I'm in the same situation - there is ONE broadband provider serving my residence. So don't think I don't understand your situation - I do.
If they get blackholed, I'll be on the phone to them immediately. Why aren't you providing the service I contracted for?
If someone on the far side of the planet writes them complaining about a spammer they're hosting, it may not get their attention. If 500 local customers call them up complaining that we're not getting the service we're paying for, that's a lot less likely to be ignored. Fact of life.
BTW, you completely missed the point. I don't care if they're selling spam software (which I never mentioned but you acted like I had) or Viagra or fake rolexes or campbells soup. They can sell whatever they want. If they try to steal from me to advertise it, THEN we have a problem. And if their ISP doesn't see the problem, then I don't want to carry traffic from that ISP.
Remember, the internet is a voluntary and coöperative thing. No one has any obligation to carry anyone elses traffic, absent contractual agreement. Where there is no contractual agreement, it's carried on the basis of generalised reciprocity and a basic assumption of decent behaviour. Decent behaviour does not include theft. And where there are contractual agreements, they almost always explicitly prohibit spam.
If you want spam, that's fine, bully for you. But don't tell me I have to put up with it. I don't.
There's a big difference between someone putting up a web-site you personally find objectionable for the content matter, and a website which promotes itself by thievery.
You want to post your propoganda? Fine. Whether I like it or not, it's no business of mine.
But when you start stealing from me in order to push it, that crosses the line.
And make no mistake, that's what spam is. Theft.
Now, beyond that, if a group of people decide they want blocks on their service to keep out porn, or nazi propoganda, or whatever, they're within their rights to do so. In fact, many people do just that, and several companies are making money selling that service - look at netnanny and that genre. I don't agree with their point of view, and I find them objectionable - but they still have a right to provide their service to subscribers that want it, no question about that.
Yes, innocent users get hurt when their ISP chooses to host spammers. There's no way around that, unfortunately, except for users to become more choosy about their ISPs.
But when an ISP gets blacklisted for hosting spammers, this is not abuse or corruption - this is exactly what a blacklist has to do to be effective, and exactly what those of us that use blacklists expect and desire for them to do.
You can play whack-a-mole with spammers day in and day out for years, and have zero or very near zero effect on them. I know, I've done it. By the time you report a spamming IP, the run is done. The spammer isn't going to come back there, he's going to come back from a different IP for his next run. If you want to have any significant effect at deterring spam, you have to do more than whack-a-mole, you have to get them where it hurts. They can send out a million emails from one IP, then never use that IP again. But they have to have someplace more stable to take the money from the handful of morons that go ahead and click on their links.
If an ISP allows spammers to host on their network, they should be blacklisted. I don't want to carry their traffic. And if that means I'm turning down traffic from their other, non-spamming customers, that's a shame, but so be it. Maybe if their customers complain they'll get rid of the spammers. If not, I suggest their customers vote with their wallets, and find a new ISP. That is, if their purpose in having an ISP is communication with those of us that don't want spam. If they're happy being able to connect only to the fraction of the internet that welcomes spam, that's fine too. But it's up to them to make a choice.
All the blacklists do is allow those of us that DO NOT WANT traffic from spam-friendly networks to implement these blocks. Trying to spin an informational service as 'vigilantism' and 'abuse' and 'corruption' because it doesn't work the way the spammers and spam-friendly hosts want it to is abuse of the language, and insulting to the readers intelligence, IMOP.
The problem there is that he never ran the test with the Xserve running Linux. I have a feeling that would be a real eye-opener, as the problem here seems to be in XNU - NOT in the hardware.
The XNU kernel has some serious performance limitations, and on a box that's going to be getting heavy usage I'd definately want linux/ppc instead.
On the other hand, not all servers are under heavy load, and the OSX Server package makes a lot of stuff relatively easy to setup and administer (particularly for the inexperienced admin,) so both have their place.
I myself do not understand the purpose of the x86 cruft any longer.
Simple. Binary compatibility.
Not important at all in the world of free software, but in the rest of the market, it's a make or break issue.
And as long as that world is as large a share of the market as it is, economies of scale kick in to the point where good design doesn't stand a chance against it.
Like with so many other things, Linux gives you a choice where others don't.
If consistency of look and feel is more important to you than a wide variety of apps, you can get that by simply choosing, say, KDE or GNOME and using only their apps. Both have all the essentials for the typical 'desktop' user covered.
