The collected works of gandalf

Hello,

first a short line of presentation: some people may know me under this nickname from the IRC channel.

My idea is to port some selected applications that have "alien" toolkits to Motif. Mainly I think from the "evil" gtk, especially gtk2. I find this idea interesting because

1. motif is fast and native, so it would improve speed in applications
2. motif is native on IRIX (and other unices, think solaris, AIX) and so a port would reduce dependence clutter (and system resource usage)
3. it would greatly improve the looks !
4. it would be not a wasted effort: other platforms may benefit, I always have lesstif or openmotif installed on a *BSD box or linux box. Thew are just faster than gtk (or QT)
5. it could potentially help getting new, useful applications on older platforms, like irix5 or irix4 where getting GTK to compile would be impossible

I myself can code C fairly decently, but UI coding is not my speciality, so I seek collaboration from others. People who know Motif and/or GTK are of course welcome, since they can help understanding what is currently done in the code and how it should be done!
If you feel busy, please, keep in touch anyway, I stress the point this is a spare-time effort and I will drop into the IRC channel and discuss matters and code from time to time. No time pressure of any kind, but the more we are the better it is.

Other reasons why this can be a good idea?
There are many applications written for GTK 1. Which was horrid but still usable. Now gtk2 is out (it has a MAZE of dependencies, runs as hell on older systems and fills up your HD) and many projects are eitehr trying to seek the switch or they are looking for alternatives. Motif is usually not considered, but in that moment some more clever authors decide to make the UI more independent or anyway remove some GTK trickery.

Although the target would be porting to current Motif 2.1, which would enable IndigoMagic and CDE users, it would be nice to keep it as 1.x compatible as possible, this could mean ported applicatins could run on older computers and on lesstif.
(think about the joy of having a new prorgam for your personal iris)

Besides porting new apps, we could also develop. If not from scratch, around the globe thre are scattered motif applications no longer maintained or for other reasons "bit rotting" we could try to revamp them.

I will start a thread for each application I find interesting. For now I have only one and let me collect ideas.

Thanks in advance for possible collaborations...

Heh, epic4 is actually nice and comes preocmpiled by SGI in freeware. I would be happy to get name completion in it, any ideas ?

On other computers I usually have irssi or x-chat

I know it is not an easy task, but it is an interesting now. And yes, I coded some Motif, though never something really big.

GTK is crap, I don't care for 'eye candy" like antialiased fonts. Often I find them even disturbing. GTK looks ugly too.

Also while GTK 1.2 was reasonable, gtk 2.4 is totally out of control. I had absolutely no way to cram it and get it working on a sun ultra machine with solaris 2.6. And the hell of dependencies I had to compile and install wouldn't even fit on the disk I currently have on my SGI.

So instead of telling me GTK is better, I'd like to find people who could help me in the effort of accomplishing my task. If I had been happy with GTK I wouldn't have thought about this project, right ?

Another way would to try to revive aplications that existed for motif but that were abandoned, but this is I think more torublesome because of the bitrot...

Personally, I think Motif and GTK are ugly (code-wise) and I don't like C++, so I stick with Xlib. Now, an Ada95 framework for X11 that was similar to Java Swing, that would be great!

Well, Motif is C only (and afaik, gtk is C too) and you see most of the Xt underpinning motif and you use Xlib stuff to draw... so it is your choice.

Sure creating a front-end for an application that already has a good splitting is better and easier.
But I didn't even specificed which applications!! I just suggested the idea and looked for helpers to join in the project and the discussion got in the detail already.

So these are my suggestions

-Browsers:
1. Dillo
Dillo is fast, clean and very nice. It will never compete with mozilla or konqueror, but that is its strength.
Currently it has been proven quite portable and it is written in GTK1. The team decides to go over to FLTK probably amd during this process the abstraction of view and engine (already present) ill be improved. It is the best time right now to underline the good idea behind this division.
2. Updating and improving an existing browser like Arena or mMosaic
3. Writing a new gecko based browser native on Motif. Like galeon is for GTK/Gnome. I think that would be nice, but a lot of work that maybe would never be finished.
4. writing a motif port for the links browser graphic part.

Personally I prefer idea 1. it would rock even on older computers and it seems that the maintainers of the project are "open" to portability issues and like quality code.
Links code is spaghett. My old compiler from SGI on irix 4.0 just doesn't like it... I fixed 80% of the stuff to get the text-only version but for now no results.


