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http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/12
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/13


Sure sounds like complaining about design issues to me!

For now, it's batteries. But in the not too distant future, it may well be supercapacitors. Supercapacitors now are about a factor of ten away from lithium-ion batteries; improvements that are currently in labs appear to be able to remove most or all of that gap. Right now supercapacitors are expensive, but once the market starts growing they should come down in price. There are relatively fundamental limits to how much better traditional batteries can get in terms of capacity, but the apparent limits on supercapacitors are phenomenal. It might be 10 years before they see serious use, but I imagine small-scale use will be here sooner than that, especially if the rumors are to be believed.

Fuel cells are interesting, but I think that direct electrical storage through batteries and later supercapacitors is more likely to actually work out.

Adobe has opened the source code of the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the high-performance ECMAScript implementation used in Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player. Adobe has made the source code available under three prominent open source licenses, and contributed it to Mozilla for eventual inclusion in Firefox.

Everyone knows that the earth is only 6000 years old, as evidenced here They even have models of Eve with vegetarian Raptors. See. I do not understand why anyone pays any attention to these activist scientists. Duh...

Your memory may be a bit hazy then. Atari and Commodore were easily beating Apple in the early 80s in the home market (most likely due to pricing factors). The Atari 800 was a far superior machine with bitmapped color and sound, and the capability to use a TV as a monitor all for a lower cost.

"In 1980, Gartner reported Apple's worldwide share of the computer market at 15.8%"
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/D579148C-8563-4FFB-8E97-C2613215F98E.html

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/4 - look at the chart at the bottom of the page. Apple was 3rd in sales after Commodore and Atari from 1980-84 (the years the chart covers). The chart on the next page from 84-87 also has Commodore and Atari ahead of Apple too.

While you may be closer on the education side because of Apple's educational discounts, there are a far more number of homes than there are schools. Even if they had 100% of the education market it still would have been less total market share than the others.

I've yet to hear someone defend the problematic firewall.

OK, here you go! Start with this surprisingly level-headed thread over in the ArsTechnica forums. The c't article seems to have been written by people with a limited understanding of nmap and an axe to grind. The bottom line is the functionality Leopard firewall is no different from the one in Tiger, except that it adds a third setting which allows exceptions for ports to be added on-the-fly as applications request them. I do agree that the firewall should come enabled by default, but at least OS X has a very small number of open ports out-of-the-box, which mitigates the issue. But regardless, the hysteria over Leopard's firewall is unwarranted.

The insanely long and detailed ArsTechnica review (slashdotted a few days ago) is based entirely on using Leopard on G5s.

I'm sure you are ALSO aware that you can't USE an OEM license on this $200 linux machine without violating the OEM license. So your argument is moot.

(also PHP, Perl and Python runs seamlessly on Linux rather than on Mac, I mean PHP or Perl or Java is well TESTED on Linux rather than on Mac).

What the hell are you talking about?

PHP PERL PYTHON and all your linux and most Unix server software has been running perfectly in OSX since the day it was released.
every single mac install comes with apache, php, perl and python installed by default.
Mysql is one click away as well.

Furthermore most software that needed to be recompiled to run on the power architecture doesn't need to be anymore as an apple server is just another x86 server.

Most developers who I work with on major web projects using PHP/Mysql/postgres/Oracle/Python/Ruby do all their work in OSX, with some compatibility testing on windows, not much on Linux. (iVillage, BlackPlanet, VH1, MTV, Coke, L'oreal, Nickolodeon, Scolastic, etc) This is to their advantage because they can use all vi or emacs on the command line, they can use all opensource tools, as well as subetha, bbedit, etc, but then they can have MSword, excel and all the garbage that production managers/account execs send them as well, without using some clanky converter software.

further down your post:
How many really bother whether Linux is an OFFICIAL UNIX or not

Why should it matter if its an official Unix?
Well for starters because it means that most applications and application frameworks from any other Unix system can run on osx, either with a recompile or directly if from another x86 based Unix; again obviating your ignorant argument about Linux being the ONLY server.

Second because any Unix admin can open an osx command line and will feel at home, as he would on Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Unixware, etc.

All I care is it should be scalable, secure and supports major application frameworks and databases. Exactly, which is what OsX does. its scalable, you can form a grid system in a few clicks or command line commands, it supports every major framework as all the other Unix systems do, and it runs mySQL, Postgres, Oracle, DB2, and any other unix compatible open source database .

Nothing can replace Linux in the server market, but there is a great chance that Linux can exceed market share of Mac OS X
OsX might not be the most popular server for sure, but Linux market share in that market is DECLINING, not increasing:
http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/08/28/the-server-market-share-battle-microsoft-gains-2/
http://www.geekpedia.com/news193_Linux-server-market-share-plummeting.html
http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/184429419
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/48999.html

on desktop (I think Linux already exceeds Mac OS X in market share)
Hugh, dood... come on alright:
http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/newsanalysis/techhardware/10385313.html
and the money is showing the opposite as well here:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/10/22/apple-q407-financials-triumph-of-the-steve


how did this post get a 5 -- are you kidding me? what is informative about it?

Red Hat is doing something close to this through their Mugshot project. It has progressed quite a bit since that Ars Technica write up and is an important component of GNOME's Online Desktop project.

I was absolutely amazed at the brokenness of the new dock... If you haven't read the review at least go to page 13: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/13

Just scroll down and look at the pictures is enough. Who at apple thought that was an improvement??

