Various reasons.

Post #209,969 by Another Scott 6/5/05 11:00:54 PM Reply	Various reasons. Some people just like Macs better. Some people have Mac customers going back a long time. Some people like the idea of being a medium-size fish in a little pond much better than that of being an amoeba in an ocean. There are lots of reasons why ISVs write Mac software. The fact that they do so seems to indicate that they're not interested in competing with Windows software on a PC. But we'll see. Maybe Steve's [link\|http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Reality_Distortion_Field.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date\|RDF] will be cranked up to 11 and it won't be an issue on Monday. ;-) QuickTransit sounds similar to [link\|http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/jx/galaxy.php\|Galaxy] from Visix. They didn't survive. Cheers, Scott.
Post #209,985 by altmann 6/5/05 11:47:44 PM Reply	Galaxy not the same thing Galaxy was, from what I could gather, a cross platform toolkit that one would have to explicity program to. QuickTransit translates binaries compiled for one CPU instruction set to another instruction set at runtime. If it works as advertised, 3rd party devs wouldn't have to recompile and redistribute their apps initially (they could do so later if/when they are ready. Trolltech makes a cross platform toolkit. They seem to be doing ok. I too am wondering how the RDF will hold up when the audience starts flinging 'reality' at Steve on-stage. -- Chris Altmann
Post #210,002 by altmann 6/6/05 4:27:28 AM Reply	One more thing From the bottom of [link\|http://pview.findlaw.com/view/3340942_1?&channel=CCC\|http://pview.findlaw...42_1?&channel=CCC] "Transitive Technologies: Represented Transitive Technologies in a co-development and licensing agreement with Apple Computer" We shall see. -- Chris Altmann
Post #210,020 by Another Scott 6/6/05 9:48:15 AM Reply	Thanks. Lots of companies are working on virtualization. E.g. AMD and Intel are adding extensions to their newest chips to allow multiple OSes to run "simultaneously". There's overhead with such approaches, obviously, and even more so if the program assumes a different instruction set. It also introduces the "Win-OS/2" problem again. If the virtualization is good enough, there will be little incentive for ISVs to write to the native CPU. Then Windows x86 wins by default. If it's not good enough, then the migration to the new CPU or OS is too painful for customers with existing vital software. Then Windows x86 wins by default. It's tough for translation/virtualization to win unless the underlying CPU is ~ 10 times faster than the incumbent. The Cell might have a chance, but it's hard to see that virtualization of existing MacOS X software on x86 variants being a compelling solution. My $0.02. Cheers, Scott.

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