OS X Snow Leopard Details 489
JD-1027 writes in to kick off a discussion of OS X Snow Leopard. Apple's stated goal: "Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard's enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality." The technologies: Grand Central to get better use of multiple processors and multicore chips, OpenCL to tap the power of the GPU, 64 bit so we can finally have our 16 TB of RAM, QuickTime X for optimized modern codec performance, and built in Exchange support in iCal, Address Book, and Apple Mail that most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments. We've previously discussed ZFS in the server version of Snow Leopard."
One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh and one more thing, we've already done it and it's going to be in our next release
Then I read posts about "well what about NTFS or Power PC".
Jebezus! get a sense of proportion here. Yeah NTFS might sell a few enterprise computers. So maybe that matter financially. But apple's doing fine with it's cash flow and we won't be talking about NTFS 5 years from now.
We will be talking about the future of computing which is how to tame and unify alternative and multicore architectures in a way the programmer does not need to worry about.
That's earthshaking if it could be done next year! Now a lot of people have blunted there spears chargin at this one so one needs a healthy dose of skepticism that it could be accomplished in a decade let alone in a few months. On the other hand the one person we know not to scoff at when he says he's going to make something complex really simple, retain 99% of it's power, and deliver it ubiquitously and accessibly is Jobs/Apple.
So doubt and wonder. Pour awe and skepticism. But fuck, don't ask about NTFS when this kind of thing is being annouced. You might as well ask about Zune support in Itunes.
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Funny)
Well... What about Zune support in iTunes?
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Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Funny)
Lost tribe from central Africa. Members went around squirting each other and throwing chairs to communicate. Unless action is taken, expected extinction in 2010.
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Funny)
Single-handedly?
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:4, Interesting)
NTFS is an integral feature in win xp, which is an upgrade for most informed vista users.
As such ntfs is the future of the pc market.
The Zune, however, is to music players what the edsel was to automobiles.
When the comp usa's went belly up in my city and had their closeout sales, even the shelving units went before the piles of zunes left sitting in the middle of the empty salesfloors (I wish I had photos, it's not an exaggeration).
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Interesting)
And no, I'm not a switcheur nor a noob. I've used/owned Macs since System 7, I've been using Linux for 8 years now, and I started with DOS 5 on an 80286, and ran every Windows and Mac version from then to current.
XFS is a fast format, ext3 takes a few minutes depending on the size of the partition, and NTFS is a few seconds in quick mode. Quick format has been there for quite a while (even DOS) and without it I always assumed format was zeroing the partition, which is slow of course.
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For some reason, Apple feels forced to use Intel in everything even in Graphics which Intel has no clue about. I wonder if there is some kind of agreement involved considering they are basically ignoring 64bit/multi core/SMP G5 userbase in 10.6. Hopefully it is false rumour.
Apple
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MBP, MacPro, post '06 iMac's - All models use either ATI or NVIDIA
only the consumer Macbook, ultra portable MBA, and the svelt MacMini use Intel integrated graphics.
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, this misinformed Bumpersticker logic has to stop, and now...
NTFS may be a bit long in the tooth, but it has taken 15 years and ZFS to catch up to NTFS on a number of features. And even with that said, ZFS, still lacks several important features that is just expected to be there by people using NTFS.
Can't believe I'm going to use quick Wiki here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs [wikipedia.org]
If you want 'technical' information, go freaking read the NTFS whitepapers, or even get a academic code release version of how and why it works WITH SOURCE code. There are important reasoning to the technology of NTFS, especially in terms of performance and features just not currently found in ANY OTHER File System made, and this even includes ZFS, that gets close.
Back to the myth. Does the poster know why NTFS will fragment a bit more than older File System technologies? Apparently No...
NTFS has copy of write and snapshot features, this adds to the fragmentation on a volume by the nature of the way snapshots and copy on write operations are handled.
This feature (snapshots/copy on write) is a MAIN FEATURE of ZFS, so if OS X moves to ZFS, it will have the same inherent added fragmentation as NTFS. Whoops, guess you should be making fun of something you are getting as an UPGRADE in terms of features.
1) Microsoft never said NTFS didn't fragment, they said it was less prone to fragmenting that DOS's FAT/FAT32, which is TRUE.
2) Microsoft did state NTFS's fragmentation was not as great of a performance issue compared to FAT/FAT32 because of how NTFS's lookup behavior works, making no additional fragmentatin lookup seeks, like FAT does. This means it can get the file locations and read it in a swipe, even if it is in 1000 fragments.
3) Microsoft has always stated snapshot and copy on write features of NTFS would mean it will always have a bit more fragmentation than 'simpilier' file systems, like OS X and most default Linux installs use today.