The I'd think a X-Chat port to Motif would be nice too.

And a Motif version of "gaim" or "Ayttm". That could be a rewrite from scratch using the same libraries those programs use.


That is the first bunch of ideas. Porting my image filtering program to IRIX would be nice too, but it is quite tied at the moment to the Objetive-C/OpenStep architecture.

if others hav ideas or proposals join in. Although starting the dilo port asap would be good to show the interest to the dillod evel. before it is too late.

FORMS is the toolkit with which Jot, showcase and other programs are written? I like its menus (in the 6.5 version at least, the 4.0 they are a bit crude) and the design of the widgets. But SGI itself touts it as "obsolete toolkit". I never programmed it. Also I don't think it is cross-platform.

The advantage of Motif is that it would work smoothly on other Unices too and even on *BSD or Linux with OpenMotif or even better Lessitf.

hmm, I'd like too some software on my personal iris. However if not for some personal satisfaction... writing pure IrisGL is crazyness.
Also mind I don't know *GL but I always wanted to learn.

I have seen some motif+irisGL demos that are exceedingly nice. Writing an application that runs both in irisGL and openGL would be cool.

When I could compile Xftp on my personal iris I was somehow happy. Motif. and it runs fine

Also I can assure you that the showcase 3.4 that I have (a wonderful piece of SW, btw) is not motif based.

If you have old source code around we could try to compile it and if the license permits it revive it.

http://world.std.com/~xforms/

I found xforms here, but the stuff seems me little updated and also. And I found no references to the SGI toolkit and the compatibility. I wonder also if sgi provides libraries for it in irix4 and irix 6.5 ... look if you fid something suitable in /usr/include I found the runtimes in /usr/lib but they may be for compatibility only

(the excellent imageworks is forms based too)

Yes, some sort of "wrapper". It wouldn't mabe obtain the maximum performance of a native application, but would ease porting (and keeping in sync) a lot. But an intimate knowledge of QT or GTK is required, so I myself don't apply!
But if someone join sin I could try to help anyway and learn from both worlds.

Hmm, just some short comments I got when reading this:

1. About Java
I actively test and cooperate with a group creating a free, portable Java environment. It has a JVM, a compiler and a class library and lately works quite well. Ports that are not x86/linux are "on the way" and not perfectly working. But the interpreter should run on many systems and there is a JIT for many cpu's. And yes, irix/mips is "almost" there, I got it half working, but I have failures with strtod(). It just doesn't work here at my place, don't know why. It works mostly on solaris and on NetBSD too. OpenBSD is on the way; x86, ARM, MIPS, Sparc, PowerPC, PA_RISC are among the cpu's it runs off. I hope it will better to a true usability point and maybe see it in freeware...
http://www.kaffe.org

2. About a 2D graphics program. It would be nice to write one. Or better: TWO.
I researched the past two years in digital imaging and wrote some filter kernels, fourier-transform based filters, convolutions, edge-tracers. All aimed to be high-quality and mathematically correct.
http://price.sf.net
They are for cocoa/gnustep and obj-c but porting the cores around would be "easy", just tedious.

I envision two separate apps. Written in Motif. Aimed at SGI but portable to solaris, BSD, linux...
The two applications should share common traits in the interface and share the same filter architecture, so that they could be reused.

one should be a cross-pollination of imgwrks, imager editor and photoshop (in the 1.0/2.0 era) itself. That is a program aimed at the manipulation of digital images, slight retouching, mostly filters, color corrections etc. FOr the moment I see no problem with having 8bit/RGBA, but it should be expandable in the future to 16bit/RGBA at least.
A second program should do the "other" part photoshop is now widely used for. BUt which is not its vocation: painting, digital image creation or really heavy manipulation and editing. I think about Fractal Image painter, one of my ever favorites.

I would start coding the first app first. There is overlap between the two application and code should be shared, but I think that "one app fits all", the way photoshop is used now mostly, is wrong.

I want MIPS ... I realldy do hope they don't trop it...

I still don't understand why taking a box and saying it runs "linux os" (oh, how do I hate this marketing term) is a benefit or advantage...

let's stop ranting. We shall code!

If I try to run wings on my Indy with XZ (X set to truecolor) eshell aborts saying there are no opengl drivers and no suitable opengl modes were found...

