On Monday, October 21, 2002, at 08:14 PM, Donald Keenan wrote: > I think it's time for Apple to shake up its advertising campaign. The > new 17" FP iMac deserves a better market share. > Donald > PS Speaking of OSes, I'm reading a "History of Unix for Dummies" kind > of > article for my web development class. It suggests that Unix held or has > the promise of running on any kind of computer. What is being done to > OS > X to make its Unix code machine specific? Is something in the code > specific to the processor? Is it the specifications of the GUI laid > over > the Unix code that makes it incompatible with anything but a mac?
most UNIX distributions are specific to a fairly limited scope of hardware. SunOS/Solaris, for instance, runs on Sun machines and i386 machines. a little background on programming would probably help understand this better. programs are written in code that's human readable. in this form, it's portable to any machine you want. however, it's not very useful in this form. it has to be compiled. after compiling, it's machine readable code. the bummer with compiling is that it makes a program machine-dependent AND OS-dependent. in order to get your code to run on a different OS or a different machine, you have to compile it specifically to run on that hardware/OS. OS's are just the same. for all we know, Apple has written OS X so that it'll run on Macs, PCs, mainframes, UNIVAXen, your car, and several popular brands of toaster ovens. however, the CD they're selling only contains the machine-code for Mac hardware. The OS X CD (and any application CD you own) contains machine code ... Apple (or Intuit, or Adobe) is not going to distribute their apps in human-readable code, because that would allow (a) people to modify the code, (b) their competitors to learn possible company secrets, and (c) someone to make superficial changes and sell their product under a different name. HTH Jeremy -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Check our web site for refurbished PowerBooks | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-Books list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:G-Books@;mail.maclaunch.com> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:G-Books-off@;mail.maclaunch.com> For digest mode, email: <mailto:G-Books-digest@;mail.maclaunch.com> Subscription questions: <mailto:listmom@;lemlists.com> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-books%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
