So it has been written, so it will be done: Apple goes x86.

Not amd64. x86.

Part of me is in mourning, because Power chips are so kewl, and this spells their doom. Immediate losers in The Steve's announcement of the Mac on x86 revolution: IBM and Freescale. (formerly Mot chip division)

But part of me is excited as hell. Pentium 4 computers running MacOS X Tiger NOW are going to be purchaseable from Apple for MacOS X development. What remains to be seen is this: are these essentially going to be Beige Boxen or are they special Apple Pentium 4 boxes with redone BIOS/PRAM structure? If they are the former, this means that Microsoft is a BIG loser too. As I mentioned last post, MacOS X on generic x86 will mean that the troubled development of Longhorn has been dealt another setback. Jobs has served Gates Revenge, icy cold with a twist. Longhorn now has to play catch-up to MacOS X. Longhorn has to be more stable, more secure and match MacOS X feature-for-feature, otherwise Apple will eat their lunch.

I was at a family gathering last night, and my Aunt Karen, the donor of my wonderful classic iBook, was initially bewildered that I took the iBook and sent it out for upgrades. "It was working fine when I had it, why would you need to upgrade it?" However, when I mentioned that I was having Panther installed, and that Panther was the last version of MacOS X that was officially supported on it, she mentioned that "it locked up when I tried installing Panther on it." Well, if you are installing Panther on a 3.2GB hard drive, unless you do a custom install and only put the bare bones of the OS on with only English support and without X11, Classic or any other goodies, you WILL have a lockup when Panther runs out of room to install. :P I don't know if she saw the wisdom of my decision at that point or not, but oh well.

There will be delays, unfortunately, in getting my iBook back home. Wegener Media did a typo when they made up the DHL mailing label: my Zip code is off by one digit. It's off by a significant digit, even: the second. Instead of going to 91xxx, which is the Valley, it will arrive first in Orange County 92xxx, then get re-routed from The OC to the Valley. This could delay my receipt of Navi until a week from today. Bleah. Note 6/7/2005 12:18pm: 92xxx is in San Bernardino County, not OC. The yuppie scum on The OC would lynch me if I made such an error. Still, no matter how you slice it, it means a delay in reunion with little Navi. :P

From bad news to good: I think I did well on the Bio 3 final, which was actually the last Bio 3 chapter test. I might have blown a couple of questions, but that's it. And currently my percentage score on all material remains at 94%, which is a definitive, authoritative A. She forgot to record one of my extra credit assignments too, which should raise the grade. That will be four units at 4.0/unit, making 16 grade points. This leaves six units up in the air. The Math 114 grade is the one that most concerns me, because at the very least I should get a B in English 103. Math 114 would take a real screwup on the Final to lower me to a failing grade of D to F, but that is somewhat possible because I couldn't answer all the questions. I suppose at worst, I'd retake Math 114 in the Summer. But it is somewhat unlikely because even with the questions I didn't answer, I shouldn't get below a 55 on that test.

Tomorrow is Commencement, so it is unlikely I'll get to blog. Will return to this Wednesday.