If you prefer a wider choice of apps instead, you can get that too - all X11 apps will still run, if you install them and their libraries.
Of course, on windows you can't run OSX apps, so you might consider it the most consistent, but that consistency is achieved only by eliminating choices.
On OSX you can only run windows apps if you go to the trouble of getting VPC, and only run X11 apps if you bother to go get X11, so for people that don't do that, there is consistency (for the most part - MS apps like Word for Mac break that too however, if you use them.) But if you install VPC and X11 it gets just as inconsistent as any GNU/Linux system.
IIRC he started with a 'treatment' of the entire series in chronological order. But when he tried to get funds to produce them, no one was interested in the first three, they were just too bad. Finally he got the money to make one - on the condition he skipped over the first three.
For GUIs on Linux, take your pick, there are tons of them. Unless your definition of 'good' requires that one must somehow kill off the others, in which case there will never be one, thankfully.
Yep, I knew that much. Changed 'testing' to 'sarge' in sources. Seems to have been all that needed to be done. System is chugging right along without a complaint.
This was really not my intention - "a surprisingly large" was a poor choice of words.
OK.
Again, I can only tell you that I have never seen a BSOD (though I have seen one legitimate crash for XP).
I've never seen *my* box produce a BSOD under that OS. Then again I know how to keep it clean (inasmuch as is possible) and reasonably well configured - plus I don't use it very often, since I just don't find it very useful. I've certainly been called to deal with problems that produced BSODs at other more 'typical users' type people's stations. Which is the same situation basically since NT4 - it's a reasonably stable OS, as long as you don't do anything stupid. But for a system that's marketed as a 'consumer' OS, it's shockingly intolerent of what we might call 'user error.' If anything XP seems to have been a step backwards - it's my impression Win2k was more stable than XP by a decent margin, although it's possible that's just because the Win2k users tend to know a little more what they're doing.
On the other hand the systems I've set up running linux for the same type of users, who are if anything worse in this context, since they have some knowledge of windows but no clue whatsoever with linux - those boxes never crash. I ssh in once a month or so to install security updates and check the logs. Some guy in Italy keeps trying to guess passwords... that's my biggest issue. The only time I've seen linux crash was on a box where, it turned out, the hardware was failing. Kernel panics were the early warning sign.
Also, KDE and GNOME most definitely are (currently) bloated - are we talking about Linux as a Desktop here, or as a server? I was referring to the former. The kernel itself remains excellent.
Linux is a kernel. Now I've been assuming you were using it in the common but incorrect sense of 'Linux based Operating Systems' in general, which is imprecise thinking and not helpful, but I'm just too tired to flame you for it today so I let that pass. But I use it for both Workstation and Server tasks. As a server it is, in my mind, clearly superior. As a workstation, it's more mixed, and I can get on as good a rant about the stupidities in the GNOME and KDE projects as anyone - but I can still set up a KDE box sitting next to an XP box, running on hardware a year older with slower processor, less storage and less ram, and the KDE machine is still quite comparable in performance.
This is such a load of stereotyping and questionable assumptions. The cracks about basing your self-worth on perceptions of your operating system are doubtless right on for an incredibly sad and incredibly small subset of users, but you present it almost as a universal. It's not. Many of us use many different OSs on a daily basis, and our sense of self-worth, if it's affected by such things at all, has more to do with being proud of our knowledge of them than with the characteristics themselves, regardless of OS.
Then you go on to paint a very rosy (and very distorted) little fable about how Windows has 'caught up' with Linux. It hasn't.
Linux is still far superior to Windows in terms of stability and bloat. Are the new NT-based Windows 'XP' versions more stable than the old DOS based ones? Yes, definately. Are they more stable than, say NT4? Not by much, if at all. Are they more bloated than NT4? Absolutely. Is it *possible* to install a bunch of bloat on a Linux system today? Absolutely! Is it necessary? Nope. So Linux still wins hands down on both comparisons - you can get a stable, lightweight linux install with very little work, you can get a stable, but still bloated, Windows install, but it takes more work.