Dump written 2005-1-15_23-52
Window: "<Unknown Window Name>"
Crashed in:
{"No suitable OpenGL mode found (are OpenGL drivers installed?)",
[{wings_init,video_mode_failure,0},{wings_init,init,0},{wings,init,1}]}

but...

olorin 10% /usr/gfx/gfxinfo
Graphics board 0 is "GR2" graphics.
Managed (":0.0") 1280x1024
4 GEs, 1 RE, 24 bitplanes, 4 auxplanes, 4 cidplanes, Z-buffer
GR2 revision 4, VB2.0
HQ2.1 rev A, GE7 rev B, RE3.1 rev A, VC1 rev B, MC rev C
unknown, assuming 19" monitor

sounds very reasonable; doesn't it ?


any ideas?

jdboyd wrote:
OK. First, what version of Irix are you running? I used 6.5.20f, and I am by far not an expert on how to make sure it will run on any 6.5.

Second, would you mind posting your glxinfo?

Otherwise, I'll have to add that to the list of things to look into. I have an Indy XZ, and Indigo2 with some pre-Extreme graphics at home, so I'll have to set them up at some point.

I would really like to see wings working on any machine that can run 6.5 if possible for a reasonable amount of work. It is such a cool program, and to me it recalls the SGI heyday, even if it is a fairly new program.

IRIX olorin 6.5 6.5.5m 07151432 IP22

display: :0.0
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2 Irix 6.5
server glx extensions (GLX_):
EXT_import_context, EXT_visual_info, EXT_visual_rating, SGI_swap_control,
SGI_video_sync, SGIX_fbconfig, SGIX_swap_group.
client glx version 1.1
client glx extensions (GLX_):
EXT_import_context, EXT_visual_info, EXT_visual_rating, SGI_swap_control,
SGI_video_sync, SGIX_fbconfig, SGIX_swap_group.
OpenGL vendor string: SGI
OpenGL renderer string: GR3-Elan
OpenGL version string: 1.1 Irix 6.5
OpenGL extensions (GL_):
EXT_abgr, EXT_blend_color, EXT_blend_logic_op, EXT_blend_minmax,
EXT_blend_subtract, EXT_convolution, EXT_copy_texture, EXT_histogram,
EXT_packed_pixels, EXT_polygon_offset, EXT_subtexture, EXT_texture,
EXT_texture3D, EXT_texture_object, EXT_vertex_array, SGI_color_matrix,
SGI_color_table, SGI_texture_color_table, SGIS_texture_filter4,
SGIX_texture_scale_bias, SGIX_subdiv_patch.
glu version: 1.2 Irix 6.5
glu extensions (GLU_):
EXT_abgr, EXT_nurbs_tessellator, EXT_object_space_tess, EXT_packed_pixels,
EXT_texture, SGI_filter4_parameters.

visual x bf lv rg d st r g b a ax dp st accum buffs ms
id dep cl sp sz l ci b ro sz sz sz sz bf th cl r g b a ns b
-----------------------------------------------------------------
0x20 2 pc y 2 2 c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
0x21 2 pc y 2 1 c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
0x22 4 pc y 4 1 c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
0x23 4 pc . 4 . c y . . . . . . 20 4 . . . . . .
0x24 4 tc . 4 . r y . 1 2 1 . . 20 4 16 16 16 16 . .
0x25 8 pc . 8 . c . . . . . . . 20 4 . . . . . .
0x27 8 tc . 8 . r . . 3 3 2 . . 20 4 16 16 16 16 . .
0x28 12 pc . 12 . c y . . . . . . 24 . . . . . . .
0x29 12 pc . 12 . c y . . . . . . 20 4 . . . . . .
0x2a 12 pc . 12 . c . . . . . . . 24 . . . . . . .
0x2b 12 pc . 12 . c . . . . . . . 20 4 . . . . . .
0x2c 12 tc . 12 . r y . 4 4 4 . . 24 . 16 16 16 16 . .
0x2d 12 tc . 12 . r y . 4 4 4 . . 20 4 16 16 16 16 . .
0x2e 24 tc . 24 . r . . 8 8 8 . . 24 . 16 16 16 16 . .
0x2f 24 tc . 24 . r . . 8 8 8 . . 20 4 16 16 16 16 . .
0x31 24 tc . 24 . r . . 8 8 8 . . . . 16 16 16 16 . .

after the failures I suffered on my own indy... I took the same erlang/esdl/wings tar.bz2 I used there and freeware SDL and went to an octane... just to test stuff. It has ESI graphics.

tere both testgl and testsprite seem to work (this makes me think that tomorrow I'll try those tests on my own indy). And exit without segfault.

