begin quoting Wade Curry as of Tue, May 24, 2005 at 04:09:26PM -0700: [snip] > Don't forget, OSX is essentially a resurrection of the old NeXTStep > OS. Most people remember that company as a proprietary hardware > company. However, after the hardware manufacturing stopped, the OS > was ported to x86 and supported.
I don't see porting your OS to the x86 hardware as a worthwhile investment -- it generally doesn't help. NeXT was ported, and died. BeOS was ported, and died. Solaris was ported, and Sun has to give it away now -- and is in the process of open-sourcing it. To me, it looks like the x86 is the touch of death. What you port to x86 you can't sell. [snip] > > The only thing it might do to Apple is increase the likely hood of > > someone illegally installing their OS onto a non-Apple system, such as a > > Dell or Sony. This is the same problem Apple faces when it releases an > > updated OS, though. > > MS is shouldering such a huge portion of the losses from pirated > software. It's about time someone came along to help the poor > slobs. ;-) There ya go. Let's help out Microsoft! > > Where is the gain for Apple to keep its market limited? > > There is none; wouldn't make sense. But single-button mice > don't make sense, either. Sure they do. The first computer I set my parents up with had a two-button mouse. When I set them up with the Mac and a _single_ button mouse, my mother was happy -- she *prefers* the single-button mouse. When I moved 'em to a Mac Mini, she was worried that the new OS might require her to use a multi-button mouse (I had, in fact, offered to 'upgrade' them), and when she learned she didn't _have_ to move away from a single-button mouse, she was relieved. This was an eye-opener for me. I had, for years, bad-mouthed the single-button mouse... and yet, for its intended market, it's ideal. Just because it ain't for you, don't knock it. You can put a multi-button mouse on your Mac if you want, and it'll use it too. But not everyone wants that, and designing your base system to exclude that segment of the population isn't very smart if they're your target demographic. > I pretty much line up with jhriv on > this one. CPUs just don't seem to be an important differentiating > factor between platforms as they used to. If they aren't important, then why is it such a discriminator? When we stop writing applications in C (or other low-level languages), the 'black-box' mentality will have some weight. But we aren't quite there yet. And we won't be there for awhile still, especially with folks making a fuss about languages like Java. -Stewart "My machine should use network byte ordering" Stremler
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