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OS X Operating Systems Intel

More Mac OS X on Plain Old x86 Boxes 844

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-don't-hardly-believe-it dept.
Slashfan writes "It has been widely reported all over the Internet that it is extremely easy to get the Intel port of Mac OS X to run on regualar PC boxes. Some of the hackers are running the tweaked version of the operating system on their PCs natively." Pardon my skepticism ;)
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More Mac OS X on Plain Old x86 Boxes More

More Mac OS X on Plain Old x86 Boxes

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  • Ummm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jim_v2000 ( 818799 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:28PM (#13307035)
    It seems to me like there would be lots and lots of driver issue with installing on a regular PC...

    • Re:Ummm (Score:4, Informative)

      by Daniel Wood ( 531906 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:29PM (#13307063) Homepage Journal
      As far as hardware(NIC, SND, 3d acceleration) working, there are some issues. As far as the OS running, no problems.

      • Re:Ummm (Score:5, Funny)

        by Klivian ( 850755 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:47PM (#13307249)
        So you have no graphics, sound and networking, but other than that it runs just fine? I'd guess that's taking the famous mac usability one step further.

        • Re:Ummm (Score:3, Informative)

          by yellowbkpk ( 890493 ) *
          To clarify:

          You get video, it just depends on if your Quartz graphics layer is accelerated. There have been only a few video cards that have acheived this.

          Sound/Network: Only a couple brand of chips have worked natively. Read the forums associated with these sites for hardware compatibility.

        • Re:Ummm (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Guspaz ( 556486 )
          I believe there will be a small to medium community porting linux drivers to OSX to allow people to use unsupported hardware, both in their official Apple boxes and their whiteboxes.

          • Re:Ummm (Score:3, Interesting)

            by ceeam ( 39911 )
            Excuse me while I bang my head on the desk... Should _everything_ mention Linux??? WTF - every card you can stick into your PCI, USB (and I guess AGP) slot you can equally well stick into your Mac. And I think they would have drivers for Mac _ready_ then. At least for mediumly popular hardware. I know that many driver disks I've seen had Mac drivers. Or PPC Mac drivers won't work on Intel Macs?

            PS: While you are at it - please port ReiserFS to Mac/BSD/NT. I know that it'd be hard.

        • Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Jozer99 ( 693146 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @02:56AM (#13310244)
          The reason Apple locks the OS in the first place is stability. Apple makes almost no money off of their Mac hardware compaired to iPods and iTunes. They would love to be able to sell their OS to the very large market of people who already have x86 PCs. The problem is, in order to keep with Apple's legendary "it just works" tradition, every part of the OS needs to be highly tested and troubleshot, especially drivers. In the past, that has not been a problem, because there are only about 15 different computer models that can run OS X. That means Apple has to make sure only 15 different systems will run stably. If they released for all x86 machines, they would have no way of testing every machine. Therefore, there would certainly be bugs that were found after release with certain hardware, making the OS no more stable than Windows, if not less so. Also, Apple does not have the clout to get drivers written for its OS by all hardware vendors, and they certainly don't have a large enough staff to write the drivers themselves. It is therefore obvious that Apple's decision to make OS X run only on their special x86 hardware was a move to insure that the stability and quality of use of the OS is consistant, not a cold hearted move to exclude the x86 masses (even though it fits with some of the terrible decissions that Apple made in the past).

      • No NIC, Sound, or 3d accel (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Throw in:
            No fan support
            Uses a ton of battery
            Unresponsive UI ...and you've got my Fedora Core installation!

    • Re:Ummm (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jericho4.0 ( 565125 )
      People seem to have it running natively on the right motherboards. I would have no problem building my next PC from a short list of parts if it meant I could run OS X.

  • pardon? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Madd Scientist ( 894040 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:28PM (#13307043)
    skepticism ignored... but emoticons? there is no excuse.

    • Obligitory Comic Book Guy quote... (Score:5, Funny)

      by shuufoxie ( 907008 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:12PM (#13307500)
      "There's no emoticon for what I'm feeling!"

  • Congrats (Score:3, Insightful)

    by suman28 ( 558822 ) <suman28 AT hotmail DOT com> on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:29PM (#13307048)
    I have always wanted to try out on my Intel box and my dream is finally coming true. I hope Steve learns a lesson from this and does not put DRM in the official version

    • Re:Congrats (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jim_v2000 ( 818799 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:35PM (#13307117)
      I would hope that Apple does not ever release their OS for the standard PC. It would be terrible for their image. Sure the Mac OS works great on Apple's machines, but start throwing it on people custom machines and trying to run all kinds of crazy hardware setups and OS X isn't going to run so swell anymore. The reason the Mac OS runs so well is because it and the hardware it runs on are meant to run together.

      Windows, which is really a great OS, gets such a bad rap because it's expected to run with every piece of hardware out there flawlessly. No one stops to think that it's a miracle that it runs as well as it does on so many systems. Not to put down the Mac OS, but compatibilty realy isn't so much of an issue/concern for OS X as much as it is for Windows.