Windows is still given to BSODs, so that is hardly an outdated criticism. (And yes, we all know that if you know what you're doing and put in the time to properly configure it, you can get it pretty damn stable. Linux doesn't require a lot of tweaking and freaking to be stable. Like I said, in this respect the situation is pretty much how it stood in the days of NT4.) Windows today is more bloated than ever, so just how is that criticism outdated? Clippy may have been abandoned, but it will always stand as a shining example of what's wrong with the MicroSoft way, so it remains a timeless reference.
And, btw, one of the few advantages of NT over Linux through all these years has in fact been the command line. Little known but true fact. Yes, the CLI that ships with Windows (true for all versions of windows since 95 - before that the CLI was shipped as a separate product but other than that technicality it's true all the way back to DOS 1) sucks donkey balls, but there's a horribly underappreciated replacement shell called 4NT that gives you the power of a *nix shell in a much friendlier package, and it's been around for years - it's a continuation of the old 4Dos shell.
So, from my perspective, your post misses just about every point.
A hack to run Aqua on a linux kernel would be really nice. Huge performance gain there for many tasks. Unfortunately it wouldn't be a small hack - the reason Apple stuck to XNU instead of going to a true FreeBSD kernel (which would have given performance gains in the same region as a Linux kernel) was because they decided they couldn't spare the programmer hours to port all the extra stuff XNU has and Aqua (formerly OpenStep) relies on. So it stands to reason that this would be a pretty big project - probably too big a project to get done without an organised group which would then become a target for Apple legal. So... yeah, IF that shows up I'll be very interested, but I'm not expecting it.
As to your G4, I have one too, my beautiful Titanium baby - it won't be 'useless' until the hardware fails either, regardless of what Apple does. When their software won't support it anymore I'll just install Debian... in fact I may not wait that long. The only reason I installed OSX to begin with was for a couple of programs, and they're quickly becoming less important.
The key here is that Apple and its BSD-UNIX kernel running on the Intel platform should outperform Windows by an extreme
OSX uses the XNU kernel, a development of the Mach kernel, with the BSD-UNIX personality hardcoded in. It doesn't have the performance characteristics of the BSD kernels at all. On top of this sits Aqua, as eye-candy intensive a GUI as any out there, which places heavy demands on chip performance. Switching to an inferior CPU isn't going to make it faster, even with the higher clock speeds in performance terms the switch is likely to be a wash.
OSX isn't going to outperform Windows on the same hardware by any stretch of the imagination. The switch may well enable Apple to improve their price/performance ratio, if as is rumoured this was prompted by difficulties getting the next generation of PPC chips at reasonable prices in reasonable quantitites, but expecting OSX to outperform any other system on the same hardware is pretty ludicrous. Unless he means to compare OSX today with Longtooth in 5 years or whenever it's finally released.
How could it possibly harm Linux? That's really quite absurd. What, the SMP code is just going to mysteriously degrade? Pthreads develop bugs without human intervention? What?
Talking about companies as if they were people is bad enough. Talking about computer programs as if they were people is just absurd.
Used sarge from the beginning on the debian box, cause I wanted ReiserFS. So yeah, when I saw this I ssh'd in and made sure it was up to date, but that didn't involve much downloading.
Wierd.
I'm upgrading now, didn't see that, and no 404s nonetheless.
Of course I've been running sarge on that box all along, but I definately have the non-us entries, and got no errors on them.
Have you been paying attention? Every internal Apple release during the OS X years (since 2000) has hedged Apple's bets by being compiled on Intel as well.
Who's not paying attention? I just said that. And in fact it goes back far prior to 2000 - OSX is OpenStep, from NeXTStep, and it's run on x86 for a very long time.
Steve's spinning this as "IBM can't innovate fast enough, and there is no consumer PowerPC processor roadmap. We're falling back on our contingency that we set up 5 years ago.
Yep. Only problem is that doesn't make much sense.
I doubt cash traded hands, except maybe for resources from each company helping to develop hardware/software.
It may be that Intel ponied up a great deal of cash for this.
I knew they'd been keeping it running on both architectures for some time - OSX is really just NeXTStep with the gui tweaked in some unfortunate ways of course, and it ran on x86. And there's nothing wrong with keeping that as an option - quite the opposite.
But the PPC is such a superior processor in so many ways, that always seemed more like a fallback in case IBM tried to push them than a real plan.
I wonder if IBM did something stupid to bring this on, and I really wonder how much Intel spent on bribes.
I agree. Going to x86 would be insanely stupid. Adding a third supplier of PPC chips would not be. And it would be a smart move for Intel to start making PPC chips - there's nothing stopping that from happening.
