No, not emulation. It does launch MacOS 9 inside of X, but it doesn't emulate any processor. Think of it as more like a megalithic code library. Surprisingly, the speed decrease is relatively neglagible. I frequently run Photoshop and Flash in Classic mode, and they run just fine, even on my laptop with only 160 MB of RAM.
It's possible but not likely. I remember in the summer of 2000, hearing on NPR that scientists at NEC had shot a laser beam through some sort of gas at (I believe) 401 times the speed of light, proving that EM waves do travel at variable speeds, and thusly the variable c in Einstein's equation was misidentified, although it was the best that he could do with the knowledge available at the time. However, I doubt that you can shoot DC pulses of electrons down copper at speeds even approaching light.
Here's a mutation of FreeBSD that can do exactly that. I've put my laptop to sleep in the middle of installing software while running MacOS X and brought it back up several hours later to resume installation with no problems. The same function works on my G4 tower. Yes, it does drop network connections. However, it does use a trickle charge to power the LED's and presumably to keep the processor alive, and possibly some memory. Paging several hundred megabytes in a couple of seconds would be quite the task! One item of note is that all Apple machines have a special piece of hardware known as the PMU (Power Management Unit). In the desktops, it's parted out onto the mother board and into the power supply, but in the laptops it's a seperate card which controls both sleep and the charging of the battery. Perhaps other UNIX machines would need a similar device for this function to work properly.
Keep in mind that Darwin has only been around for about a year and a quarter, while Linux has been around for nearly a decade. It started out as x86 only. People have had more than enough time to port it to those processors. Considering that Darwin uses the Mach 3 kernel, it should run on anything that NeXT runs on, however Apple is currently focusing efforts on PPC and x86. Since it's open source, anybody who wants to can try to get it to run on other processors, but this project hasn't been around all that long. It's still only on version 1.4. It does have the potential to be every bit as ported as Linux.
I know that many of you will view this as irrelavent because it's not specifically x86 oriented, but Darwin is quickly approaching the features and usability of Linux, but I see some distinct advantages to Darwin. #1) It runs on both PPC and x86 machines. Obviously you can't use the same binaries, but you can use the same source. #2) It's based on FreeBSD, and I know that everybody has different opinions about this, but in my experiece, I've gotten better performance out of FreeBSD than I have out of Linux, and for some reason, it just feels more stable.
For those of you who don't know, Darwin is the core of MacOS X, which is freely downloadable and open source. Here is another great advantage. If you have a machine running MacOS X, you can run not only all of you Mac applications, but you can also run XFree86 and a great lot of open source apps, and people are constantly porting new ones over.
To date, Apple has only released one security update. I know this one intimately, because I submitted the bug report that caused (at least part of) it, and let me tell you, it has nothing to do with Apple, and everything to do with the FreeBSD implementation of sudo. I merely found a way to exploit it from within the GUI.
And in response to the above post, I too love Mozilla. In fact I'm using it right now, and ChatZilla is the only free IRC client on the mac that's worth any amount of time (Forget JediKnight 2.0 for MacOS X if you want to use any commands that aren't built in, or *gasp* COLOR TEXT).
The iMac is a beast to take apart, and offers no real expansion options. It is, however, cute and stable, and reasonably fast. Early models had a special connector called the Mezzanine connector that was designed for internal testing at Apple, but could be used to add SCSI cards, etc. However, this connector was quickly discontinued, and the only current expansion options for iMacs are RAM and HD upgrades. I would also like to mention that virtually the same applies to the new iMac, although it's easier to take apart, but still no PCI slot. The Cube had one PCI slot, but that was in use by the video card, which was a custom job, owing to the fact that a regular sized video card wouldn't fit inside the Cube. The PowerMac G4 is an absolute joy to expand and upgrade. I installed a SCSI card in mine, and had it up and running in 5 minutes! I didn't have to battle any cables or anything. Just remove the metal tab covering the back panel slot for the card, insert the card, secure it with one screw, and close up the case. In fact, you don't even need to unscrew anything to get the case open in the first place, just pull the lever and lower the side down. The whole logic board is laying flat on your desk with no cables in the way! Then just raise the side panel back up and press at the top until it clicks in place. Now that's some good design. It's still a full sized mini-tower however, and that defeats the purpose of this discussion, but it sure is a pleasure to work with.