Just to recap:
When/if Apple adds ZFS to OS X, its inherent level of fragmentation will be equal to NTFS, because it is the nature of the File System design features of both that prevent this trade off for more advanced features.
Also, people do realize that NO FS is fragmentation free, even the current mainstream file systems in OS X, right?
OS X runs a background defragmentation utility, just like Vista does. There is nothing hard or special about this. (Vista has a low I/O priority added to the inherent NTFS priority abilities, making backgroun operations like defragmenting seamless in terms of performance to the user.)
ZFS is good and finally steps up to the plate on some important and modern File System features long needed. It still is young and lacks inherent encryption, file level quota management, and other little features, but with some good support will be a good alternative to NTFS in the UNIX world. NTFS is far from primative or old in terms of features, as it has been the File System to live up to or beat outside of Microsoft.
However, NTFS is MS Intellectual property and MS probably won't be giving up the code to it anytime soon. I actually wish Sun and Microsoft had a better relationship, as it would be nice to see a unified File System technology across all platforms, and a combination of Sun's ZFS work and NTFS would be a freaking awesome mix of technology in terms of File System features, and performance.
NTFS is nothing to mock, especially when you are responding to an article talking about Snow Leopard getting ZFS which will present the same issue for OS X you are making fun of NTFS for...
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Interesting)
And can you point to any standard??
Last time I was checking, only few applications were using Direct X 10. For any kind of productivity more or less everybody uses bunch of wrappers or some commercial library.
The whole point here that there is no standard. And M$ forces everybody to kiss PR ass of Direct X, though literally nobody directly uses it, except for hardware manufacturers (nVidia and ATI). Some proprietary half-arsed spec in .DOCX peppered with implementation details from actual version of Direct X (even is such document exists) hardly qualifies as standard to me.
On other side, Kronos group is something. They are slow on up-take, but generally deliver usable standards industry needs. They are vendor neutral what is also important.
Do not expect anything in particular from OpenCL. I'm pretty sure that it would try to appeal to wider audience - consequently it would be pretty dumb down. But still it would let any developer to access GPU chip. Knowing how Apple does things, with couple of extra objects in one's program and few extra checks on whether you can use GPU, many tasks would get a decent performance boost. It wouldn't be high-end nor exclusive - it would be something for wider audience.
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DirectX 9. In a few years, if Vista is successful as past incarnations of Windows, DirectX 10.
I'll assume what you are saying is that everyone wraps the various APIs via internal or platform agnostic middleware. Because DirectX and OpenGL are both important, and neither can be done away with i
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is moving towards ZFS, I just hope they'll start using it in Mac OS X client as well. All the neat features that *do* take up space (like revisions) and which people aren't used to can be easily turned off.
Most of Apple's reconsiderations of UNIX have been made to simplify or streamline what's there. Take launchd, which is their daemon that replaces rc.d and the startup system surrounding it. It was built to work with programs as they worked today. Upstart in Ubuntu was developed to be an entirely new design and work better and as a consequence probably does not work with completely unaltered programs. Tell me honestly: do you think people wouldn't have ragged on Apple for "being Apple" if they had done Upstart instead of launchd?
The problem isn't Apple making up new solutions to problems solved years ago, the problem is thinking these solutions can't be improved. Most (not all) of Apple's own problems in OS X with respect to being a UNIX citizen consists of compatibility junk that they're just now going to get around to dropping. (The newest version of Mac OS X manages to be certified as UNIX compliant, even if it's obviously not Linux certified since a different kernel is used.)
Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why no-one expects to pay for service packs. Can you imagine the uproar if MS charged for XP SP1/2/3?
The fun part is the counter-argument has always been "This OSX point upgrade has over 200 breathtaking new features!", but here even that doesn't apply; it really is going to be a stability upgrade like a service pack.
No-one but Apple would escape criticism for selling stability, security and performance updates...
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
In reality, all four of these things exist on a continuum. OSX Leopard is very stable, hasn't had any serious security compromises in the wild, and isn't particularly slow either. It stacks up well against the competition. Yet, there have been things around before like BeOS- sure, it had its problems, but it was just blazingly, impressively fast, and it was beautifully, wonderfully responsive. OSX could be like that. And while OSX hasn't been the subject of major security exploits, researchers say the vulnerabilities are out there. And while it rarely kernel crashes, it certainly does sometimes.
So Apple sells an OS with a nice, competitive feature set, great stability, apparently effective security, and decent optimization. They need to decide what to do with their developer time for the next release. If they concentrate on features, they can make approximately $300 million dollars off it in the first week of selling it. If they concentrate on making it super stable, blazingly fast and responsive, or having security like a hardened SELinux or OpenBSD installation, then the attitude is "Why didn't they do that already for free? I'm not paying for that."