FUrthermore on the octane I can almost run wings. It starts and I see no particular artifacts in the interface. I see the icons, the axes, the menus... the menus seem to work, I can add a cube for example (so the pop-up menu works) and I can spin the camera. I can select faces.
But some opration make everything hang. For example, with a face selected, I select "inset" from the pop-up menu and every thing hangs, no mouse cursor anymore. But I see that the apps in the background continue to work.
SO instead of killing X, I telnet remotely kill the beam... and tada my desktop is there again.
So the bugs are there and are subtle.

after the "success" of running the esdl tests that dexter run on the octane, I tried again on my indy.

I still use the stuff compiled by jdb.

the testsprite test is ok, the testgl not:

olorin 13% /opt/jdb/erlang/bin/erl -pa ../ebin
Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.3 [source] [threads:0]

Eshell V5.3 (abort with ^G)
1> testgl:go().
Command:68:SDL_GL_SetAttributeFunc: ok
Command:35:SDL_ListModesFunc: ok
Command:31:SDL_VideoDriverNameFunc: ok
Driver "x11"
Available WindowSizes [{sdl_rect,0,0,1280,1024}]
Command:34:SDL_VideoModeOKFunc: ok
Command:34:SDL_VideoModeOKFunc: ok
Command:34:SDL_VideoModeOKFunc: ok
Command:34:SDL_VideoModeOKFunc: ok
A guess at max video res is 1280x1024:32
Command:36:SDL_SetVideoModeFunc: ok
Command:69:SDL_GL_GetAttributeFunc: Segmentation fault
olorin 14%


I remember an extremely simialr problem on OpenBSD/sparc with 8bit graphics and Mesa. I wrote to both esdl and sdl teams and eachone said the problem was from the other. Esdl always replies "look at my code, it is jsut a wrapper".
I compiled SDL myself and I could run all their tests fine though

Here the siutation may be a lot different though.

I then tried to run other tests:

4> erldemo:go().
Fatal signal: Segmentation Fault (SDL Parachute Deployed)
olorin 16%

This sounds bad too, doesn´t it?

on my Indy r5k with XZ I get a kernel panic when I launch fgrun... The screen gets all black and then crash

-R

everything is still very rough and sketchy... linking problems and clear appearance problems (since SGI motif is a bit modified)... also it doesn't build with mipspro... and other bigger and smaller details...

but I have wxWidgets running on my indigo2 ! and also some of the samples too... (some are very buggy). Including the samples which embed the HTML widget (does someone here smells the odour of a small lightweight quasi-native browser?)

so the road is long, the problems are of two kinds

- specifix irix problems
- wxMotif problems, since the port is little used and maintained.

I think that if there is someone left in this community who cares for SGI, irix and motif and is not just another "woah, coloured hardware thing, now let me slap kde stuff on it" (for not saying something worse)... I think it is for the time to rise, help...

fix the motif port essentially. The sgi specific quirks are of various causes and some can be easily fixed.. some can be patched (I have some here locally) but would require a lot of work for a proper fix.

And then also help the wx apps that are around to work on wxMotif...

and we would have our native apps (well.. almost).... instead of using crappy gtk.

OpenGL is not implemented in wxMotif.


if it compiles on MipsPro it is because it was fixed yesterday night in CVS.. I'm collaborating with some of the of the wx guts and I report bugs, propose small patches...

Drag&Drop and OpenGL don't work though, they are not implemented Afaik. Getting those in would be great and would kick wxMotif closer to windows and gtk2 levels.

ok... wxMotif compiles now with MipsPro again, I could launch the first apps and the first samples. I need to clean up my sgi look patch too.

cool that opengl work for you! I was told it wasn't supported....

I am using CVS head and update it about every day... trying to ork with some of the developers to fix some of the bugs that crept in.


you can compile both with motif 1.2 and motif 2.1 but you need to use the correct headers and libraries together.... or you get a mismatch.I try to test both versions, but use 2.1. It is better supported by wx and also supports some widget features that are good to have. If motif has a future at all... then it is 2.1 version of course

I wil have a closer look today at the appearance patch again if time permits.