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I'm in the same situation - there is ONE broadband provider serving my residence. So don't think I don't understand your situation - I do.
If they get blackholed, I'll be on the phone to them immediately. Why aren't you providing the service I contracted for?
If someone on the far side of the planet writes them complaining about a spammer they're hosting, it may not get their attention. If 500 local customers call them up complaining that we're not getting the service we're paying for, that's a lot less likely to be ignored. Fact of life.
BTW, you completely missed the point. I don't care if they're selling spam software (which I never mentioned but you acted like I had) or Viagra or fake rolexes or campbells soup. They can sell whatever they want. If they try to steal from me to advertise it, THEN we have a problem. And if their ISP doesn't see the problem, then I don't want to carry traffic from that ISP.
Remember, the internet is a voluntary and coöperative thing. No one has any obligation to carry anyone elses traffic, absent contractual agreement. Where there is no contractual agreement, it's carried on the basis of generalised reciprocity and a basic assumption of decent behaviour. Decent behaviour does not include theft. And where there are contractual agreements, they almost always explicitly prohibit spam.
If you want spam, that's fine, bully for you. But don't tell me I have to put up with it. I don't.
There's a big difference between someone putting up a web-site you personally find objectionable for the content matter, and a website which promotes itself by thievery.
You want to post your propoganda? Fine. Whether I like it or not, it's no business of mine.
But when you start stealing from me in order to push it, that crosses the line.
And make no mistake, that's what spam is. Theft.
Now, beyond that, if a group of people decide they want blocks on their service to keep out porn, or nazi propoganda, or whatever, they're within their rights to do so. In fact, many people do just that, and several companies are making money selling that service - look at netnanny and that genre. I don't agree with their point of view, and I find them objectionable - but they still have a right to provide their service to subscribers that want it, no question about that.
I really get sick of this sort of whining.
Yes, innocent users get hurt when their ISP chooses to host spammers. There's no way around that, unfortunately, except for users to become more choosy about their ISPs.
But when an ISP gets blacklisted for hosting spammers, this is not abuse or corruption - this is exactly what a blacklist has to do to be effective, and exactly what those of us that use blacklists expect and desire for them to do.
You can play whack-a-mole with spammers day in and day out for years, and have zero or very near zero effect on them. I know, I've done it. By the time you report a spamming IP, the run is done. The spammer isn't going to come back there, he's going to come back from a different IP for his next run. If you want to have any significant effect at deterring spam, you have to do more than whack-a-mole, you have to get them where it hurts. They can send out a million emails from one IP, then never use that IP again. But they have to have someplace more stable to take the money from the handful of morons that go ahead and click on their links.
If an ISP allows spammers to host on their network, they should be blacklisted. I don't want to carry their traffic. And if that means I'm turning down traffic from their other, non-spamming customers, that's a shame, but so be it. Maybe if their customers complain they'll get rid of the spammers. If not, I suggest their customers vote with their wallets, and find a new ISP. That is, if their purpose in having an ISP is communication with those of us that don't want spam. If they're happy being able to connect only to the fraction of the internet that welcomes spam, that's fine too. But it's up to them to make a choice.
All the blacklists do is allow those of us that DO NOT WANT traffic from spam-friendly networks to implement these blocks. Trying to spin an informational service as 'vigilantism' and 'abuse' and 'corruption' because it doesn't work the way the spammers and spam-friendly hosts want it to is abuse of the language, and insulting to the readers intelligence, IMOP.
The problem there is that he never ran the test with the Xserve running Linux. I have a feeling that would be a real eye-opener, as the problem here seems to be in XNU - NOT in the hardware.
This is actually true.
The XNU kernel has some serious performance limitations, and on a box that's going to be getting heavy usage I'd definately want linux/ppc instead.
On the other hand, not all servers are under heavy load, and the OSX Server package makes a lot of stuff relatively easy to setup and administer (particularly for the inexperienced admin,) so both have their place.
Obviously you see irony there because you haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
Why on earth would you download the .isos?
Net install is the way to go.
Funny, my Debian box has KDE.
Back under your bridge now, silly troll.
Simple. Binary compatibility.
Not important at all in the world of free software, but in the rest of the market, it's a make or break issue.
And as long as that world is as large a share of the market as it is, economies of scale kick in to the point where good design doesn't stand a chance against it.
