This humorous blog post is a great retrospective on what the Engadget blog would look like circa 1985 as viewed via a BBS. Great ASCII art, 11lb cell phones, newest Apple Lisa computer, and more hot new products. Gotta run now and re-attach the phone headset back into the suction cups of my 300 baud modem!
With recent articles about how Google is evil or how Google is the new Microsoft, over-leveraging their powerful position in the web and its hoardes of current and soon-to-come cash, it makes me wonder about poor old Yahoo. Afterall, they were the first web site I went to when I was using Mosaic 1.0 in 1993, running on my Sparc workstation in my lab/office at BYU and in the menu of Mosaic there was a menu item called “Cool Sites” or something like that which would take you directly to Yahoo’s page, which used to be just a page of links since there were so few websites then.
So before you start wondering if Yahoo is the next AltaVista (which used to be the best search engine), don’t worry. With some smart acquisitions like Overture and Inktomi, minus Broadcast.com (thanks for creating the ego-maniacal monster that is Mark Cuban), they have some pretty smart people on-board. And I’ve seen several job postings on user group mailing lists, Craigslist, etc. by Google down here in Southern California, both for their Pasadena (Overture, GoTo) office and their newer Santa Monica office which I think deals more with their forays into media and entertainment. This strength in hiring and acquisition shows that they are taking a very aggresive and bullish stance on shaping their future.
I later heard a rumor on Leo Leporte’s podcast (episode #19) that Google engineers had said that Yahoo’s search engine is more accurate than Google’s. I couldn’t find any such report on the web, so it’s just a rumor, but it prompted me to give Yahoo’s search engine another look. Visually, it was disturbing, not because it was poorly designed, but because it wasn’t Google, which I’ve become so accustomed to. I was surprised by the amount of resistance I gave it solely on look and feel, and realized that switching search engines may be more difficult than people think. Eventually, I overcame the UI resistance and I started using Yahoo for search throughout the day, comparing them with Google’s results, and I was noticing that I actually was getting better results on what I was looking for than at Google! I’ve even changed the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo…a big step.
So my advice? While everybody talks about Microsoft and Google duking it out for the future of computing, Yahoo may be the sleeper play in all of this. Also, give Yahoo’s search a try out next time you do a search, and give it some time to get used to it if you’ve been a long-time Google user.
<disclaimer>I do not own any Yahoo or Google stock, nor am I shorting Google’s stock either</disclaimer>
I’ve seen the several announcements about people getting OS X to work on their x86 boxes and thought I’d try it out. I ran into some of the problems others have had but then got around them. I post this for those trying to do the same thing and having some of the same problems I was running into.
My main reference is this post from the UneasySilence website.
For your reference, my hardware is
1GB RAM
P4 3.0E socket 478, Prescott core, 800 FSB
ATI Radeon 9600 128MB video
DVD-RW attached
80 GB HDD, with 3 partitions (Mac, Linux, Windows), all blank
OS X is on the first partition
First of all, let me say I’m not very expert with Linux nor OS X. I’ve put together from scratch 2 PCS and have maintained my own hardware and occassinally fixed other people’s hardware for 10-15 years now so I’m pretty decent at hardware stuff but primarily on Windows. Also, I’m primarily a .NET/Java/database programmer and don’t deal with hardware at this level too often.
Secondly, I didn’t try to install from Windows, I did it the way originally described in the original post, using an Ubuntu Live CD and the OS X image on a separate USB hard drive. I got the OS X image from the .torrent as hinted at from the UneasySilence website. The downloaded file is a .bz2 file, about 1.28GB, but once unpacked it’s about 6GB. I had to download some special program for Windows that could unpack a .bz2 file, my WinZip didn’t know how to handle it. I don’t remeber the program, Google “bz2 windows”.
When I booted Ubuntu Live with the USB drive (an old 20GB HDD in my hard drive enclosure) it showed up in Ubuntu as “/media/usbdisk” and not under /dev as originally described.
It took me a while to get the “dd” step to work. From Ubuntu, make sure you use the “Root Terminal” application and not “Terminal” to ensure you have root privileges. I kept trying /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 and it wouldn’t let me. I then realized my HDD was at /dev/hdc so that finally worked. Again, I’m not very knowledgable in Linux so forgive my naivety here. Some have reported using hda, hdb, but hdc worked for me. Do an “ls /dev/hd*” to see all of the hd devices you have and you can naively try each one. If one you choose takes several minutes of waiting then it’s probably working for you, otherwise you will get an error almost immediately about access or not enough disk space.
Then when I boot OS X it froze and said something like it couldn’t find the primary drive. I remember something about primary and secondary IDE slots on motherboards. So I had to make sure my slave/master/cable select setting were right and the boot hard drive ribbon had to be attached to the primary IDE slot. My mobo has 2 IDE slots, the one closest to the front of the edge of the mobo is the primary IDE slot. Once I got my HDD’s ribbon plugged into that one I progressed.
Then when OS X booted, it froze like described during the boot up with the Apple logo and eventual a “no smoking” logo appearing after a few minutes. So I booted with the -x option as described. Then I got the “deadmoo” login screen, but my keyboard and mouse weren’t working. Turns out OS X wouldn’t recognize my PS/2 keyboard and mouse coming off of my KVM switch, so I had to attach USB keyboard and mouse. Now I could try to login.
My next problem was when I tried to boot “-s” to change the password it says I can’t because it’s running on read-only mode. Then when I boot in “-v” mode and it freezes at “VGA: vram [d8000000:00000000}” as other people have reported. I read through the Uneasy Silence original post’s comments and someone had mentioned that the “deadmoo” password is “bovinity”. I tried that and voila! It logged me into OS X!
I haven’t played with running any apps yet. Others have reported problems getting sound and network adapters to work, and I haven’t found anybody successfully running Rosetta on x86 yet. Many have reported that OS X on Intel is blazingly fast, but without Rosetta the only apps you can run are the ones that come with the OS X install until you get Rosetta to work. So until then you get to run Safari and iChat wickedly fast…yay.
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