      So basically, OS X runs good because it runs on Apple hardware. Start putting it on other machines, and it won't be too long before "OMG this OS suxors! It keeps crashing all the time on my CompuExpress UltraGaming Machine 2000!"

      • The same could be said about linux. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Reeses ( 5069 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:48PM (#13307251)
        Alright, I've seen this argument a number of times, and for some reason people forget that OS X is unix-based. It has the same ability to handle hardware that all other unixen do.

        In the above statements, if you could substitute the word "Linux" or "NetBSD" for every occurrence of Macintosh, and not sound like some sort of raving lunatic, I'd be surprised.

        I don't understand how Linx and xBSDs can be expected to "run everywhere" on everything, yet, for some reason OS X, a very pretty GUI that is supported by the same technology as the other Unixes, is excluded from that. It just mystifies me.

        Maybe it's just anti-Mac zealotry.
        • How many 3rd party hardware vendors ship Linux device drivers as compared to Windows drivers?

          The major share of Windows crashes are due to poorly written device drivers that 3rd party hardware vendors write. In the past, these drivers has access to critical sections of the kernel and so if for example, they had a buffer overrun, it was possible that it could write a critical section of the kernel space, thus bringing down the machine. With Vista, this is going to change.

          I am only saying that the original po
          • > In the past, these drivers has access to critical
            > sections of the kernel and so if for example, they
            > had a buffer overrun, it was possible that it
            > could write a critical section of the kernel
            > space, thus bringing down the machine. With
            > Vista, this is going to change.

            Wait? Didn't they say that about Windows 95? And Windows NT 4? And Windows 2000? And Windows XP? I've had blue screens on all of those (except NT4, which I've never run).

        • Exactly!! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by snowwrestler ( 896305 )
          Any OS will be more reliable, secure, and just plain work better if it can be tweaked carefully for the exact hardware configuration it's running on. Linux and Unix allow anyone, including the end user, to customize their configuration to the exact hardware it's running on. It's not exactly easy though, is it?

          Apple takes the opposite tack to achieve the same end result--rather than complete freedom to customize the software, they strictly limit the hardware.

          Either way, the end result is a product in which

        • Re:The same could be said about linux. (Score:5, Informative)

          by happyemoticon ( 543015 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:13PM (#13307512) Homepage

          Clearly you've never done anything with drivers. We're doing some driver programming at my company, and let me tell you sir, it's a bitch. We have Dell and Gateway boxes with the same OS revision and everything, but (one particular rev of) the driver makes the Gateway box bluescreen and not the Dell. Hell, we've even had cases where two seemingly-identical Dells were tested side-by-side; one consistently bluescreened, and the other did not. It is a very tricky topic.

          And moreover, since we're just talking about the OS running on Intels, it's decidedly not the kernel/processor, which is the lowest level of portability and the level at which Linux almost universally succeeds. One Genuine Intel x86 is pretty much the same as the next, a few register extensions aside. It's the devices which might be attached to it which create headaches. I could set up Slackware or Gentoo on almost any system on the face of the earth with very little difficulty. Now, getting sound to work on one of those systems is another matter entirely. Framebuffer devices will always be a pain in the neck. I'm still working on scanning properly. MacOS uses a ton of OpenGL and other chutzpah for its basic functionality; Linux basically just uses the kernel and a few core tools you'd find on the Slackware "a" diskette set.

        • Re:The same could be said about linux. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:17PM (#13307544)
          Argh, you're making the wrong point with the right analogy.

          The truth is, Limited hardware support is precisely the reason Linux cannot become mainstream on the desktop in the forseeable future, and it does not bode well for OSX on general PC hardware.

          I use Linux full time every day, and the software, for the most part, is good. But fighting with hardware is the #1 source of frustration. The fact is you just don't know a lot of times whether something you buy will work. There are tons of supported hardware lists out there, and every one is about 50% wrong for a variety of reasons - they're outdated, incomplete, and also people who submit information to them are very liberal in calling devices "fully supported." In practice, very many don't work fully and are unstable. This despite the fact that most of the linux kernel is drivers. To have everything but the drivers is to have very little.

        • Re:The same could be said about linux. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:25PM (#13307628)
          Parent post is simply ignorance.

          Linux or any BSD is hardly a commodity OS. It runs on everything because there is a geek somewhere with every piece of hardware imaginable who has nothing better to do than make that operating system work.

          Meanwhile OS X has to run because the people who want to use their computers, aren't the kinds of people who have time to make every single piece of hardware work.

          Microsoft's Windows works on a lot of hardware because of the WHQL program they've instituted, and that only works because they're big enough to pressure PC manufacturers to use cheap, standard components, and because they've got the money to buy every single piece of hardware, and code for it. And, if you haven't used Windows lately, there are still hundreds upon thousands of bugs. My P3's audio quality sucks, my mom's P4's disk controller is a serious flake. Both are Dells.