I was told by a developer that motif "doesn't work well on some particular architectures": it is an answer that leaves a lot open. The only thing is.. trying... maybe it is no longer true or it is something that can be fixed. A wokring GL canvas would be a nice thing to have.
Motif 2.1 should be fine.
I think hat i you want to jump on te boat and contribute to the motif port, developers will be happy (as long as you don't break anything else, but most stuff is quite well separated).

markh wrote: I found out OpenGL does work. It just isn't enabled by default.
If you run configure with the flag --with-opengl, it will compile it.
You can then run the samples cube and penguin. I didn't get isosurf to work. Bombs out with some error. I haven't looked closely yet at why.

I tried my CVS release and cube and penguin do work! isosurf not. This on linux... I'll try elsewhere later. This is encouraging!

Intel-OUTSIDE wrote: Btw, they cant call it Vista.

that name is already in use by 2 software company's and by philips electronics.

they where warned about this breach 2 days ago.

it is also the brand name of a colour film by Agfa... (a good one for non-professionals, btw). But I bet that Agfa, which is in financial troubles due to all these crappy digital cameras, won't have the money to sue microsoft.

markh wrote: I found out OpenGL does work. It just isn't enabled by default.
If you run configure with the flag --with-opengl, it will compile it.
You can then run the samples cube and penguin. I didn't get isosurf to work. Bombs out with some error. I haven't looked closely yet at why.

I tried on lnux and.. the same. but I gives an error before breaking. I found that it looks for isosurf.dat (which exists gzipped in the dir, just uncompress it) and a file called mondrian (I copied the mondrian.ico file from the sources over and renamed it). Now at least on linux it starts and works...

I have one, but I'd rather sell it together with the matched R5K/180...

emachine wrote: Hiya, I'm trying to get this to work:
http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/~bartsc ... /Main_Page

I've mostly built Kaffe ( http://www.kaffe.org ) but build dumps at end due to the jitter only supporting o32. Are there any Java 5 alternatives for IRIX or am i SOL?

hehe kaffe, kaffe, kaffe! Kaffe rules ! Well you could play with gcj.

kaffe in CVS semi-works on IRIX and linux/mips... I know because essentially, I'm the official tester for those. But intrp is the only way to go currently. Pthreads are reasonably fixed so you could try using those too. But jist... well... I did some work with a developer but the irix pain of having three different kind of ELFs is.. well, a pain.
Linux/mips is in a terrible state because... gdb is broken so it can't be debugged. But Ireally have only one mips box for testing so guys with embedded mips stuff can use it, because on SGI hardware, linux is an insult. Or, linux is an insult everywhere except when it replaces windows

Indeed, unfortunately, the isosurf crashes on irix. I tried here too. With Motif on Linux it works. I hope I can try it on netbsd soon. But penguin runs smooth and fine on my XZ

the best place to ask is in the wxwidget channel on freenode... or in their mailing lists...

Right recently there were some improvments commeited for motif! Better dialog panels and buttons.. And I have some sutff here on my HD too that needs to be cleaned and sorted out... wxMotif is not dead. let's show the workd that motif rules.

indeed, this is a lot of money. I too would have estimated the cost between 10K and 20K, a number that could have been put together.

70K could be reached only with sponsors: bugging some institution, compoany or SGI itself and make them interested in the effort.

gtk is evil...

and to really answer: no I haven't tried

well, wxMotif (wxWidgets for motif) has gotten quite decent lately! thus that part might be ok already for you.

I have to jum in this discussion...

blender on IRIX interests me quite a bit, because it is a nice piece of software, because it is small and light etc etc... (also essentially the only decent 3D package you get for irix, mac, linux and windows...)

right now I am overly busy, but some months ago I tried to get involved in the irix effort. I got the nice help from guys as Hos and other chaps from the blendercoder channel, including ton himself (to be honest, ton makes always correct statements, often says true things but is rarely of real help...).

I found it very difficult to compile blender on IRIX, compared to other platforms. The configure system came in but worked badly. I think it is out again. THe whole thing is full of small things to check for if you system is not "standard". The effect that I tried to build on three or four computers with gcc 2.95, gcc3 and mipspro and rarely succeeded. I remember I got it really building only on one I think.
It is a problem with the pre-built libraries for example...

I needed this because that crappy ghost thing is full of big and small bugs on X11. Yes, the bugs affects linux and irix and solaris, but often you don't notice that on all platforms. THe problem is, there are few/no skilled developers for X11.
Specifically there is abug that causes an incredible CPU usage on IRIX with mouse position tracking, you can notice that very well on older, express based boxes. I notice it little on a 5K indy and not at all on an octane, but my indigo2 RK4 with XZ... I cn get the CPU to 100% by just moving the mouse! A pity, because even that old machine is actually better to model than my iBook (and belnder on my centrino with radeon just plainly sucks).

