about how OS X uses the ROMs for two reasons:
1) A big part of the design philosophy behind the Mach microkernal that Darwin uses is that only the kernal gets to interact directly with the hardware. So if Aqua interacted directly with the ROMs that would seem to violate this philosophy.
2) OS X runs on systems whose ROM's were burned years before anyone started work on OS X so it would be weird for OS X to use any executable code in the ROMS.
yeah, but what if you wrote a powerPC emulator to run on Darwin-x86. Could you then run Mac OS X with the emulator even though you didn't have the Mac ROMs?
Does OS X access the Mac ROMS directly or does it go through Darwin?
If you could get Darwin running on such a homemade PowerPC (not made from old Mac parts, but built from 'scratch')... could you then take the pre-compiled parts of aqua out of Mac OS X and run this on your homemade powerpc computer?
Doesn't darwin handle all of the interaction directly with the hardware? If the aqua binaries can run on your homemade powerpc, shouldn't everything work just fine?
And a related question... what if you got Darwin running on an x86 chip with a PowerPC emulator? Could you, theoretically, get aqua to run on such a system?
shhhhh.... don't name any names :)