          Linux isn't expected to run everywhere. Linux is MADE to run everywhere. This requires effort. This kind of effort isn't economical for a business to support. I'd feel sorry if Redhat or IBM decided to go out and support hardware.. they'd immediately go out of business dealing with the Tech Support alone.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:49PM (#13307264)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Congrats (Score:3, Insightful)

        by freeze128 ( 544774 )
        Yeah, sure Mac OS runs better on MACs than on PCs. Well, it seems to me that trying to get software to run on a platform that it wasn't designed for is what being a hacker/geek is all about.

        Perhaps we shouldn't try then. MAC OS was just intended to be run on Macs, and that is that. Oh, woe is the PC user for he cannot see Expose at work!

    • Re:Congrats (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Senjutsu ( 614542 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:38PM (#13307142)
      I hope Steve learns a lesson from this and does not put DRM in the official version

      It seems to me the only lesson to be learned is "If we don't make a serious effort to make our x86 macs different enough from vanilla PCs, a bunch of jackassess will just download it off some P2P network, run it on their own boxes, and freeload off our hard work".

      Having learned that, why would he not make it harder for people to obtain and use OS X without purchasing their products?

      • Re:Congrats (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sundog61 ( 816978 ) * on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:52PM (#13307303) Homepage
        Having learned that, why would he not make it harder for people to obtain and use OS X without purchasing their products?

        Contrary to popular opinion, Windows/PC users aren't all thieves. I'd be happy to be able to purchase an x86 version of OSX.

      • Re:Congrats (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rekoil ( 168689 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:50PM (#13307800)
        IIRC, Apple's plans for the retail Mactel boxes include a custom BIOS. The reason the existing dev release is so easy to run on generic PCs is that the dev kit boxes use a standard PC BIOS; once the "real" Mactel machines are moved to a custom BIOS, I would make an uninformed guess that getting it to boot on a generic PC with a standard BIOS would be much more difficult.

        Can someone who knows more about BIOS foo comment on this? I'm curious myself...

      • Re:Congrats (Score:3, Informative)

        by sp5 ( 867987 )
        Having learned that, why would he not make it harder for people to obtain and use OS X without purchasing their products?

        Apple allows users to purchase a family pack [apple.com] of 5 licenses for $199 instead one license for $129.

        Instead of going the MS activation route, they've acknowledged that home users aren't crazy about buying mutiple licenses at cost when they don't really need to. With the family pack, everyone is happy.

        I haven't upgraded my machine at home yet because of the whole XP activation thing.

    • Re:Congrats (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:44PM (#13307214)

      I hope Steve learns a lesson from this...

      What that dishonest people will lie, violate their NDAs, illegally infringe upon his copyrights, and not pay him a red cent because they have some sense of entitlement? Not exactly model customers for a software company that (usually) prides itself on trusting its customers and does not even require an authentication code to install and run its OS and the majority of its commercial applications.

      MS makes you pay when you buy the hardware and does not worry and just tries to annoy you when you pirate. Apple also has not worried about pirates and makes you pay when you buy the hardware. Apple running on commodity PCs would make this situation one where you pay MS when you buy your hardware and then pirate Apple's OS and pay them nothing. And you applaud pirates freely distributing this pirate copy?

      I'm sure Jobs has learned a lesson all right, that being PC users are untrustworthy and if there is no DRM locking OS X onto Apple boxes they will all just pirate it without paying one penny.

  • Call me when (Score:5, Funny)

    by Winckle ( 870180 ) <mark&winckle,co,uk> on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:29PM (#13307057) Homepage
    they get it running on toasters [slashdot.org]

  • Duck! (Score:5, Funny)

    by rapturizer ( 733607 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:30PM (#13307067)
    I hear the sound of incoming Apple Lawyers.

  • Not Surprising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RumGunner ( 457733 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:30PM (#13307068) Homepage
    I've suspected this was Apple's plan since the Intel announcement. They're going into direct competition with Microsoft.

    About damn time.

    • and I bet geeks pirate it more than pay for it too (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @05:07PM (#13307935) Homepage Journal
      Apple isn't going to take on Microsoft. First Apple knows better than to waste their time trying to make an OS that supports every damn accessory; card or plugged in; as that only invites frustration on the consumer level.

      I believe it is more likely Apple was fully expecting this to happen and have already "written it off". There won't be enough geeks pirating it to matter and they don't have to support anyone who does. If anything it may help them because more people will become familar with how it looks and feel. By that I mean some of these basement dwellers will show it off to coworkers and relatives - bragging that they did it but at the same time spreading the Apple kool-aid without realizing it.

      Two markets Apple has to get into.
      1. Corporate. How many years has it taken AMD to do it, and they are only trying to sell a product that runs everything their competitor already does!

      2. Games. That is going to be the hard sell. The big item in most retail stores are lots of junk software for web related stuff and then GAMES. Lots and lots of games. All of which require "Windows XP". How will Apple convince developers to write for their platform?

