Author: Joey deVilla

I

posted this to The Farm, but I thought it bore

repeating here…

That’s the

question

on

the

tech

industry’s

collective

mind

at

the

moment.

My counterpart at Microsoft, Robert Scoble, writes:

…the

entire industry is shaking because of Steve Jobs’ decision. It’s

impossible to know all the details until the shaking subsides a bit.

It will be one of the most interesting weeks in technology

since I started blogging, that’s for sure.

Although the keynote isn’t being webcast,

the

tech blog Engadget

has been keeping everyone apprised of Steve Jobs’ announcements at

WWDC

2005 by live-blogging the event, and it’s official: Apple is

switching to Intel chips!

The way he’s been doing it is quite dramatic — the keynote

slides,

which were presented on Mac OS X using Apple’s Keynote app was running

on a P4 3.6GHz!

Some quick notes, based on the available info thus

far:

• Two years ago, Jobs promised a

  3.0GHz

  PowerMac, and hasn’t been able to deliver since the PowerPC still

  hasn’t hit those speeds.

• The

  Intel architecture also offers more processing power for less

  electrical power: 70 integer performance units/watt versus PowerPC’s

  15.

• A personal obersavtion: You may want to keep

  an eye on this page,

  which shows PowerPC G5 configurations outperforming Intel

  configurations. I expect that it will disappear from Apple’s

  site shortly.

• The

  rumours about the “Just in Case” scenario — the ones that mentioned

  that a team within Apple has been making sure that OS X compiles on

  Intel — are true! According to Jobs, for the past 5 years,”Mac OS X

  has been

  living a secret double life.”

• The lowdown for

  Mac developers:

• Widgets, scripts and

  Java should just work from the get-go.

• Cocoa/Xcode apps should need “just a small tweak” and a

  recompile.

• Carbon/Xcode apps will need “a few

  weeks of tweaking” and a recompile.

• Carbon/Metrowerks apps should be moved to XCode.
• A new technology,

  Rosetta, will run existing PowerPC apps on

  Intel. 

This may be all the

tech

publications and sites talk about for the next little while…

I’m posting this here (as well as the forums on Tucows Discuss) since I know that some of our customers read this blog from time to time.

Here’s what I know — a more official notice should be coming your way shortly.

The actual applications, for the most part, continued to work.

Folks

with Blogware accounts could post to their blogs, Email Defense

continued scanning for spam and viruses, Certs kept working, Email was

queued for a little while and began processing again in the early

evening, and no mail was lost.

What stopped working during the outage: Provisioning and Management.

The

specifics are a little different for each service, but in general, it

was the ability to sell new instances of services or manage existing

ones. Blogware, being located in a different facility, was unaffected.

It’s very unusual for a redundant power system to fail like this.

The

“redundant” in “redundant power system” makes this sort of thing very

unlikely. For example, if you have two systems with a 1% probability of

failing, the probability that both will fail is one one-hundredth of 1%.

The

cause for the failure is as of yet unknown. We’re working with IBM to

identify it. Once we know, we will take steps to prevent this from

happening again and let you know what we will be doing in the future.