It’s like with piracy: who cares if someone steals your application if they were never going to buy it in the first place?

Golden. The above quote was taken from the ars technica interview with Wil Shipley (of Delicious Monster).

Oh, and by the way, Merry Christmas!

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.

(…)

I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn’t ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

This is one way to make great software. Graphing Calculator shipped initialy on more than 20 million machines and is part of the OS X till this very day (in classic mode). Yet the project never officialy existed. Sounds like a fairy tale? It sure does. This is an exceptional story, that reminded me of Milton from Office Space.

via 37Signals / Wired

OS X PROVEN hacked and running on an ordinary PC

All in all, it does not appear to be a hoax as the installation instruction is very detailed.

The only downside is that it requires a pretty decent CPU to run (smoothly) and a helluva lot of disk space to install. That means no fun for me (yet!). But still, it’s a small step of one man and a big step for all humanity. Job well done!

UPDATE: Wired has more info about OSx86.

Thx Clint for the link!

Here are some excerpts:

If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which equals Intel’s power specs, EXCEEDS Intel’s performance specs AND does so at a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.

(…)

The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn’t have matched. If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD, so I simply have to conclude that technology has nothing at all to do with this decision. This is simply about business – BIG business.

Read the full article: Going for Broke.