Back Up
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, June 14th 2005 at 7:52am
Well, everything’s back up and can all be accessed from that static IP in the meantime until the DNS servers come around :)
The new host is Site5.
…still going
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, June 14th 2005 at 3:05am
Damn that’s a lot of forum! It’s been over an hour and forty minutes already and the database is still busy importing …. sigh
I’ll have to check it out in the morning…
Forums almost back
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, June 14th 2005 at 1:20am
I’m importing the SQL now.
You’d be surprised how long it takes to source a 22MB SQL file. Yes, the forum contains 22MB of pure text. phpMyAdmin actually timed out trying to deal with importing scripts the ‘easy’ way, and my SSH access isn’t enabled yet …
Logged in via mySQL remotely and it’s running queries like mad. Hopefully it’ll only take a few more minutes.
Moving… (expect downtime)
Posted by Skrud at Monday, June 13th 2005 at 7:42pm
Well, it’s time to be moving web hosts. You will experience downtime before the DNS’s update.
Apples on Intel
Posted by Skrud at Monday, June 6th 2005 at 3:28pm
So it’s official … Apple is moving to Intel-based processors. And not even some super-awesome PPC-core based processor, but the boring old Pentium at that! At first I was shocked, aghast, and confused. The PowerPC processors are some super-awesome CPUs, based on a RISC architecture. They have much faster processing speeds than x86 CPUs, and it’s no wonder that both Sony and Microsoft are using a PPC core processor for their next-gen consoles: PlayStation 3 and XBox 360.
Yet Apple’s moving away from PPC? Interesting…
It took a while for this to sink in … but what this really means is that Apple software products are no longer going to be dependent on Apple hardware. That means I could go out and by “Tiger - the Intel version” and put it on my home PC. … So could everyone else.
There’s more too… In a report released a couple of days ago from MacDailyNews, it seems that the Mac OS install base is about 16% – and that Mac users tend to buy more software than Windows users. Why is that? There is certainly no lack of torrents. (I have two theories on this… (1) the “normal” people that buy macs don’t know about pirated software (and good for them?), and (2) people are more likely to buy software if it doesn’t cost about the same as a downtown apartment, complete with hookers). I for one am not adverse to paying $60 for iWork, if I’ll actually use it, while I’ll never plunk down the full $900+ for Microsoft Office, or even the $250 for the Office Student Edition.
If, all of a sudden, hardware is no longer a barrier for Apple products, then how many people would be switching to Mac OS X? Even just comparing the $150 price tag of Tiger with the $464 for Windows XP Pro SP2 (according to NCIX)… what do you think that means? How many more people will buy iWork over Microsoft Office (well, at least Word and Powerpoint) if it even works on Dell flavour-of-the-month $450 PC?
Okay but enough about prices … I hate numbers. The point is, that Apple is removing a significant barrier in the adoption of their products, and they’re entering the same arena as Windows and Linux in terms of cross-platformability. I bet Microsoft is a little scared. Apple has an excellent reputation when it comes to Mac OS X, and they’re getting more popular by the day thanks to the hugely successful iPod, among other things. On top of all that, Mac OS X, being Unix-based, will work flawlessly with anything that’s running any flavour of Unix. There’s no need to for tinkering or hacking around or finding annoying workarounds to get it to work in a Unix environment.
What about the fact that using an x86 processor would mean that all that software which currently exists - compiled only for Windows - would now run natively in a Mac environment? VirualPC does a great job of emulating, but if you can run stuff natively, then you won’t even be limited when it comes to gaming on a Mac. Do you think Microsoft will port Direct-X to an Intel-based MacOS in order to sell more games? Probably not, because that would pretty much kill their last remaining advantage. But what if you could get games on your Mac to use existing DirectX libraries that live on a Windows partition in a dual-booting system? (You can already do this sort of thing with NTFS drivers on Linux to enable NTFS write support)…
There’s a flipside to this whole situation as well, that Apple’s hardware would become more popular as well. What about people who were previously turned off by the fact that they’re have to use Mac OS – as foreign as it can be to comfortable Windows users. Now they could get themselves a beautiful-looking PowerBook, and have Windows on it. They’d be comfortable … well, until it crashes. :P
Earlier today on the forums I said I probably wouldn’t buy a Mac if it was Intel-based. I’m still not sure. The PowerPC processor was one of the influencing factors of my purchase. They’re smooth and fast. If Macs were all using the same Intel processors as everyone else … then I probably would have bought an IBM ThinkPad or something of the sort, and then I could just put OS X on it and reap all the benefits. It really is all about the OS … I absolutely love it. The hardware is little more than a complimentary commodity – even if it _is_ in fact, top-notch hardware.
I think the biggest obstacle regarding the switch would not be about compatibility issues with existing software - since Apple’s Rosetta emulation software seems to accomplish that well. The biggest problem is going to be keeping up to date with different kinds of hardware. Making sure that drivers exist for different peripherals and graphics cards and network cards and scsi cards and all that other stuff. One thing Apple has always maintained is the philosophy of “It just works”. I can attest to the fact that I’ve never had to fiddle with anything to get things working on my Mac – things just work. But moving to a hardware-independent level means that there’s this whole bag of worms being opened that could either make or break Apple’s transition. Without the tight control over their hardware, could Apple still make everything work as smoothly as it does now? Or will everything resort to crossing your fingers and hoping that new graphics card you installed won’t set your computer on fire…
I’m really glad I got the last line of PowerBooks with PPC processors. :D
