So obviously there is much controversy all over the computing world about Apple's announcement, as well there should be. It seems as though Apple has finally decided it should be targeting mass markets, too, since Jobs said they plan on having more offerings like the Mac Mini. Personally, I think Apple did the right thing. Hopefully the PPC architecture will still live on somewhere other than XBOX 360 and handhelds.
Also, John C. Dvorak, here, made it a point to mention that he now thinks Linux will be hit significantly harder than any other operating systems due to Apple's shift. He predicts that many developers will forgo writing and distributing open source software for Linux since they can now do it for Mac and they have better user interfaces and more intuitive design. He also says that some never really cared much for open source and now can develop for OS X and sell their code for profit. Well, I disagree completely. People who write open source software do so for many more reasons other than eye candy, ideology or profit. I'm not going to get into it but great organizations doing great things, similar to Summer of Code, will ensure that there is a healthy stream of high quality FOSS developers for years to come.
Dvorak's final comment was that he sees this as a major threat to Red Hat and it's business. Now, I've been a Dvorak fan for quite some time, but I must say, this is pure crack. Anyone who knows anything about Red Hat's business model would surely know that the markets for RHEL and OS X are so completely different, they shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. What Dvorak fails to see is that many more people are replacing UNIX with Linux and not Windows with Linux. So barring Apple allowing installation of their server offering on stock hardware, I really don't see why Red Hat or any other Linux centric product distributor should be worried. Apple is still way to closed minded to begin thinking about expanding to the mainstream server or embedded markets.
Otherwise, haven't been up to much lately. Working on getting some python/xmlrpclib foo to work with some graphing foo to make some pretty pictures of things. Also, spent a fair bit of time trying to troubleshoot broken hardware today. As Warren mentioned in a post a few days ago, broken hardware sucks, it took forever trying millions of combinations of hardware to finally figure out what was wrong. What's even worse than broken hardware is when manufacturers decide to change specs mid production without changing revisions. This makes problems significantly harder than they need to be.
Oh well, fun fun fun.