That attitude makes short-term profit motivation favor lots of new features with half-assed security, stability, and optimization. It takes someone visionary like Jobs to back of and say "look, we can't make a quick buck off this other stuff like we can some shiny new widgets, but these things have a big impact on user experience, which will affect the long-term viability of our platform, so we're spending money on it anyway."
But if users would just consider features, security, stability, and optimization all as things worth paying for, there'd be a lot more competition to deliver them.
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Charging for stability is not going to go over well with consumers, because lack of stability is a product flaw, and consumers do not appreciate being charged for fixing a product flaw. People will certainly pay for improved speed, but it needs to be enough of an improvement to make a difference.
Of course, Sno
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
Consumers don't make such hair-splitting distinctions. The consumer's view is that any aspect of the OS X that prevents applications from being perfectly stable constitutes a defect, and consumers don't like to pay for somebody else's mistake. Consumers would doubtless willing to pay for an upgrade that actually made the applications that they already have run perceptibly faster (which for most people means something like 20% or better) but it is hard to imagine that this is achievable.
So if it is to be a full-price upgrade, Apple needs to have some sort of bonuses up its sleeve, such that the consumer who upgrades will perceive an immediate, easily perceptible benefit.
Knowing Apple, they probably do, they just aren't disclosing it this early.
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Case(s) in point:
Windows 98 -> 2000. People jumped on that ship pretty quickly, even though 2000 offered diminished graphical performance. The only people who stayed with 98 were people with low-end hardware, people who'd been bit by upgrading MS software too soon in the past, and by those who were hardcore gamers and didn't mind the stability for an extra 5fps.
Enlight
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
We always will be as long as Apple doesn't provide a built-in way to stop dropping dot-file turds all over shared resources.
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Informative)
That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, this attitude of consumers is exactly why companies like Apple and Windows have so far focussed more on building OSes that look good, rather than work well. People want a shiny new thing, not a really efficient, rock solid operating system, because they have got used to crashes, useless error-messages, viruses and spam.
For me, this is the most enthralling idea in the End-User computer market in years. Finally, a company decides it's time to stop adding new eye-candy. Instead, Apple is taking a step back and taking their time to iron out the bugs and add actual innovation.
OpenCL sounds amazing. If it works as advertised, it will give developers who really care about performance the option to tap into the hugely parallel architecture available on the GPU that was inacessible to most of us so far (unless we wanted to learn the obscure proprietary semi-languages of ATI, IBM and nVidia).
Grand Central seems to be just the opposite of this: It will make sure those eight cores we'll soon all have in our machines will actually get used, even if the developers who wrote the programs we run didn't care to think about parallelization.
I'm bying Apple stocks. At a time when Microsoft's developers are once again falling victim to the marketing department (remember when Windows 7 was supposed to be a clean new start?), Apple is taking a bold step in what I think is the right direction.
Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:4, Insightful)
To add to your mentions of OpenCL and Grand Central, from what I've seen it looks like both will be used in the background for most processes, so by default your system will be sending blocks of instructions to CPU or GPU cores depending on who would get it done faster. This would seriously rock and really increase the power of the system!
I can even see that chip company Apple bought creating specialized chips that can be dropped in place and used by Grand Central and OpenCL automatically without the developer having to worry about it.
I will definitely be purchasing 10.6, if nothing else to show support to a company willing to spend time/resources going back and cleaning up their work. It's something I've always wanted to do after every project I've worked on, but it's something that's nearly impossible to sell to the customer.
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Apple in particular has been steadily improving the inner workin
Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple didn't just add bling - they made the operating system more stable and fixed a lot of bugs. So, be fair - we didn't pay $120 for a new dock.
Full list of new features in Leopard: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html [apple.com]
Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, never mind; I thought you said "System 7."
Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:4, Insightful)
In recent times, there has been no end to proposed tools and languages to help express parallelism. These are made by extremely bright people, and many have some neat and interesting features. However, so far, few people can really take advantage of them. Experts can design programs on them and use them, but these experts are a far cry from your run of the mill people. These are not the programmers you can hire for $40k or even $80k oftentimes.
New technologies are needed to take advantage of parallel computing. However these technologies must be as easy to use as Visual C++ is (really it needs to be as easy as VB, but that's another story). So far they all have problems, and a programmer cannot have a serial mindset when programming these architectures. Unfortunately, the brain does not seem to be very good at expressing parallelism, and the tools we currently have do not do enough to prevent developers from shooting off their legs.
Will these new technologies be useful in snow leopard? Possibly, they will probably be used in Quicktime, and some of Apple's video software. It's possible that open source video codecs might take advantage of them, but that depends on whether people make research projects out of them. Photoshop might make use of it for some of their operations, but don't expect everything to be done that way, as it's expensive to rewrite complex algorithms in parallel.