Thus SGIs, even if really old, are still quite nice to model in wireframe. For rendering you might move the scene elsewhere.

thus I wasn't really able to help out in blender, I was able to build and check proposed patches... but little more, I have no X11 and OpenGL coding experience. I remain open to support everyone in an unofficial way though. Currently I am not able to get official due to time constraints, not only knowledge constraints.

Then there are many small details that make blender slow on older machines or even buggy to use due to openGL differences. THings which are often even useless (I think about those stupid new menus). And generaly the new ui is "heavier". I miss some things of the old gui. I'd like a cross-breed of them.

another thing that I'd like a lot is blender classic: IRIS GL is much much faster than OpenGL on the same hardware that supports it. There is a blender version that has both binaries and runs also on irix 6.5. I tried it on my indy and my indigo2 and was impressed. Really.

getting glut to work on IrisGL? A Dream.

skywriter has that blender classic project. Imagine blender working on your 4D series, indigo1 or Crimson? wouldn't that rock?
running blender on a skywriter?

skywriter is a very nice chap, but in 2 years I was never able to do anything with him. He has a chronical lack of time and old blender sources are a bit out of order. ANyway I still hoep that we can get together and spur interest in other peoples.

if possible, both paths could be walked: keep new blenders on irix as long as possible (as long as opengl 1.1 can be used or 1.2...) and our own blender fork, starting from an old version and then maybe updating it here and there with interesting new stuff (raytracer, some new UI things, subdiv. surfaces.... and other cool things that got in in blender 2.x) and leaving out useless stuff.

have fun and feel free to contact me for any development help. But don't ask too much

strange thread...

I am working on FPGA from virtex for my thesis and I can tell you one thing: FPGA's are slow and have a bad perfomance/power ratio. Just a good asic goes many times faster.

Virtex high-end fpga's integrate one or more power-pc to get speed!


so why is FPGA interesting? because you can do your custom stuff at a low price. You can program you functions in hardware, you can reconfigure the hardware on your FPGA. Virtex fpga's are essentially a memory.

You need a 11 bit adder ? you need hardware checksumming? You need hardware RGB->HSV conversion?
But beware, your special hardware might still perform a function slower than a high-speed cpu! it really depends on the application.

oly 512K of cache? itneresting.
My R4000 indigo2 has 1MB...

nice that you guys got something to work already... I had always problems with true type fonts, even in official builds: they showed up, but beveling caused artifacts. This also on a sparc with a mesa-based and gcc build.

I personally would prefer a generic 6.5.x build and mips3/mips4. I would hate not to be able to run it on my indigo2 and in some future, on my indigo1! but of course intermediate steps can be taken. I think that the official BF version which just run without having to depend on nekoware or freeware was the best thing.

GeneratriX wrote: Well, let's start with something different on this thread. I want to talk about the power of the marketing, and how you can make look better what in fact is the same, almost the same, or plainly worst.


1) When Apple uses Intel processors, we say "-wishes do come true!"
2) When Apple uses ATI graphic pipelines we say: "-Oh!!! ...That means it’s screaming fast. Up to 256MB GDDR3 graphics memory!!!"
3) When Apple uses to have on their site the yin-yan logo, with the legend: "UIniversal Binary: Software just works", we said: "-oh geez!; it is a miracle... they managed to run Mac apps inside the intel-OSX!!! Geniouses!!!"
4) When Apple uses SATA drives we say: "-bloody hell!!! ...they will provide an amazing 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA hard disk drive!!! Cool!!!"


...Oh Steve; what a magnificent genious you are, and what a magnificent genious are your marketing chieffs!!! ...You can make almost the same thing that the rest, but it will look different, and people will think that they are "Thinking Different" ! ...Heheheh... we gotta love you, mediatic Guru!

untrue. I think macs are no more macs. THat whole intel crap is crap. APple externalized the chipset and motherboard design. It is not just a "processor" change, it is a philosphy change.
intel macs may sell, they may be geek, people may like them, but I dislike them.

I still don't like the idea of loosing the PPC... sigh.

no.. if I had infinite space and money I'd love one.

I have a 4D/20