      No, I don't see Apple competeing with Microsoft. The "Duopoloy" of Apple and Microsoft will continue on the desktop for some time. Just because they run on similar hardware doesn't mean they will compete or want to compete.
      • "2. Games. That is going to be the hard sell. The big item in most retail stores are lots of junk software for web related stuff and then GAMES. Lots and lots of games. All of which require "Windows XP". How will Apple convince developers to write for their platform?"

        Your answer, Windows Vista. Thanks to the hubris of Microsoft, Windows Vista will be ignored by gamers just as they ignored Windows2000 and shunned WindowsME. Doing stupid deliberate things like retarding the performance of OpenGL in Vista in favor of DirectX is enough to alienate the likes of id Software. Combine that with the fact that the next generation console of choice will be the Sony Playstation3 (which supports OpenGL), the conversion to the computer platform of choice will be the Macs as long as videocard support becomes equal to the current Windows market and Apple offers some headless desktops that support end user expansion through PCIe cards (including SLI techniques too).

         

        • Re:and I bet geeks pirate it more than pay for it (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Pulzar ( 81031 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @09:00PM (#13309177)
          Your answer, Windows Vista. Thanks to the hubris of Microsoft, Windows Vista will be ignored by gamers just as they ignored Windows2000 and shunned WindowsME. Doing stupid deliberate things like retarding the performance of OpenGL in Vista in favor of DirectX is enough to alienate the likes of id Software.

          There's nothing deliberate about what they are doing. Please try to understand what's going on before coming up with generalizations like "Vista will be bad for Open GL so all games will go to Mac because all games are written by Id Software".

          The Vista desktop uses Direct X to render the new desktop features, so it can't run Open GL natively at the same time... so, they provided a wrapper, which causes a performance hit. As far as the full-screen games are concerned, though, they don't use the desktop, hence the aeroglass support goes away and ATI or nVidia native OpenGL driver kicks in.

          So, don't be sad. Your OpenGL games will run just as fine as they used to.

          The OpenGL windowed applications might suffer performance degradation, but that's another story.

          • The OpenGL windowed applications might suffer performance degradation, but that's another story.

            That story is interesting in it's own right. My understanding is that CAD and other visualization tools depend on OpenGL, inasmuch as DirectX sucks for 2D, so assuming all that is true:

            • Will 2d stop sucking in DirectX?
            • Will AutoCAD move to DirectX?
            • Or will AutoCAD instead port to Linux and OS X?

            I'd be interested in any observations.

  • It's been said before (Score:5, Interesting)

    by digidave ( 259925 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:31PM (#13307074)
    and I'll say it again: Apple wants OS X to be pirated. First, you pirate OS X and start to like it, then next time you go to buy a computer you choose an Apple because, hey, you get some advantages to running a legit copy and you can still dual boot Windows or Linux if you want.

    Apple should start sending out OS X on CD AOL-style. If they really are a hardware company, that will sell them a lot of hardware later on. If they're really smart, they'll send out Panther on CD to everyone. People will pirate Tiger anyway, but that would at least get OS X onto computers that would otherwise have never pirated it, then those people can buy Apple hardware in a year or two when they upgrade.

    • Re:It's been said before (Score:5, Insightful)

      by blibbler ( 15793 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:45PM (#13307221)
      and I'll say it again: people go and install OSX on a cheap machine, realise how great it is, and then when they want a new machine, they get another cheap machine, and install OSX on that one. I can't see any reason why someone would pirate it the first time, then go out and spend extra to get an Apple machine, when can get (or build) a similar (albeit stylistically challenged) machine cheaper.

      Your argument might be valid if the final intel version of OSX wasn't (as easily) hackable, so people wouldn't be able to run the final version on non-apple machines.
    • Who says you're pirating it if you run it on your PC?

      Personally if I find out this is a solid platform on white boxes, I'm going to purchase a copy for my home PC and possibly my office laptop.

      It's not stealing if you use it for something besides what they intended.

      That's like saying a Neon can't legally be a monster truck. Give me a welder and some beer and we'll see about that ;-)
    • then those people can buy Apple hardware in a year or two when they upgrade.

      They can buy Apple hardware right now if they want, but they don't. And they still won't in your scenario. Why? Same reason as today: because they'll take one look at the price and buy a Dell instead.

      Rampant pirate copies of OS X will not change that.

      • In some other discussion of .com failures, someone remarked in comments about how the marketing blitz of the .com world failed miserably because it didn't take into consideration who really makes decisions and influences people about computer related decisions. Instead of speding X millions of dollars buying a superbowl ad, the successful companies tried and succeeded into getting their products into the hands and minds of the alpha geeks and was then disseminated to the unwashed (maybe the washed in this

    • Moore's Law and the Apple hardware tax (Score:5, Insightful)

      by anon coward ( 113810 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @06:00PM (#13308288)
      A lot has been made of the fact that PC hardware is cheaper than Apple hardware. But Moore's Law degrades that argument at the standard rate. The 50% Apple hardware tax is significant when computers cost $3000. When computers cost $500, the tax is still 50% but not so significant. And when computers cost $100, even less significant. At that point, $50 for "looks cool" might be worth it to a lot more people. Like esr said, as the cost of the hardware approaches the cost of the OS, things get interesting.

