by Crompee at 6th Apr 5:40pm

A) my windows XP very rarely ever breaks.
B) and that means?
C) the windows look can be edited, google desktop can be downloaed and installed, and windows has all the editing tools that i require.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 5 — After long imploring computer users to "think different" and defining the Macintosh as a lone bulwark against the Windows onslaught, Apple Computer has decided to open the gate, at least a bit.

Two decades after the first Mac arrived, Apple said Wednesday that it would offer users of its latest models a simple way to run the Microsoft Windows operating system as well as its own.

That means a single Apple computer will run programs written for either the Mac or Windows, though it will have to shut down one system to start the other.

The move was greeted with exuberance even among the loyal cult of Macintosh enthusiasts who sustained Apple through many bleak years before its resurgence on the strength of its iPod music player. Its sleek machines have long been objects of consumer lust but are frequently passed over in favor of more pedestrian computers that run Windows, leaving Apple with about 5 percent of the personal computer market.

Wall Street analysts and computer industry experts also greeted the move as an obvious and potentially lucrative one for Apple, whose stock jumped almost 10 percent, ending the trading day at $67.21, up $6.04.

"The religion has changed," said Charles Wolf, a financial analyst at Needham & Company, a New York investment firm. "Apple is saying we have the chance to really build the Macintosh platform, and although there are risks, we're going to do it."

Indeed, although much is still made of the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft, and Steven P. Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, has continued to poke fun at Microsoft's struggles to modernize Windows, Apple has steadily moved to accommodate itself to the rest of the computing world.

Shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997, Mr. Jobs persuaded Microsoft to commit to make its Office software run on his computers and invest in his company. More recently, in 2003, he developed a version of his popular iTunes software that runs on Windows-based computers, giving him an opening to sell his wildly popular iPods to tens of millions of PC users.

Last year Mr. Jobs stunned the computer world by announcing that he would break away from his alliance with I.B.M. and recreate the Macintosh based on Intel microprocessors. It was the switch to Intel chips, long the standard in the Windows world, that opened the door to Mac-Windows harmony.

Through all of these moves, Mr. Jobs has managed to maintain his loyal base of customers. In fact the Macintosh religion can still be palpably felt among those who have remained loyal to the user-friendly computer even as its market share dipped below 3 percent.

"I love the Mac platform, I just hope I won't have to boot Windows even for Photoshop in a few years," Alexandros Roussos, a student at the University of Paris who is founder and editor of the MacCulture network, a group of Web sites for Macintosh enthusiasts.

Wednesday's move also won an important endorsement from Apple's other co-founder, Stephen G. Wozniak, who long ago left the company but remains a vocal Macintosh user and is idolized by the Mac faithful.

"It's a great thing for Apple," he told a reporter by e-mail. "I don't see the earth being rocked, but I can now recommend Apple hardware to a lot more people. One pitch is that if Windows gets too frustrating and unbearable and unsafe, then they can easily switch."

And Microsoft took the opportunity to salute the move, and itself. "Windows is a great operating system," a Microsoft statement said. "We're pleased that Apple customers are excited about running it, and that Apple is responding to meet the demand."

But even as it introduced the new capability, in the form of a free program called Boot Camp available for download, Apple tried with not-so-subtle body language to play down its significance.

Ever the showman, Mr. Jobs had been accused of excess in a recent product introduction, when he called reporters to Apple's headquarters on short notice for a presentation that included a leather glove to protect the finish of an iPod music player. But he was nowhere in evidence for Wednesday's announcement, which was made in a simple news release.

"Obviously ever since the Macintosh was moved to Intel, we've been getting this question from customers," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, explaining the Windows decision. "We always said it's possible."

Its muted announcement notwithstanding, Apple did a significant amount of technical work to make Windows run cleanly on a Macintosh computer. Part of the challenge was writing software modules called device drivers that connect the Microsoft software to the Macintosh hardware components like disk drives and video displays.

by Yanker at 6th Apr 4:32pm

But the best thing about Macs is A) the OS is nearly completely stable, B) The OS is compiled for the specific hardware its run on

Gentoo was originally designed for the x86 architecture, but it has been ported to many others due to the highly-portable nature of Linux, gcc, glibc and Portage. It currently runs on the x86, PowerPC, PowerPC 970, SPARC, AMD64, IA64, MIPS, DEC Alpha, PA-RISC, ARM, and zSeries/s390 architectures. Gentoo was the first distribution to offer a fully functional 64bit Linux computing environment (user space and the kernel) for the PowerPC 970 architecture.

by Jack at 10th Apr 3:47pm

http://www.gentoo.org



Why buy a Mac when any old PC with Gentoo has the same good points?