PBS | I, Cringely . April 6, 2006 – A Whole New Ball Game

Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me…

3 Responses to “PBS | I, Cringely . April 6, 2006 – A Whole New Ball Game”

1. Steve says:

   April 8, 2006 at 10:03 pm

   One thing about that though-actually, several THOUSAND things about that-all the diversity in Wintel land. By that I mean that you have to look long and hard (often in the same order/batch of PCs from a major OEM) to find two PCs with the same hardware. Not so for Macs. What does this mean for support/legacy issues in the OS. TREMENDOUS THINGS. Just stop and think about it. We diss Windoze all the time (and with good reason most of the time) but Billy G. and company have put upon themselves a herculian task-to support an absolutely STUPEFYING kalediscope of devices (have you ever tried to find just the EXACT driver for a particular ATI video card? A particular sound card made by ANY-FREAKING-BODY?!?!?!) AND provide backwards-compatibility of software that compares to making cars drivable by stablehands of the 13th century. Of course, they really have no one but themselves (and their incredible greed) to blame for this, but they have raised expectations to rather high levels. I mean, the list of old stuff that will run on XP is incredible! No wonder that mother has such problems! Having to have that kind of compatibility just BEGS problems of ALL kinds-and that is what Apple is looking to jump into if they start selling OSX for X-86. I think that they think if people can dual-boot, and use Windoze for what they HAVE to, and OSX for what they WANT to, that the wonder and magic of OSX will win them over and they will find a way to convert completely. Or maybe not, they will have made the purchase by then, and it won’t matter if they run “Plan 9 from Outer Space” on their MacBook Pro, Apple will have it’s dime.

   Just my $0.02….I could be wrong….probably. So could Cringely.

2. Dave says:

   April 9, 2006 at 8:18 am

   True, true, and true. But…

   One of the things that Linux has done is to open/expose the need for open, driver specs. And I wouldn’t expect the Mac OS to work on anything that XP won’t so right there is a large reduction in devices that will/would need drivers written for them. Also there is the driver emulator (can’t remember the name right now) layer (?) that has been developed (again for linux) to allow for the use of the actual windows drivers. And since OS X is a BSD varient I suspect the emulator will work just fine. Processor and bus speeds being what they are this shouldn’t be a bottleneck or much of one anyway.

   I am (quite) often wrong and could be here also, but this line of thought makes a LOT of sense in light of the Apple events of the last year…

3. Steve says:

   April 10, 2006 at 5:42 am

   Hmmm….could be interesting. A driver emulater layer (a hardware abstraction layer of sorts, no doubt) could be a GOOD thing, if it could get more universal adoption. Drivers are, without a doubt, one of the biggest PITAs in the support world. Do I hear any amens? I mean, all devices:
   A. receive input of a standard form.
   B. produce output of a standard form.
   Why can’t we abstract what happens in between, especially since (as you point out) nowdays we have gobs of processor power sitting around. In a few years we will be able to task a processor just to driver management and not miss it! Now THERE’S an idea……