  • What's the point (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:31PM (#13307075)
    Running OS X on a Dell is like putting race car parts in your Yugo. You can, it is sort of funny, but... why?

    • Re:What's the point (Score:5, Insightful)

      by m50d ( 797211 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:50PM (#13307280) Homepage Journal
      Not really. These are x86 chips made by Intel themselves, so the only thing your mac hardware premium (and don't try and claim it doesn't exist) is going on is the software and the pretty boxes. It's more like reflashing your video card to behave like a more expensive model, something many of us here applaud.

      • Re:What's the point (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:44PM (#13307753)
        You act as if a CPU is all that makes a computer a computer.

        Motherboards, chipsets, video cards, hell even computer cases are all part of the Apple experience. If you want to believe that the only "premium" you're paying for is the operating system, then believe it all you like. But when you run out and try one of the machines, you'll realize there's a lot more to it.

        Apple puts serious time into making their product work, and to making it work, every single time. They put serious effort into having good tech support. They put serious effort into making their machines fast (as that's the number one driving force to x86 today). They put serious effort into making sure the ram your system uses is of quality. The list goes on.

        Most PC vendors are bidding in a market to get the cheapest, working parts they can find, and if you like your machines to run like that, then by all means I won't stop you. But before I went to Apple, I built my machine with premium parts that I raed reviews on and made sure were of quality. After doing the same with Apple's components, and finding out it was, in the end, much cheaper to go with their pre-built machine, I switched.

        Besides, if you call a hundred or two bucks a premium, then your really talking bottom barrel parts. Apple doesn't even want your money if you're not willing to spend it.

        • Re:What's the point (Score:5, Interesting)

          by radish ( 98371 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @06:29PM (#13308462) Homepage
          Apple puts serious time into making their product work, and to making it work, every single time.
          Well, then they've failed. Apple's crash. Apple's have hardware failures. Hate to break your rose-tinted bubble but they are JUST COMPUTERS, like all the others. Why do I read so many problems about PowerBook logic board failures if they're perfect? Why the tint problems on their amazingly over priced LCD displays? Why did my girlfriends ibook just need a battery recall? What's with the ipod mini recall from a while ago? Do I even hame to mention the cube?

          They put serious effort into making their machines fast (as that's the number one driving force to x86 today)
          Again, they've failed. There is not an Apple in production today, for any price, which can beat a decently high end Athlon or P4 based PC.

          They put serious effort into making sure the ram your system uses is of quality
          Oh please. It's the same (perfectly decent) generic ram everyone else uses, it just costs twice as much.

          Look, if you want to buy an Apple go ahead, it's no skin off my nose. But DO NOT give me all this crap about how if I prefer a PC I'm being cheap, or I don't appreciate the perfection of Apple. I don't want an Apple because I think they're too expensive, too slow, I don't really like OSX, and I don't think they look particularly great. I've dealt with their support - it's nothing great (waiting in line for an hour to speak to a "genius" who really doesn't know what he's talking about is not a win in my book). I've dealt with their failed hardware and I've dealt with their insane pricing. When the Intel based Apples come out I'll take another look, but right now I've thought about it and decided no.

          • Re:What's the point (Score:4, Insightful)

            by ltbarcly ( 398259 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @07:02PM (#13308649)
            Oh please. It's the same (perfectly decent) generic ram everyone else uses, it just costs twice as much.

            Stop, collaborate and listen!

            Ram quality is a highly overlooked cause of many many stability problems. I will NOT run generic ram in the debian machine I use for development, nor will I in my powerbook. Many of those hard to track down and intermittent 'software' errors are caused by either poor quality ram or a cheap power supply. With windows it's not so important, as you are less likely to keep it up for long periods of time (apparently it reboots itself to install patches now, without asking).

            If you are doing anything serious on a PC, I really recommend ECC. There is a slight cost involved, and a very small performance penalty, but it comes with the total prevention of single bit errors due to cosmic rays or decomposing atoms in solder. You'll avoid a hell of a lot WTF troubleshooting.

            Now, if you're a cretin, feel free to get GENERTEC's offering for $5 less, but in the long run you'll bitch and moan about whatever operating system you're using being unstable.

            CRETINS STOP READING HERE, AND RECEIVE A GENUINE IMITATION LEATHERETTE WALLET CARRYING CASE

            Ok, now that they're out of the picture, check out www.crucial.com. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Micron, and it is high quality stuff.

            Two RAM boards with the exact same chips can vary widely in quality. This is because the big 3 ram manufacturers do a great job, but the PCB makers do an often shit job.

            As in all things you get what you pay for.

            Oh, and parent IS a cretin. Nobody cares about your personal justification for Apple bashing. Apple makes great stuff, it's not everything to everybody. I personally wish that konqueror would be split from KDE so that it could be platform independent. It's fantastic.

            • Re:What's the point (Score:3, Interesting)

              by radish ( 98371 )
              I think you and I have different ideas of what generic means. To me, Micron/Crucial is generic. They make good, reliable stuff and it's cheap. It's not Geil SuperDooperProGold Overclockers RAM with LEDs. That's what I meant by generic...