I just laugh when I read everyone clamoring about how this technology will change the world... It is a step in the right direction, but there is no panacea to make parallel programming easy. The first step involves making libraries of many of the compute intensive functions available to programmers. Joe programmer can call library routines. . . at least if they fit into normal programming paradigms. Expect these libraries to be expensive though. Writing highly parallel optimized code to do the compute intensive operations people need is expensive. The experts capable of doing it are extremely expensive, and it isn't like they can do this work overnight, or in a week sometimes. Also, expect HDL coders to be in demand. They understand parallelism and might be capable of using these new tools.
Phil
Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your analogy is flawed. It implies the improvements Apple is making are bug fixes, ie, a missing wheel. What Apple is adding are new technologies. It is more akin to turning around and paying to convert your 2 wheel drive vehicle to all wheel drive, which allows increased performance in off-road conditions. Grand Central is not a bug fix, but it does increase performance for multi-core systems. OpenCL is not a bug fix, but it allows increased performance for applications that have spare GPU cycles. Neither is needed to have a functional and fast system, just as adding all wheel drive and an airfoil are not fixing problems with the car you bought, but do provide improvements to performance and the former may keep your car from bogging down in adverse conditions.
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I'm skeptical that Grand Central will help as many applications as some suggest. But it's anything but vaporware. It's on the 10.6 developer edition given out at WWDC and there were sessions on it.
Not being behind the NDA I have no clue exactly how Grand Central functions or what kinds of processes it'll improve. But those who have seen it seem reasonably impressed. Even if mum about the details.
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Sorry. (Score:4, Funny)
Let me get the rest out of my system, so I am not tempted:
o Does it run Linux?
o Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
o Profit!
o In Soviet Russia, post firsts you!
Korea (Score:3, Funny)
That settles it, I'm moving to Korea!
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, the boosts in efficiency and stability will be welcome, but I for one am very excited about full Exchange support in iCal and Address Book. Heck, the Exchange support in Mail is a bit spotty as well, so touching that up would be great as well.
But what would really be great (and very much in line with the whole "embracing enterprise" thing) would be native support for Cisco IPsec VPN connections. As it stands, you have to use Cisco's own clunky client; if you could use the built-in client you could connect via a menubar icon. (Shimo does this pretty nicely, but it just became crippleware.)
It seems like an obvious addition, given the iPhone 2.0 OS is supposed to have it. Anyone know if it's on the docket for Snow Leopard?
Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Interesting)
But what would really be great (and very much in line with the whole "embracing enterprise" thing) would be native support for Cisco IPsec VPN connections. As it stands, you have to use Cisco's own clunky client; if you could use the built-in client you could connect via a menubar icon. (Shimo does this pretty nicely, but it just became crippleware.)
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But, there are a few other options.
One Free VPN GUI: http://www.lobotomo.com/products/IPSecuritas/
And one that costs a bit:
http://www.equinux.com/us/products/vpntracker/index.html
another one that I haven't tried:
http://www.nexumoja.org/projects/Shimo/
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Spotty?? Spotty???
The Exchange 'support' in Mail.app is through IMAP. Many Exchange admins love turning off IMAP. But even if they didn't Mail.app doesn't really support Exchange at all, they just support IMAP with a slightly different layout in the configuration dialog.
If they get real Exchange support going in Mail.app in Snow Leopard I know at least 3 people in my hallway at work, including myself, that will dance a jig of joy the day it is
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Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Interesting)
Or so I've heard.
Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hahaha. IRIX back then was so buggy I'm amazed that the user experience was as good as it was.
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I don't think Apple would want to play to that customer base anymore... might destroy their brand.
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But seriously: like it or not stability and performance _are_ features. It's just that they are vague enough and lied about enough that people don't like paying for them. Yet they pay for them anyways: in trouble and time. Just because you expect them to be there doesn't mean they are. I've spent far too much time struggling with buggy software to believe otherwise.
I noticed that 10.5 seemingly h
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Interesting)
I noticed that 10.5 seemingly has more stability problems than previous versions of OSX since 10.1. Is it unfair?
I don't know if it is unfair but it sure is incorrect. Did you use the Finder from 10.0 through 10.3? It got slightly more stable with 10.4 but it was only 10.5 that a network outage didn't take down most of the Finder.
OSX wasn't even usable until 10.2 and not really preferable until 10.3. (IMO)
Now I will say that 10.5.2 was the first point update that I thought caused tons of problems. I ended up having to reinstall Leopard from scratch and then apply the updates. I haven't had to do that since the old XP SP1 days.
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And if Microsoft took some time off from releasing half-baked features and put some time into kernel stability and overall security, I might buy one of their products again.
I'm not trying to flame bait here, but IMHO Windows isn't getting fixed because it's not broken to MS. Broken to them is "it stopped making money," not "there's a new 0-day vulnerability."
