Some of you might have noticed that some time around half past two yesterday afternoon (GMT) this site disappeared. My web host was hacked and a lot of user files were deleted, so the site had to be restored from backup. Then my ISP's routing went up the spout (again!) so I couldn't even get online to check when the site was back up. Apart from the wonder that is my precioussss my lovely new iMac, this has been a really bad week IT-wise.
Fortunately no posts were lost, and all but the last couple of comments posted were rescued. I do still have email copies of the comments, so I should be able to restore them somehow, but not right this minute.
Hooray! You're back! Looks good. Did you tweak the stylesheet or something? The text just looks somehow different. Maybe a little smaller? I dunno. It's fine though, so no worries.
We wants to hear about the preciousss!!
Posted by: Kris on March 14, 2003 12:09 PMFor some reason my stylesheet wasn't restored along with the rest of my files, so I had to grab what I thought was the up-to-date copy Movable Type had stored. It's obvious that it wasn't the correct style sheet, so I'll fire up my old PC at some point today and upload the correct version.
I'm going to write an account of my first few days with My Precioussss and the process of Switching in general some time over the weekend.
Posted by: John on March 14, 2003 12:18 PMyeah you were down for ages!
I was reading a story today that apple might release a version of OSX for PC's. Even though I doubt I'd buy it I think it would be a fantastic move for apple. Limiting themselves to their own hardware can't be as profitable as doing both. PC owners would have a big choice and I'm sure there's a lot of people who would make the switch
Posted by: simon on March 15, 2003 01:32 AMThe idea of an Intel-based OS X keeps popping up. I think it's unlikely to happen, because whilst it's true that such a move would provide Apple with a larger pool of potential customers it would also expose them to a world where they would be expected to provide drivers and support for an enormously wider range of hardware suppliers. One reason MacOS works so smoothly - and this applies as much to pre-OS X is that Apple know that they only have to cater for a small number of chipsets, each of which they made in the first place. Producing OS X for Intel-based PCs would mean that they'd have to write system software which was much more forgiving of the quality and specifications of the hardware being plugged into it. (Yes, in theory producing suitable drivers is the job of the hardware suppliers. But they aren't all going to jump to produce drivers for OS X just because Apple have released a product. Not initially, at any rate.)
What you'd end up with is a situation like that affecting Linux; you'd run the risk of customers buying OS X and finding that that new video card they'd bought was too new to have been incorporated in the base set of drivers, or the version available wasn't optimised to make use of the whizzy new features they'd bought the card for. Apple could legitimately point out that it's the customer's fault for buying hardware not on the 'Hardware Compatibility List', or the video card manufacturer's fault for not producing a suitable driver for OS X. But that's not the real issue.
The issue for Apple is that the real casualty of such issues would be the image of OS X as a system which "Just Works." That's a very precious asset, and one which they'd be loath to fritter away in search of 0.5% of the Intel-based PC market. I know Apple have parts of OS X working on Intel hardware, and I don't doubt that they'll keep working on the project in order to keep pressure on the suppliers of the PowerPC series, but if it ever happens that Apple switch to the Intel platform I would bet a large sum of money that the port of OS X will not work on bog-standard Wintel PCs, but will work only with Apple's own, carefully customised, version of an Intel-powered PC.
Posted by: John on March 15, 2003 12:22 PMI'm not sure where you get the .5% figure from but I don't think it would be that low. I've lost count on how many people I see moan about windows. Of course no one now says "buy a mac" but in the future they might say "buy apple OS". I'd figure that it would be as popular if not more so than linux is for x86 users (lets not forget AMD or Via).
It may also aid those with Macs as more users would encourage more software to be ported to OSX (not sure if they'd have to be 2 versions of an OSX app).
I believe that it's down to the hardware suppliers to write drivers. Does each windows driver have to go though MS? If not there's no reason why apple couldn't do that if they were so concerned.
I think the pro's outweight the cons for Apple but I don't think many software houses would like 2 platforms to deal with if they only do windows.
Posted by: simon on March 16, 2003 03:29 AMYou were missed. Incidentally, you know your side bar's gone walkabout right?
Posted by: Jann on March 17, 2003 05:00 PMYes, I've noticed that in some browsers my sidebar has moved down so that it starts where the main content ends. I think this is because the excerpt of Anita's comment in the Recent Comments list contains a longish URL which MT refuses to truncate. This makes the right hand column much wider than usual, to the point where it can't fit into the space allocated to it.
If I'm right, after two or three comments Anita's comment will disappear from the Recent Comments list and all will return to normal. If not, I'll be looking closely at my CSS to figure out what broke when I restored the style sheet from backup the other day...