              • Re:What's the point (Score:3, Insightful)

                by ltbarcly ( 398259 )
                don't be "one of those people". You can't just take words to mean whatever you want 'to you'. That is bullshit. As soon as you do that everything you say has no meaning, as who knows what YOU mean by 'reliable'. Perhaps by 'reliable' you mean 'lasts at least 1 week' and 'cheap' means 'less than a million dollars'. Of course you take 'ideas' to mean 'the internet version of deas' or something equally stupid.

                So, since you don't seem to know what words mean, I'll lend a hand:

                Generic: Not having a brand na
                • Generic: Not having a brand name.

                  So you cannot possibly consider 'Crucial' to be 'generic' as 'Crucial' IS the name of the brand.

                  Really, there isn't any truly "generic" memory. Only a few companies make memory chips, smaller companies couldn't possibly build a fab to produce memory chips.

                  The "generic" companies use the same Samsung, Toshiba, or Hynix, etc chips that most other companies do, and build them according to the reference design produced by the chipmakers. They also buy the PCB that the memory chi

        • Re:What's the point (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ImpTech ( 549794 )
          > Motherboards, chipsets, video cards, hell even computer cases are all part of the Apple experience. If you want to believe that the only "premium" you're paying for is the operating system, then believe it all you like. But when you run out and try one of the machines, you'll realize there's a lot more to it.

          But thats really the whole point... Apple's going to Intel, ergo their motherboard and chipset choices will be the same as everybody else's (I'd imagine they'll use Intel-brand boards and chipsets,

  • Perhaps, a licensed version soon? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Blindman ( 36862 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:31PM (#13307079) Journal
    Apple has to realize that there is a demand for their software of the x86 PC. Obviously, there would be problems if they had to support all the varieties of x86 PC hardware, but they could at least try to provide a version that works for the customers willing to use it.
    • Apple can notice the demand all it wants, but in order to produce the quality that they must to stay competitive, they _must_ limit their hardware install base, or they _must_ grow to being the size of Microsoft overnight.

      Simply handing off driver creation to the companies isn't an effective way of ensuring something will work. Many companies will half-ass a driver just to get their product, others won't even put that much effort in to it.

      OS X is a great operating system. Apple has the right to demand

  • Dupe? (Score:5, Funny)

    by JLyle ( 267134 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:34PM (#13307098) Homepage
    It has been widely reported all over the Internet that it is extremely easy to get the Intel port of OS X to run on regualar PC boxes.
    Yes, for example, it was reported [slashdot.org] on Slashdot just yesterday.

  • OSX DRM similar to ITMS DRM (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:36PM (#13307125)
    It seems to me that the philospophy behind OS X DRM is exactly the same as ITMS DRM - the DRM is just there to say "we'd rather you not do that" but they don't take a lot of steps to stop the people that work around it.

    Really this makes the most sense. Any kind of DRM is going to be broken eventually, so it makes sense to do a quick and cheap effort to stop casual users but not to expend a huge amount of money or time on an effort that is, in the end, futile.

    So the shipping version will also probably have some light protections on it but I'm sure it will be cracked and spread shortly.

    The interesting thing I read is that as a result of being able to run this on other boxes, people are writing new drivers for devices not covered before - if the source for these drivers is public it could drive more devices to work under OSX (even on the PPC) than did before!

  • Linux in on the act... (Score:5, Informative)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @03:42PM (#13307197)
    ha ha... Linux was used to achieve the feat... basically as the midwife OS used in the copying act before kickstarting the new OSX image...

    1. Download "VMWare files for patched Mac OS X Tiger Intel" from your favorite torrent site. (Hint: Use the search function).


    2. Copy tiger-x86-flat.img from the archive to an external USB drive (it's 6gb)

    3. Download Ubuntu Live CD (link) ... be sure you get the "Live CD"!!

    4. Burn the ubuntu iso, stick it in your pc, and boot it! (make sure you have your bios set to boot to CD)

    5. Once ubuntu boots and the gui finally comes up, hook up the USB drive you copied the 6gb image to. A window should pop up showing the contents of the drive. Take note of where its mounted. It should be /Devices/Yourdrivesvolumename

    6. Open a terminal window and cd to that directory (/Devices/Yourdrivesvolumename). Do an "ls" to make sure you are in the right place (you should see the 6gb img file.

    7. In the terminal window type:

    dd bs=1048576 if=./tiger-x86-flat.img of=/dev/hda

    Replace hda with the correct drive! If you only have one drive, its probably hda. Thats what mine was. You are about to erase this entire drive so make sure youve got it right and make sure you want to do this! Hit enter. It takes a while... took my vaio about 9 minutes.

    8. When it's done, remove the ubuntu disc and shut down the pc. Disconnect your usb drive. Thats it! When you power it back on, OS X should boot!
    • Does it still work if you use the Ubuntu PPC Live CD?