Like with so many other things, Linux gives you a choice where others don't.
If consistency of look and feel is more important to you than a wide variety of apps, you can get that by simply choosing, say, KDE or GNOME and using only their apps. Both have all the essentials for the typical 'desktop' user covered.
If you prefer a wider choice of apps instead, you can get that too - all X11 apps will still run, if you install them and their libraries.
Of course, on windows you can't run OSX apps, so you might consider it the most consistent, but that consistency is achieved only by eliminating choices.
On OSX you can only run windows apps if you go to the trouble of getting VPC, and only run X11 apps if you bother to go get X11, so for people that don't do that, there is consistency (for the most part - MS apps like Word for Mac break that too however, if you use them.) But if you install VPC and X11 it gets just as inconsistent as any GNU/Linux system.
IIRC he started with a 'treatment' of the entire series in chronological order. But when he tried to get funds to produce them, no one was interested in the first three, they were just too bad. Finally he got the money to make one - on the condition he skipped over the first three.
Personally I prefer WindowMaker, but to each his own.
I've got KDE running quite well on a PII 300, if you think that's 'uber-bloated' you must really be down on WinXP and OSX.
Oh, and my KDE setup doesn't look much like Windows at all, so I don't have a clue what you're talking about there either.
I hate to guess about other peoples personal problems, but it sounds to me like you're just trolling.
Both have been available for many years.
Good command line for NT.
For GUIs on Linux, take your pick, there are tons of them. Unless your definition of 'good' requires that one must somehow kill off the others, in which case there will never be one, thankfully.
Yep, I knew that much. Changed 'testing' to 'sarge' in sources. Seems to have been all that needed to be done. System is chugging right along without a complaint.
OK.
I've never seen *my* box produce a BSOD under that OS. Then again I know how to keep it clean (inasmuch as is possible) and reasonably well configured - plus I don't use it very often, since I just don't find it very useful. I've certainly been called to deal with problems that produced BSODs at other more 'typical users' type people's stations. Which is the same situation basically since NT4 - it's a reasonably stable OS, as long as you don't do anything stupid. But for a system that's marketed as a 'consumer' OS, it's shockingly intolerent of what we might call 'user error.' If anything XP seems to have been a step backwards - it's my impression Win2k was more stable than XP by a decent margin, although it's possible that's just because the Win2k users tend to know a little more what they're doing.
On the other hand the systems I've set up running linux for the same type of users, who are if anything worse in this context, since they have some knowledge of windows but no clue whatsoever with linux - those boxes never crash. I ssh in once a month or so to install security updates and check the logs. Some guy in Italy keeps trying to guess passwords... that's my biggest issue. The only time I've seen linux crash was on a box where, it turned out, the hardware was failing. Kernel panics were the early warning sign.
Linux is a kernel. Now I've been assuming you were using it in the common but incorrect sense of 'Linux based Operating Systems' in general, which is imprecise thinking and not helpful, but I'm just too tired to flame you for it today so I let that pass. But I use it for both Workstation and Server tasks. As a server it is, in my mind, clearly superior. As a workstation, it's more mixed, and I can get on as good a rant about the stupidities in the GNOME and KDE projects as anyone - but I can still set up a KDE box sitting next to an XP box, running on hardware a year older with slower processor, less storage and less ram, and the KDE machine is still quite comparable in performance.
This is such a load of stereotyping and questionable assumptions. The cracks about basing your self-worth on perceptions of your operating system are doubtless right on for an incredibly sad and incredibly small subset of users, but you present it almost as a universal. It's not. Many of us use many different OSs on a daily basis, and our sense of self-worth, if it's affected by such things at all, has more to do with being proud of our knowledge of them than with the characteristics themselves, regardless of OS.
Then you go on to paint a very rosy (and very distorted) little fable about how Windows has 'caught up' with Linux. It hasn't.
Linux is still far superior to Windows in terms of stability and bloat. Are the new NT-based Windows 'XP' versions more stable than the old DOS based ones? Yes, definately. Are they more stable than, say NT4? Not by much, if at all. Are they more bloated than NT4? Absolutely. Is it *possible* to install a bunch of bloat on a Linux system today? Absolutely! Is it necessary? Nope. So Linux still wins hands down on both comparisons - you can get a stable, lightweight linux install with very little work, you can get a stable, but still bloated, Windows install, but it takes more work.