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to be a common failure to understand what Apple is claiming they will be adding in snow leopard. From TFA Apple will be adding... "...a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality."
That is, they're adding new technology that will allow for increased performance and stability. An example of this is OpenCL, which will make it easier for software developers to make use of the GPU for miscellaneous computing tasks... thus increasing the performance of those applications. Another new technology is Grand Central, making it easier for developers to get the most out of multi-core processors, again increasing performance and also increasing stability. Yet a third example is the move to 64-bit to allow applications to address more memory, thus increasing performance. You'll note none of these are about fixing performance or stability bugs in OS X; although doubtless Apple will apply them to do that as well.
Hey, if you don't like what is in snow leopard, no one is forcing you to pay for it. Just wait for the next release you do feel is worth the money. Still, I think you are misunderstanding the summary and the blurb. When Leopard was introduced one of the features allowed OpenGL applications to automatically spawn an extra thread to feed the GPU, utilizing a second core even for applications that had not been written to take advantage of it and providing significant performance improvements for many applications. This is more of the same, features being added to increase performance, not bugs being fixed to increase performance.
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What I do see is end users rightfully objecting that they should pay for narrow-market SDK/developer features that may or may not ever be useful to the end-user. The average Safari/iTunes/Word user has zero use for any of this stuff.
What makes you think that anyone is going to force people to buy Snow Leopard? It's not like Apple is instantly dropping support for Leopard. So, you're right. The average Safari/iTunes/Word user won't buy Snow Leopard. They don't need to and nobody is going to rough them up.
Actually, you bring up an interesting point. Do you run OS X? I'm curious how many "end users" are the ones complaining. I run Tiger, no one made me buy Leopard and I haven't. I don't mind that Apple decided to focus that nex
Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
Numerous people claimed Apple was fixing problems with OS X's stability and performance, although this is not what Apple's information released so far says. That's a failure to understand what Apple did say.
They should pay? Says who? Apple hasn't even said if they're charging for this and if they are, does that force people to buy it? If you don't like it, vote with your wallet and don't buy it, just like many people aren't buying Vista. At least for people buying new computers this one will be an improvement in speed and stability and presumably will not introduce and anti-features like Vista has. I can see complaining because you're buying a new computer and can only get it with Vista, which is inferior for your needs. What's the complaint if you can only get a new Mac with snow leopard?
Everyone has a use for faster response times and better multitasking and use of resources. Still, if people don't think it is worth $X.XX, they can just not pay for it. Where's the problem?
Maybe, maybe not. MS is an interesting case because they have a monopoly and a lot of people have no viable alternatives to paying them to run applications they need as the result of certain illegal acts. That said, so long as the majority of critical programs still run on XP, who cares what MS releases and suggests we pay for?
Congrats. You combined a straw man argument with an argument by association. It takes skill to wedge two logical fallacies into one sentence. If you look at my posting history, I call out Apple for all sorts of things they do that I feel are improper. This just isn't on of them. Heck, before they announced snow leopard I read people complaining of forums that Apple should stop adding features and focus on optimizing and refactoring code. Personally, I wish they'd focus on certain new features instead, but we don't all get what we want. When snow leopard comes out I'll decide if it is worth whatever Apple charges for it. It's not like people have to buy something just because Apple makes it you know.
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Interesting)
10.5.3... (Score:5, Insightful)
10.6 is something I'd be willing to pay for, though. Grand Central and true Intel 64 bitness would be awesome and make this MacBook rock. And as I mentioned earlier ZFS on a multi-disk future Time Capsule appliance would rock my world.
Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, Apple has done amazing things with every release of OSX and I look forward to Snow Leopard as much as every other release. I simply didn't read it as something that anyone should treat as a Really Big Deal, even to the point that Jobs barely mentioned it in the keynote, unlike Leopard that got its coming out party twice.
Therefore, if a 10.6 box just appeared in the Apple stores, but didn't get much mention, it would probably be missed by most. Sure it would be pre-installed on new machines, but where would be the hype to get everyone on it as quickly as possible? This is why I was thinking about the 10.0->10.1 upgrade; if this is the first Intel-only release, how would they sell a version that offers no new features, and is unavailable to everyone who doesn't haven an Intel machine? I, personally, wouldn't want to be in the marketing department trying to sell 10.6; if they just make it available as a download, they might ultimately save a lot of $$$ that would have been spent trying to market it, then explain it, correct the marketing, etc.
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Now, they've got a fairly substantial "additional" product line - ipodTV, airport, etc. which all need support. And...
Now they've got other considerations for OS X: they're running all their products (aside from the ipod touch) on the OS X core technologies. That requires reduction in size, ad
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Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just the Apple mindset, and it's kind of ironic. Apple computers do tend to be well built, and last a good while, but Apple's stance seems to be that everyone should always be buying the latest and greatest, and that you should ALWAYS have their latest OS release.