    • Re:but before you begin... (Score:5, Funny)

      by whyde ( 123448 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:21PM (#13307598)
      This sounds just like a set of open-source bomb defusing instructions I read:

              1. Remove bomb housing

              2. Unscrew blasting cap cover, counter-clockwise

              3. Locate red wire with a white stripe

              4. Cut red wire with white stripe near blast cap connector

              5. Now the bomb should be defused, but before you begin, move the bomb to a remote, secured area and wear appropriate protective gear.

  • Just like Microsoft got rich by allowing distribution of pirated windows.

    Then, if at the appropriate time (let's say 4 or 5 months from now) they OFFICIALLY RELEASE Mac OS/X for Intel platforms...

    The heck, release TWO versions: "Official Mac" (which is obviously going to be cheaper), and "Broad Intel".

    And I, for one, would welcome our new Apple Overlords. And no, I'm not kidding.

  • Sell a "dev kit" version of OS X for x86 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by angryflute ( 206793 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:02PM (#13307406) Homepage
    This way Apple can make money by selling legitimate copies of OS X to the geek/hacker/developer community, and not have to worry about fully supporting the operating system for the average computer user. This version would, after all, be for "development purposes only".

    It would also have a legitimate purpose for Apple, too: It would further encourage software development for the company's MacIntel line.

    The hacker/geek community gets to build their own gray box OS X systems, and Apple still makes most of its money with average computer users through its hardware. Furthermore, more software is developed by independent programmers. Everybody wins.

  • restricted hardware set (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:02PM (#13307416)
    Okay, so Apple may not have to implement any DRM type scheme here, AND not have to support all hardware under the sun. They can do like any other x86 vendor does - here's what we sell. Our OS runs on this just fine. If you don't have drivers for YOUR system, that's an awful shame, but not really our problem, since it's not our hardware. We support OS what we sell _on what hardware we sell it_. Now, you may be able to build a system using similar enough hardware to what Apple sells, and that's okay - as long as you've bought a legal copy of the OS. :)

    I'm _seriously_ jonesing for a Yonah-based 12" PowerBook. *Homer Simpson drooling sound here*

  • as a computer maker, Apple is done (Score:3, Informative)

    by RealityProphet ( 625675 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:05PM (#13307438)
    We have seen this time and time again in the computer industry: commodity hardware puts niche makers out of business. SGI toyed with Intel architecture, about a month before going belly up. DEC Alphas. Sega couldn't compete in the console market, and instead turned their efforts into porting their trademarks (e.g. Sonic) to other systems. Nintendo will soon follow, or die. Apple is just the latest in a very long list to have their hardware market commoditized right out from under them. They have some very cool software products that many people seem to like (iTunes notwithstanding). Maybe they can turn into a software only company, or a services-oriented company that gives their software away for free.
    • So you're projecting into a future that doesn't yet exist because of companies that don't share the same business models that happened to fail?

      You use Sega, for example, but fail to note that the forces that killed Sega (commoditization) hasn't killed Nintendo (Gameboy Advance, Gameboy DS) and hasn't killed Sony (Playstation, Playstation 2). You bring up SGI, but then can't account for the fact that commoditization hasn't killed IBM (who has their own CPU and architecture, Power and PowerPC, used in superco
      • You use Sega, for example, but fail to note that the forces that killed Sega (commoditization) hasn't killed Nintendo (Gameboy Advance, Gameboy DS) and hasn't killed Sony (Playstation, Playstation 2).

        The Playstation was the primary impetus behind Nintendo's fall from grace. They can sustain a massive amount of financial pressure and undersell Nintendo at every turn because they have a tremendous amount of other sources of income. Nintendo has their game console. It is hard to undersell on your only source

        • Ah, I get you now.

          I will have to respectfully disagree, because I own a Mac and I still wish to see Apple continue to make Macs for the foreseeable future. It is not improbably, in a crazy reality, that Macs become PCs (and vice versa) because Apple will have Intel's ear, and Intel will have Apple's manufacturing interests; in the same way that, after Apple bought NeXTStep, NeXTStep became Apple, Apple adopting Intel CPUs might make PCs directly descended from Macs.

          As for being done with the computer market

  • It's simple psychology really... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dduck ( 10970 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:05PM (#13307439) Homepage
    You can't give it away.

    People are going to wonder what's wrong with it

    What you can do is charge for it, if it's good enough to charge for, or else "let" people steal it. The last bit is the really really clever bit of marketing.

    I run a rather successful software business (for the niche, mind you), and early on made the decission not to copy protect the software per se, but to personalize each copy sold with a user name. This way, anyone who wants to steal it can, but will have to look at someone else's name every time they start it. If they can live with that, they either can't afford the software anyway, and are welcome to it - it's assistive technology, which no-one sane or normal uses for "fun" - or they are just the kind of people who don't pay for software, and never will, so why bother trying to stop them?

    Make it easy for them to steal it: The thrill will make it seem even sweeter to the last category - the people who just have to try stuff - and make them love, and thus recommend, it even more. You can't stop them anyway, and trying is only going to make them mad and negative.