Windows is still given to BSODs, so that is hardly an outdated criticism. (And yes, we all know that if you know what you're doing and put in the time to properly configure it, you can get it pretty damn stable. Linux doesn't require a lot of tweaking and freaking to be stable. Like I said, in this respect the situation is pretty much how it stood in the days of NT4.) Windows today is more bloated than ever, so just how is that criticism outdated? Clippy may have been abandoned, but it will always stand as a shining example of what's wrong with the MicroSoft way, so it remains a timeless reference.
And, btw, one of the few advantages of NT over Linux through all these years has in fact been the command line. Little known but true fact. Yes, the CLI that ships with Windows (true for all versions of windows since 95 - before that the CLI was shipped as a separate product but other than that technicality it's true all the way back to DOS 1) sucks donkey balls, but there's a horribly underappreciated replacement shell called 4NT that gives you the power of a *nix shell in a much friendlier package, and it's been around for years - it's a continuation of the old 4Dos shell.
So, from my perspective, your post misses just about every point.
A hack to run Aqua on a linux kernel would be really nice. Huge performance gain there for many tasks. Unfortunately it wouldn't be a small hack - the reason Apple stuck to XNU instead of going to a true FreeBSD kernel (which would have given performance gains in the same region as a Linux kernel) was because they decided they couldn't spare the programmer hours to port all the extra stuff XNU has and Aqua (formerly OpenStep) relies on. So it stands to reason that this would be a pretty big project - probably too big a project to get done without an organised group which would then become a target for Apple legal. So... yeah, IF that shows up I'll be very interested, but I'm not expecting it.
As to your G4, I have one too, my beautiful Titanium baby - it won't be 'useless' until the hardware fails either, regardless of what Apple does. When their software won't support it anymore I'll just install Debian... in fact I may not wait that long. The only reason I installed OSX to begin with was for a couple of programs, and they're quickly becoming less important.
OSX uses the XNU kernel, a development of the Mach kernel, with the BSD-UNIX personality hardcoded in. It doesn't have the performance characteristics of the BSD kernels at all. On top of this sits Aqua, as eye-candy intensive a GUI as any out there, which places heavy demands on chip performance. Switching to an inferior CPU isn't going to make it faster, even with the higher clock speeds in performance terms the switch is likely to be a wash.
OSX isn't going to outperform Windows on the same hardware by any stretch of the imagination. The switch may well enable Apple to improve their price/performance ratio, if as is rumoured this was prompted by difficulties getting the next generation of PPC chips at reasonable prices in reasonable quantitites, but expecting OSX to outperform any other system on the same hardware is pretty ludicrous. Unless he means to compare OSX today with Longtooth in 5 years or whenever it's finally released.
How could it possibly harm Linux? That's really quite absurd. What, the SMP code is just going to mysteriously degrade? Pthreads develop bugs without human intervention? What?
Talking about companies as if they were people is bad enough. Talking about computer programs as if they were people is just absurd.
Used sarge from the beginning on the debian box, cause I wanted ReiserFS. So yeah, when I saw this I ssh'd in and made sure it was up to date, but that didn't involve much downloading.
Wierd. I'm upgrading now, didn't see that, and no 404s nonetheless. Of course I've been running sarge on that box all along, but I definately have the non-us entries, and got no errors on them.
Who's not paying attention? I just said that. And in fact it goes back far prior to 2000 - OSX is OpenStep, from NeXTStep, and it's run on x86 for a very long time.
Yep. Only problem is that doesn't make much sense.
Of course, that's the way it's done.
Yes indeed that does seem to be the story.
I still think it's insanely stupid on its face.
It may be that Intel ponied up a great deal of cash for this.
I knew they'd been keeping it running on both architectures for some time - OSX is really just NeXTStep with the gui tweaked in some unfortunate ways of course, and it ran on x86. And there's nothing wrong with keeping that as an option - quite the opposite.
But the PPC is such a superior processor in so many ways, that always seemed more like a fallback in case IBM tried to push them than a real plan.
I wonder if IBM did something stupid to bring this on, and I really wonder how much Intel spent on bribes.
I agree. Going to x86 would be insanely stupid. Adding a third supplier of PPC chips would not be. And it would be a smart move for Intel to start making PPC chips - there's nothing stopping that from happening.