Look at software applications for example. Many of them already now require OS X 10.5 or newer. My PowerPC mac runs 10.4 and I have no intention of upgrading it, so I'm shut out of those applications completely (except for older versions). Windows software on the other hand: most stuff out there now will work at least as far back as Windows 2000. Not as much, but still a lot of stuff will work back to Windows 98 and some ever Windows 95.
Basically just accept: if you want to be part of the Mac club, Apple expects you to be regularly dishing out cash for their stuff.
For what it's worth, I do thoroughly enjoy using a Mac (though I have Windows and Linux systems too). I just am not happy being forced to move up from 10.4 to 10.5 when I didn't want to at the time.
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Re:Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:5, Informative)
There's also the case where many of Apple's own applications work in much the same way (the newest version of Safari for example, requires not only 10.5, but 10.5.2).
End of PowerPC Support? (Score:5, Informative)
A good analysis of this decision can be read at RoughlyDrafted Magazine [roughlydrafted.com].
Re:End of PowerPC Support? (Score:5, Insightful)
They still have to maintain a port of Mac OS X just in case, and the also have to keep OS X running on the iPhone (Strong ARM) so I don't see the benefit of focussing just on Intel CPUs. In addition, keeping code running on PPC will help with keeping bugs down as it is often the case that just the act of compiling C code for a different architecture can result in unseen bugs showing up. As for performance tuning, rarely do you need to worry about much more than some small parts of the code to fine tune for a specific platform.
I'm not surprised that this developer preview is Intel only but I will be surprised to see the final release be Intel only. Leopard on PPC could no doubt do with some fine tuning although it does run surprisingly well on my nearly five year old G4 iBook. Besides which, the last of the PPC machines were being sold by Apple as late as the end of 2006 (PowerMac G5s) so I think it would be a bad move for them to drop support this early.
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Even Apple does it. The iPhone SDK requires 10.5.
Re:End of PowerPC Support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow! great decision (Score:3, Insightful)
Strategy? (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea would be to stop Redmond from using Apple as the R&D labs, as many suspect winds up being the case ("Start your photocopiers"), and deny MS even the opportunity to borrow for Windows 7.
The more I think about it though, the more obstacles I see to this. But it would be sweeeeet...
Don't forget: Dropping PPC! (Score:3, Insightful)
The last Power Mac G5s were released in late 2005 and weren't replaced by the Mac Pro until late 2006.
The last revision to the PowerBook line was also released in late 2005. I'm still very happy running 10.5 on my 12" PowerBook G4/1.33Ghz from early 2004.
The last iBook came out in mid-2005, replaced in mid-2006. The last PowerPC iMac was released in late 2005. We have 10.5 happily running on my wife's 12" iBook G4/1GHz from 2003 as our kitchen TV.
It's pretty shitty that Apple is dropping support for machines less than 4 years old, and older machines that run 10.5 very well. It's especially galling that they are dropping support with a release that sounds like it should really be a free service pack or point release to 10.5 anyway.
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Wait till the rumor is actually confirmed before complaining about it. The developer preview doesn't support it... yet. We still don't know if they plan on PPC for the final version, or if we do we signed an NDA.
Kick the Finder. (Score:5, Insightful)
After years of complaints from OS 9 and OS X users about the Finder Apple should confess to the difficult reality that - for many, not all - it is a major bottleneck to ease-of-use and therefore adoption. Students of mine - in general - spend far too much time second-guessing OS X where file and software management is concerned. Why are users' *losing* software and files so often that they need a *Finder*? Why are they so dependent on Spotlight that OS X might as well house all files in a flat-file-system? Why does the parent-window of an application still dominate the core navigation context even when minimised? This stuff confuses and frustrates people far too often I think.
It may not be the case for pro-users but I see students of mine spending far too much time clicking and dragging windows around in the course of trying to find and get stuff done on OS X.
My 2 clicks.
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Tiger for Intel was "Snow Tiger" (Score:3, Interesting)
With Tiger they said "come get Tiger" and with Tiger for Intel they said "come get Intel". With Leopard they're selling Leopard and with Snow Leopard they'll sell a larger number of processors and more memory than Leopard can support. One release they sell the software then one release they sell the hardware. They don't have to worry if Snow Leopard in-a-box doesn't sell all that well, because Snow Leopard in-a-Mac will sell really well, it'll be designed to drive new Mac sales. They already mentioned ungodly amounts of RAM in their first PR about Snow Leopard.
Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:4, Informative)
If this is your situation, speed is not your primary concern, it's interoperability. That's where MacFUSE comes into play. Sure it won't access that NTFS drive as fast as Windows would, but so what. With MacFUSE, you can access just about *anything* in *any format*. Got a ext3 filesystem? MacFUSE reads/writes that too.
Just because Apple doesn't provide it doesn't mean it can't be done.
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Can't read from a Windows partition (Score:3, Interesting)
How about NTFS, Apple? About damn time OS X supported read-write for NTFS - hard to bring it into corporate environment when you can't read from a Windows partition. NTFS-3G drivers are stable, they ought to have been integrated with Leopard to begin with.
Granted you can't write to NTFS in OSX, but OSX has been able to read an NTFS partition for quite some time.
It's actually really nice to have a Mac around when pulling files from a possibly infected NTFS drive. You're not going to pick up anything that will infect your machine, and you can pick and choose through the files you want at your leisure after reimaging your Windows box.
Re:Yeah, if the Winbox and Mac are separate machin (Score:5, Insightful)
The GP was referring to a 'coporate' environment. It's pretty rare to have dual boot machines, it's either one or the other, with networked resources. If you want to dual boot, your data would still be stored on remote servers and accessed via CIFS/whatever in a corporate environment anyway.
Re:To wait or not to wait (Score:4, Funny)
XP to Vista, arguably, was a more minor upgrade. (And, I use the term "upgrade" very loosely. That should be good for a few mod points.)
Re:To wait or not to wait (Score:5, Funny)
Re:To wait or not to wait (Score:5, Informative)
10.0 - March 24, 2001
10.1 - September 25, 2001
10.2 - August 23, 2002
10.3 - October 24, 2003
10.4 - April 29, 2005
10.5 - October 26, 2007
That's 6 months, 11 months, 14 months, 18 months, 30 months.
Heck looking at Wiki, Apple has always kept a relatively short release time (Nothing as short linux kernels, but absolutely nothing as long as Microsoft)
1.0 - Jan 84
2.0 - Apr 85
3.0 - Jan 86
4.0 - Mar 87
5.0 - ???
6.0 - Apr 88
7.0 - Jun 91
8.0 - July 97
9.0 - Oct 99
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2.0 - Apr 85
3.0 - Jan 86
4.0 - Mar 87
5.0 - ???
Profit!?
6.0 - Apr 88
7.0 - Jun 91
8.0 - July 97
9.0 - Oct 99
Apple release times (Score:3, Informative)
Further, it's easy to point to the 7.0-8.0 timeframe (> 6 years) as a counterexample, but there were at least three arguably major changes during that time: the release of System 7.1.x, System 7.5.x, and Mac OS 7.6.x. Among the improvements were (IIRC) the introduction of the Open Transport networking infrastructure, support for the PowerPC platform, and support for 32-bit addressing. Quite a bit for six years, methinks.
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Re:Who is in charge of codenames at Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
Batman: Shut up. It's just 10.6, dude.
Re:Who is in charge of codenames at Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
For the end user, it sounds like Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade. With bug fixes, performance enhancements, etc. It's a 10.5 -> 10.6 upgrade. Perhaps that's why they have a minor name change, from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
Or maybe they started following the Ubuntu naming Model. Let's see, is Hardy Hippo the same thing as Ubuntu 7.06 or what?
Re:Microsoft will never do this (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure many slashdotters have shared in the experience of a project rewrite that ended up bigger, buggier, and all around worse than the system or project it replaced...
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Re:Why did Apple ever go 32-bit x86 anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple can't "go back" to something it never went away from. Tiger had limited support for 64-bit code, whether on PPC or x86, and Leopard had 64-bit versions of most of its userland libraries. The Snow Leopard page doesn't say much about what's being done other than "Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM - up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today."
Some of the PowerPC machines were 64-bit. The notebooks and the Mac mini were 32-bit.
Re:first post (Score:5, Funny)
Translation: "Let's see if we can distract Mac owners from the fact that the recent Apple developer conference produced no new upgrades, no new hardware, no Jobs-ian announcements on OSX, just iPhonery."
Translation: "We're an iPhone company now"
Translation: "We've put off any serious work on OS X for eleven months"
Translation: "We're hoping to bugfix some of the the low-level tweaks promised for Leopard and finally get them out the door... if we're not too busy with the iPhone."
Translation: "We really might be able to fix those bugs..."
Translation: "Yet another feature, like resolution independent graphics, that didn't make it into Leopard, because we were way too busy with the iPhone. But we might have it for you in a year. Read-only, of course. And not turned on by default. For developers only. And only in beta, of course. Use this feature at your own risk."