  • It's theirs. Get over it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dduck ( 10970 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:16PM (#13307533) Homepage
    Guess I have some karma to burn, so here goes:

    To the ones bitching over the (very very low, IMHO) possibility that Apple will NOT release OS-X for generix x86:
    It's theirs. They made it. They can do with it whatever they want. They have that right. If you don't like it, go code a better OS yourself or something, but don't bitch at them - that only makes you sound like a kid who can't get his/her way.

    Or in playground terms: It is indeed their ball, and they can take it home with them if they feel like it.

    Yes, it's software, so you can copy it without taking the original away from someone, but that it still stealing. Just because you want it, doesn't mean that you have a right to have it - no matter how much you want it.

  • Apple should follow SGI's example (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Listen Up ( 107011 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @04:37PM (#13307712)
    Like SGI, Apple should have the similarity between common x86 hardware and Apple specific x86 hardware end at the CPU pins. Just because Apple wants to use x86 CPU's does not mean they have to let anything else from the CPU pins back be common x86 compatible. That would easily solve the pirating problem.
    • And have you seen anything from SGI lately?????? Who here has an awesome SGI box sitting under their desk at home, or in the office... you may have hit the nail on the head but you forgot to move your thumb out of the way. Apple shouldn't be doing anything like SGI if they want to remain a profitable company.

  • The "Piracy is good for Apple" reasoning is faulty (Score:3, Informative)

    by guidryp ( 702488 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @05:20PM (#13308014)
    It seems like half the comments here are along the lines of piracy will be great for Apple. I get the impression a lot of these folks think Dvorak still has a clue.

    Let us think this through a bit. I am of the mind that selling the OS for generics, piracy or even giving it away for free! Will not have much positive effect on Mac market share. Reasons:

    1: Statistically insignificant numbers of people change the OS that the machine came with. Plain and simple. Apples best bet for increasing market share is to sell more machines.

    Why?

    2: Installation is a pain, 99% of people never re-install.

    Installing and maintaining multiple OS's is non trivial and is not undertaken lightly by most folks. I built my last 5 computers, install my own OS's, did dual and triple boot setups. But yet my windows is sufferring windows rot right now and I really dread the idea of doing another re-install. It is a royal PITA.

    How about comparison to something else alternative:

    3: Market share when something is universally acclaimed, trivial to install and Free! Firefox 10%. Think about this. The vast vast majority aren't even interested in upgrading their browser which is a trivial operation and free.
    I would estimate at least 100 fold uptake in browsers over whole OS's. So at best this would gain maybe .1 % market share due to even a free OSX.

    Addressing the most tired simplistic argument:

    3. Piracy worked for microsoft didn't it? Er No? Where you sleeping? Microsoft is a marketing juggernaut, that had essentially no competition. They also made sure, by hook or by crook that almost all PC's shipped with Windows. Piracy may have helped Office along, but windows was a done deal. One other tiny detail. MS wasn't facing an incumbent monopoly.

    Finally the main point. Apple must sell more macs to raise market share.

  • Buying a Mac (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eminence ( 225397 ) <akbrandtNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday August 12, 2005 @05:59PM (#13308283) Homepage
    This whole thing helped me decide to buy a Mac. You see, I have a two year 1.3 Gig Athlon based PC, so to really benefit from this hack I would have to upgrade it. That would mean I would have to spend about a $100 on a new processor, like AMD 64, and a new motherboard, possibly new memory and another hard-disk (to move stuff from my older, smaller drives to make room for the OSx86 image). I think I would reach $500, maybe less, but what I really need at this point is a laptop, not a beefed up desktop. So, I would be looking for laptops with Centrino Pentium 4M, like the Vaio they run it on, that would be at least $1000, but closer $1400 - $1500 I think. Whatever I choose I would be left with a PC while what I really want is a Mac, not a PC, I want to have a stable workstation, Unix based and pleasing to use - that's why I bother at all with OS-X.

    So, in the end, I'm just buying a PowerBook next week. Unless I hear a really good rumor that a new major version of these would be coming out in Paris next month.

  • Slashdot = site for clueless morons. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shippo ( 166521 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @06:36PM (#13308496)
    I have never read so much utter crap in my life.

    The development version of Mac OS X for Intel has been designed to run on a specific Intel motherboard, which co-incidentally is the same model as support by the PC port of Darwin. It's purely designed for proving that PPC code will run on an Intel chip when the source has been successfully tweaked - nothing more. It's just a quick and dirty hack.

    YOU CAN'T READ ANYTHING INTO THIS PRE-PRODUCTION SYSTEM - JUST GET IT INTO YOUR THICK GEEKY SKULLS NOW!

    When Apple finally release Intel machines the hardware will be significantly different to a run of the mill PC - some hardware devices appearing in a different place, others being present at all, and so on. The OS will need very specific drivers. Also it's more than likely that there will be some other forms of protection to further limit the hardware it will run on.

    Don't bother replying to me as I can't be bothered to read the crap posted to this site any more.

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