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more on Opinions Re: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips rumor on CNet
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 17:22:20 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com> Date: June 4, 2005 4:51:28 PM EDT To: Roman Gollent <roman-ip () gollent com> Cc: dave () farber netSubject: Re: more on Opinions Re: [IP] Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips rumor on CNet
Two words: Fat Binaries
Two more words: byte order M68K and PPC use the same data formats, same byte order, same everything else in data files and internal data structures. But x86 uses the opposite byte order from M68K and PPC. Recompiling programs is (to oversimplify somewhat) a one-time painful exercise for developers, but sharing files between machines with different data formats is an unending source of pain. In theory you can audit the code and find all the places where you read and write data structures and do the reordering where you need to and eventually try to move everything to XML stream formats where byte order isn't an issue. In practice, you'll spend your life picking bugs from places in your code where you hadn't noticed the byte order dependencies, and each time the failure will be either that something looks wierd in a document, or an application crashes when you feed it one file even though it was OK on the hundred previous file. It's certainly true that the economies of scale in wintel hardware are compelling, but the costs of switching are way higher than it was for M68K->PPC. I'll be interested to see what's really going to happen. R's, John ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on Opinions Re: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips rumor on CNet David Farber (Jun 04)
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- more on Opinions Re: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips rumor on CNet David Farber (Jun 04)
- more on Opinions Re: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips rumor on CNet David Farber (Jun 04)
- more on Opinions Re: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips rumor on CNet David Farber (Jun 04)
- more on Opinions Re: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips rumor on CNet David Farber (Jun 05)