SciFi's Profile

I'll go you one better. I spent part of a recent lump sum on a PowerMac Dual G5 and 23" Cinema display -- close enough to my "dream machine" I've always wanted. I've been using a vastly-upgraded original Sawtooth all this time (it won't support the Dual-G4 kits, only single G4 upgrades, that's how old it is). It looks like it'll be my last Apple machines period. I've said on other fora (yes I'm the same SciFi dude) that Apple has become simply another clone-maker now. The motherboards and chipsets etc. are made by/for/at Intel the company. Nothing is solely Apple-designed -- parts that actually matter -- nothing "special" -- anymore. Once a software or hardware exploit is invented for Intel's EFI / BIOS / CPU chips etc., there will be nothing native to keep it from infecting the MacTels. Apple is now swimming in the same pool that other companies are in, in this regard. Some ppl talk about a "wall" between XP/NTFS partitions and OSX. Bull -- it is still the same physical drive and set of cables and wires and chips. An exploit is designed to get around such meagre hurdles. OSX/x86 is common enough code with XP that an exploit will know how to patch OSX modules and start spreading like wildfire no matter which system is booted-up. Apple lost a wonderful partner with IBM. They should've worked together better. I'm so down with this "switch" that I will try writing a snail-mailed letter to Apple's Board of Directors to convince them to continue making and supporting PPC-based machines. It is more than just the worries about viruses etc. -- it is about technical issues, too, such as Endianness (I *need* a big-endian platform for what I do). Supporting two platforms that are designed in-house can be done, if they really want to listen to some of their paying customers and not lose the still-majority out there. Other companies support more than one platform like this; Apple can do it if they really care about these worries some of us have. Apple should be concentrating on their own pledge and promise to make OSX run Linux apps better -- n.b. run Linux apps *in* OSX. That means supporting the open / free projects going on everywhere. This BootCamp stuff is like stabs in the backs of all such projects. Soon enough, developers everywhere will tell you to run their app under XP and forget OSX altogether, and especially forget us PPC ppl. I'm the one who coined the term "PPC Marginalisation" many months ago, btw. There won't be such a thing as "Mac Marginalisation" when MacTels can run XP apps. Do you see what I'm trying to say here? I'm not going to sway from my educated opinion -- I've worked on so many different computers over the last 35 years, yes even "before PCs" (guess what I'm talking about) -- this is a deep-down gut feeling of the kind I've learned to trust. Go ahead, be my guest to run infective code on your MacTels, see if I care, you've been warned.