>
> On 11-Nov-07, at 5:05 PM, John Sonnenschein wrote:
>
>> The thing with Apple PPC hardware is that it's still fairly expensive
>> for a machine whose only use can be OS development. After talking a
>> bit with Shawn Walker, we concluded it may be worthwhile to
>> investigate the Playstation3 as a potential target.
>>
>> My reasoning is that people buy PS3s to play games, so if we already
>> have instructions on bootstrapping Polaris on it, they have a
>> development platform incidentally. It's also more likely that people
>> will have the development platform and come looking for us than if
>> they come looking for us and step one for them is "drop a couple
>> hundred dollars on an old mac that's useless for anything other than
>> this project"
>
>
> ...not sure how that is different from "drop a few hundred on a game
> console".
>
> The Mac is a general purpose computer with a huge installed base
> (PPCs have been shipping for well over 10 years, admittedly the New
> World/PCI Macs are not quite that old :). Why not support both...
Getting from the ODW to anything else will be a major leap.
I think that we need to pick the next target hardware from a pool of very
large and very common hardware sources. I have a DEC Alpha 4100 server here
and I can still find parts for it today because the DEC Alpha was fairly
common. At least more of them than ODW's were ever produced. If we choose
something from the IBM world then we can be assured of parts supply for five
years at least. I don't think that we will see that from the Apple world.[1]
Anything lower down from that tier-1 level should not even be considered.
Certainly not game consoles at this stage of the game.
You are of course welcome to do whatever you want, welcome to open source.
Dennis
[1] I can call IBM and get new parts for an IBM ThinkPad that was made
in 1999. It is simply a matter of money. That would be true for
any of their RS/6000 hardware also.