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Pshaw. Means they're just done screwing with the interface for a while. They have a stable and useful user experience in 10.5.3. It'll get a few tweaks along the line, 10.5.3 changed Spaces considerably. They're also talking about major architectural changes to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the hardware. You may not care about optimizing for multiple cores or offloading processing to the GPU, but the bioinformatics
Re:first post (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got five Macs. My daily driver is an 8GB, 8-core Intel Mac Pro [flickr.com]. My carry along a is loaded dual-core Macbook pro. Both are typically running linux, windows, and OSX all at once. I write graphics software for a living. Powerful graphics software, written at the metal level. I'm all for multicore/multiprocessor at the OS level; the easier, the better, and likewise, multi-machine for even bigger jobs. However, this does not change the fact that Apple is mostly doing iPhone work, and that not adding obvious consumer-level goodies to OS X will cost them dearly -- which they don't care about, because -- wait for it -- they're all about the iPhone now. I meant the post to be funny, all right, but only because it's true.
The very idea that low level improvements and bugfixes precludes feature addition at the GUI/high level is absurd, and if anyone at Apple had half a brain focused on the Mac, they'd never have said anything like that, or even implied it.
OS "features" can be as simple as adding a nice set of programs to the stable. Things like a decent personal finance manager. Wouldn't affect system stability one whit, but it'd increase the value of the Mac to the first time buyer by quite a bit. How about a nice, basic paint program? Or a set of kids coloring books / tools? A basic expert system? Lots of middle to high end users could use one, and heck, they're not that difficult to write. I wrote one in python that, minus the knowledge base, isn't even 10k and you'd be blinking amazed at how much it knows about rocks and minerals, and how well it can generalize and leap to conclusions. How about including a language teacher? How about a finder with a decent feature set? Something like... Pathfinder - buy it, maybe tweak it, and ship it. That would be @#$%^&*$ awesome. Heck, I'd probably pee right down my leg if they simply shipped a working, color version of midnight commander (a findery thing for shellfolk.)
See where I'm going here? Put an expert programmer in a corner, say "make a COOL one of these apps" and leave them be. In a year, if you don't have something really cool, the programmer should be shot. Total investment, one programmer's salary. Put ten programmers to ten tasks, watch em decently, and in a year, you'd have ten new selling points that had ZERO to do with OS stability, etc. Or just reach out the the Mac community and buy a few things, again, there are tons of them out there and I can assure you that many of them could be had for what amounts to peanuts. And also as we know, Apple's got more than peanuts in its pocket, and dropping a few million on programmers and/or acquisitions isn't a problem if they simply want to. So when they say "no features for you", what they're telling you is, "we're not going to exert ourselves on your behalf." They're not saying why... but just wake up and smell the iPhone marketing, man.
Re:first post (Score:4, Funny)
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There are small st
Re:Streamline It Simple Again (Score:4, Insightful)
The success of the Wii owes much to Nintendo's brave (but wise) decision to persue a completely new customer base and leave the adolescent male (of all ages) market to MS and Sony.
The problem with the established PC/Mac market is that a big chunk of it have established skills and don't want (or don't think they want) a radical new GUI - they want a better way of running MS Office.
Its also worth wondering why the original Apple (after Xerox) GUI caught on. Now, I'm not going to dismiss all the psychology about desktop metaphors, but the big obvious factor that seems to get overlooked is simply this:
Before MacOS and Win3.1, if you wanted to (say) quit an application, it might be :q! or Ctrl-X-C or Ctrl-K-Q or Esc-X or /Q or /X or /E or QUIT or EXIT or BYE or. ESC and 9 from the menu or... Every fricking program was different. The IP wars of the time were not over software patents, they were over "look and feel" copyright of the basic menu structures.
After MacOS/Win3.1 it was File -> Exit. Ditto for Open, Save, Print... and the resulting dialogue boxes were all common, too. Instead of having to RTFM simply to find out how to open a file, everything worked the same way. It didn't matter if it was logically inconsistent to have "Exit" on the "File" menu you only had to find out once!
One problem now is we've drifted back to the application-specific GUI, as everybody invents their own system of dockable palettes, customizable tool bars, drawers, panes and other guff...
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That's why the PC environment I want [slashdot.org] has all UI widgets standardized, across the OS, with no individual "application spaces" in which different UIs are available for the same operations, on the same kinds of data. Throwing out the "application
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Note, I am by no means an Apple/Mac fan. "User" at best; I consider my mac like the rest of my music gear: as an appliance. My primary OS is Linux.
I call BS
Re:Apple can get Mac OS X into corporate environme (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone has that one thing that keeps them from buying Apple products. ("real" video card in iMac, video camera on iPhone, etc.)
You already have an option. What's wrong with:
I have a collection of Dell Optiplexes, HP dc7700 desktops, and a bunch of MPC 4x4 all-in-one systems. I would gladly, and with executive support I believe, pilot a Windows to Linux project on a few hundred systems within a quarter of that ability coming available