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No, not emulation. It does launch MacOS 9 inside of X, but it doesn't emulate any processor. Think of it as more like a megalithic code library. Surprisingly, the speed decrease is relatively neglagible. I frequently run Photoshop and Flash in Classic mode, and they run just fine, even on my laptop with only 160 MB of RAM.
It's possible but not likely. I remember in the summer of 2000, hearing on NPR that scientists at NEC had shot a laser beam through some sort of gas at (I believe) 401 times the speed of light, proving that EM waves do travel at variable speeds, and thusly the variable c in Einstein's equation was misidentified, although it was the best that he could do with the knowledge available at the time. However, I doubt that you can shoot DC pulses of electrons down copper at speeds even approaching light.
Here's a mutation of FreeBSD that can do exactly that. I've put my laptop to sleep in the middle of installing software while running MacOS X and brought it back up several hours later to resume installation with no problems. The same function works on my G4 tower. Yes, it does drop network connections. However, it does use a trickle charge to power the LED's and presumably to keep the processor alive, and possibly some memory. Paging several hundred megabytes in a couple of seconds would be quite the task! One item of note is that all Apple machines have a special piece of hardware known as the PMU (Power Management Unit). In the desktops, it's parted out onto the mother board and into the power supply, but in the laptops it's a seperate card which controls both sleep and the charging of the battery. Perhaps other UNIX machines would need a similar device for this function to work properly.
Keep in mind that Darwin has only been around for about a year and a quarter, while Linux has been around for nearly a decade. It started out as x86 only. People have had more than enough time to port it to those processors. Considering that Darwin uses the Mach 3 kernel, it should run on anything that NeXT runs on, however Apple is currently focusing efforts on PPC and x86. Since it's open source, anybody who wants to can try to get it to run on other processors, but this project hasn't been around all that long. It's still only on version 1.4. It does have the potential to be every bit as ported as Linux.
I know that many of you will view this as irrelavent because it's not specifically x86 oriented, but Darwin is quickly approaching the features and usability of Linux, but I see some distinct advantages to Darwin. #1) It runs on both PPC and x86 machines. Obviously you can't use the same binaries, but you can use the same source. #2) It's based on FreeBSD, and I know that everybody has different opinions about this, but in my experiece, I've gotten better performance out of FreeBSD than I have out of Linux, and for some reason, it just feels more stable. For those of you who don't know, Darwin is the core of MacOS X, which is freely downloadable and open source. Here is another great advantage. If you have a machine running MacOS X, you can run not only all of you Mac applications, but you can also run XFree86 and a great lot of open source apps, and people are constantly porting new ones over. To date, Apple has only released one security update. I know this one intimately, because I submitted the bug report that caused (at least part of) it, and let me tell you, it has nothing to do with Apple, and everything to do with the FreeBSD implementation of sudo. I merely found a way to exploit it from within the GUI. And in response to the above post, I too love Mozilla. In fact I'm using it right now, and ChatZilla is the only free IRC client on the mac that's worth any amount of time (Forget JediKnight 2.0 for MacOS X if you want to use any commands that aren't built in, or *gasp* COLOR TEXT).
The iMac is a beast to take apart, and offers no real expansion options. It is, however, cute and stable, and reasonably fast. Early models had a special connector called the Mezzanine connector that was designed for internal testing at Apple, but could be used to add SCSI cards, etc. However, this connector was quickly discontinued, and the only current expansion options for iMacs are RAM and HD upgrades. I would also like to mention that virtually the same applies to the new iMac, although it's easier to take apart, but still no PCI slot. The Cube had one PCI slot, but that was in use by the video card, which was a custom job, owing to the fact that a regular sized video card wouldn't fit inside the Cube. The PowerMac G4 is an absolute joy to expand and upgrade. I installed a SCSI card in mine, and had it up and running in 5 minutes! I didn't have to battle any cables or anything. Just remove the metal tab covering the back panel slot for the card, insert the card, secure it with one screw, and close up the case. In fact, you don't even need to unscrew anything to get the case open in the first place, just pull the lever and lower the side down. The whole logic board is laying flat on your desk with no cables in the way! Then just raise the side panel back up and press at the top until it clicks in place. Now that's some good design. It's still a full sized mini-tower however, and that defeats the purpose of this discussion, but it sure is a pleasure to work with.