Rui Carmo- Russell fans the flames on the Apple-Intel rumors originally kindled by Paul Thurrott, recently confirmed by Scoble and which mainstream media seems to be going nuts about. Gruber has already debunked this thoroughly, of course, but there are all sorts of actual business reasons (as opposed to geek hysteria) for this to be true, despite the effective freeze on buying decisions it would bring.
- My take: as far as rumors go, I still think it's more likely that Apple is trying to get a bead on Intel's WiMax chipset, get them to do some sort of glue logic (hopefully they have enough sense to steer away from the graphics chipsets), or get them into the PowerPC fray as a silicon fab.
- Still, rumors abound, like this mention of PowerBook G5s. Or maybe there's an Apple tablet in the works - what the heck, it's Saturday, nothing has to make sense anyway...
- Incidentally, hype monkeys will be delighted to be reminded that yes, Mac OS X has been running on Intel for years now. It's called Darwin, and even lacking Aqua goodness, it's long been in motion (pretty much since the NeXT days, actually, save for a few hiccups). And guess what, it makes for a pretty mean server - but you can't get it to run on just about anything without a lot of pain, since it doesn't even handle common network cards...
- But before going into yet another howling frenzy, those very same monkeys would do well to consider this: although it would be a trivial thing for Apple to create an Xcode profile that got gcc to spit out Intel opcodes and make "porting" a simple recompile (plus the usual amount of tweaking), of course, the old mirage of getting Mac OS X to run on your home PC will never happen - Macs are more than the PowerPC CPU, they're a carefully matched mix of hardware (most of the architecture is subtly different from your average Intel box, and I'm not talking about the CPU glue...), firmware (there's no PC-compatible BIOS), and software (device drivers, for instance). So if Apple pulls this stunt (and they're probably the only ones that can manage it), the end result will still be a Mac, and Mac OS X won't run on your Dell.
- Moving on to more interesting stuff, Melo (who recently got iconized, complete with his trademark smirk) is going to Reboot7, boldly going where no other, er... Portuguese geek icon has gone before. And he's packing...
- He also points to XAMPP's all-in-one Apache/Perl/PHP/mySQL packs, which seem a very nice addition to my usual quick-let's-set-up-a-new-test-environment woes. No mod_python, but hey, it had to have some flaws...