Well, It turned out I was half right.

My first big question was what endian the new Mac will be. This was answered by reading Apple’s developer documentation. The new Macs will be little endian. Hmm, has any other platform in the history of computer operating systems supported both endians? How about NeXT and NT. But we know what happened to both of those operating systems. NeXT became Mac OS X and NT dropped support for the PPC.

My second question was how will Apple keep people from installing retail boxes of Mac OS X on non Macintosh computers? The line item in the license that prohibits users from doing this is completely unenforceable. Technically, Apple could use some secret chip in their Intel Macs to keep the OS from running on white boxes. But I’ve learned a lot by writing emulation software recently and I know Microsoft’s Virtual PC for Windows and other x86 virtualization environments will quickly come up with ways to make the OS think it is running on a real Macintosh. Apple can not stop this thru legal means.

This means Apple’s hardware business will die. I give it three more years. In other words, a year after the first Intel Macintoshes are produced virtualization software will negate the need for me to buy a Macintosh from Apple.

Since I like Mac OS X, I hope it won’t die along with Apple’s hardware business.

I just finished reading John Grubers latest article on the Apple/Intel story. I pretty much agree with what he is saying. It boils down to: “Whaa?”. But what if Apple used an Intel coprocessor? Either an entire x86 or some new chip in addition to the main PowerPC.

Managing fonts on Mac OS X is hard. Much harder that it needs to be. By default there are three folders where fonts can reside. I am angry that Adobe decided to add additional font folders. These new font folders (one in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts and on in each application folder for InDesign and Illustrator) are only used by Adobe application. The system will never look into these folders to allow other application access to these fonts.
The only reason Adobe created these folders is greed.

On my way to work today, I saw a billboard that said (in really large letters): Fixing Email. Not just a job, but a passion.
I’ve been running an email server on the internet for five years. I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason spam is such a problem is because email it easy and cheap to send email. So stopping spam (at it’s source) can only be accomplished by making email hard and expensive to send. I believe that is the wrong approach.
I use bayesian classification to filter my email on my machine. I have a 99.93% success rate. The specific product is PopFile and I am here to tell you it works very well.

A long time ago I read the original Dune series by Frank Herbert. Just recently a friend of mine gave me a copy of Dune, The Butlerian Jihad and I am really enjoying it.

My original boss at where I worked left about two years after I was hired. My current boss decided to take a picture of the Village People and substitute our faces as a parting gift. Hilarity ensude!

Extra points if you can identify me and my coworkers.

My wife got a new dog recently. A Rat Terrier she named Olivia. She promptly chewed up a Tandy Delux Color Computer joystick. This made me very angry. I eventually go over it.

• Using a Quadra 610 running Mac OS 8.1 I can create a bootable RAM disk installed with System 7.5.
• Apple Disk Copy from System 7.5 will read more disk under System 7.5 than 8.1.

I been an avid read reader of folklore.org for a while now. Recently Andy Hertzfeld released a book that I’ve been meaning to buy.
But from the begining, I found this article to be the most interesting. Ever since I’ve been trying to figure out the execution address of the easter egg. Fortunately someone posted it. I’ve made some screen shots (from minivmac) for everyone to enjoy.



And a close up:

Since I am having a lot of fun porting this code to the Mac, I decided to share a screen shot!