ppc – Robert Accettura's Fun With Wordage

Dear Apple,

Please kill off resource forks. They add an unnecessary complexity to data archiving and management that’s unneeded by todays standards. Since Mac OS X it seems only a few places exist where resource forks are actually used. For example the older pre-Mac OS X “font suitcases” used a resource fork, while the modern “Data Fork Suitcase Format” as it’s name implies, does not¹.

One could argue keeping resource forks is good for legacy purposes. But since Mac OS X 10.5 can no longer run Classic even on PPC systems, is there really a need?

If that’s really not possible, could you please make rsync suck a little less?

Ideally since rsync 3.0 looks like it will be a lot better, make it a high profile download for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 similar to what was done to push Safari 3.0. That would be a nice stop gap solution.

I hope you’ll fix this since it’s a real pain in the butt for people like me.

Thanks,
Robert

1. 25251 Mac OS X: Font file formats

A very interesting note here:

Customers with existing PPC G5’s will have the option of a PCI-X based add-on card with a native Intel follow-on to the P4 “D” chip and of-course the Transitive/”Rosetta” bundle. Any other PPC machine bellow the G5 (i.e. G4, G3 machines) are not included on the current roadmap inclusion. Third-party providers have shown interest is providing a solution for down-level Macs.

In regards to the G5, IBM pretty much has hit a standstill with the existing PPC architecture (i.e. PPC G5) and scalability. The initial IBM roadmap to reach the 3 GHz mark never happened and has slipped not only months but years. This really disappointed Steve and everyone else at Apple as the architecture was quite promising.

The big problem is heat dissipation. As you guys have probably noticed, the high-end dual G5’s have been sporting “water-cooling” for some time now. The old saying in the industry is “The last to water wins”, IBM lost and Intel has clearly won.

How sweet would it be to have a G5 with a Pentium 4? Tri processor goodness! Would also be interesting to see Pentium PCI cards for older systems.