Apple has grand plans for LLVM. How grand? How about swapping out the guts of the gcc compiler Mac OS X uses now and replacing them with the LLVM equivalents? That project is well underway. Not ambitious enough? How about ditching gcc entirely, replacing it with a completely new LLVM-based (but gcc-compatible) compiler system? That project is called Clang, and it's already yielded some impressive performance results. In particular, its ability to do fast incremental compilation and provide a much richer collection of metadata is a huge boon to GUI IDEs like Xcode.

I know this LLVM subsection is quite a digression, but even if it's only used in a limited capacity in Leopard, LLVM is quite important to the future of Mac OS X. Indeed, it could also be important to the present of the iPhone and other OS X platforms.

Which says that there is no future for Java under OSX.

Did you check out the new generic PC icon? Man, if that isn't worth the upgrade...

It's really not exactly the same, but it's probably sufficient. Just to play around today I built a little Ruby application against CoreData for saving a few related tables and saved thumbnail images, and it only took me about 10 lines of code on top of the boilerplate (and schema definitions, Interface Builder stuff, etc.) Archiving/Unarchiving the image and making the edit view receive it from a drag-n-drop event didn't require any code either, I was happy to notice. The Ruby/Python system is extremely good for making a quickie one-off program for yourself -- a demo project in the dev package is an RSS reader that pulls pictures down and lets you apply CoreImage filters among other things, very styling, beautiful UI and extremely fast to code, it's probably 100 lines. I might not ever write a CLI ruby script again, the Cocoa links and IB stuff are too easy.

The parent wasn't really talking about this, though. The desire is for some kind of first-class "environment" that doesn't just "bridge" into the OS framework but is actually used to implement it. Bound into this is "safe language" snobbery: there's this attitude among a certain class of programmer that if a language lets you put a *star in front of something, the language is inferior, will cause NORAD to launch missiles, will trash your ~/, and "crashes alot". The Siracusa quote on the issue might be:

Of course, among the end users, Objective-C isn't perceived as much of anything. It ain't perfect but crashing and security aren't really issues on Mac OS X, and are quite effectively addressed (for the time being) in other ways. I've never ever ever heard an end user observe that programs on Mac OS X "crash more" or "install adware more" than programs on XP or Vista. This could change, but when is it going to happen and how?

That said, even when Apple came out with it's "safe" development environment and runtime, what devs would use it? I would, maybe Siracusa would, we're little ISVs. Maybe hobbyists and students and ISVs writing FTP software would, but nobody buys computers to run FTP programs or hobbyist projects; people buy computers to run Word, and Illustrator, and Final Cut Pro, and Cubase, and on and on. These vendors don't give a flying fuck about .NET, and won't probably ever, and we have yet to see any .NET or managed-runtime competitors for them.

I think the whole "safe language" debate is just a bunch of devs arguing over wether or not MS and Sun have discovered the "next magic bullet." Which, if you get my reference, lets you know what I think.

So, lots of eye candy for the casual user. Anyone care to chime in why a geek might want to upgrade?

Oh, were there only an extensive article highlighting all of the under-the-hood changes that a "geek" might be interested in. Sure wish that were in the OP.

Who else remembers when Panther came out and Apple promised a new Finder? Well, the same words are being used to described the "new finder" in Leopard. Shame on you, Apple.

From TFA:

The changes in Leopard do indicate that Apple has taken a renewed interest in improving the Finder, but motion is not the same thing as progress. For where I'm sitting, it looks like one step forward, two steps back.

Truer words have never been spoken. This guy deserves credit for inventing a vocabulary ("spatial"/"browser") so we can talk about the Finder issues clearly, and cutting through the haze of "new features" to see the underlying problems. How often do you see this level of insight from your typical schwag-drenched tech reviewer?

The problem with the Finder is that, even though most people agree that it's fundamentally broken, it's too mundane to get the high-level attention it needs. In particular, capital-S Steve probably figures most home users will be fine accessing their files through applications, otherwise it would have been fixed by now. But Steve! Remember you were the one who said that saving a few seconds of every user's day is like saving a few lives. Now, Mac OS has an installed base of over 20 million.

New features does not a new Finder make. It may seem like a mundane issue, but now is the time to raise a stink so we can move on from this already. F F T F .

This review is great, I'm glad we have a source like Ars Technica to provide counterbalance to all the vapid and superficial product reviews we usually find elsewhere; Siracusa goes in-depth on every topic from the UI to the filesystem to the new Core APIs and Objective-C 2.0. I agree on just about every point, particularly his comment about Apple's need to eventually supplement OS X with a first-class managed code language and runtime:

I'm sure there are Mac developers reading this that don't see any problem at all, in 2010 or otherwise. I could go off on another tangent about how programmers always seem to think the language they're currently using provides exactly the right amount of abstraction for the task at hand, with anything less dynamic being considered barbaric, and anything more dynamic seen as crazy and unsafe, but I'll spare you and save it for a blog post.

(As much as I love working and programming on the Mac, seeing how nice .NET is really gives me concern for the long-term future of Apple's platform.)

On the other hand, if you're not interested in all this technical mumbo-jumbo and only wanted to catch a glimpse of the new intro movie, here it is.

This review is great, I'm glad we have a source like Ars Technica to provide counterbalance to all the vapid and superficial product reviews we usually find elsewhere; Siracusa goes in-depth on every topic from the UI to the filesystem to the new Core APIs and Objective-C 2.0. I agree on just about every point, particularly his comment about Apple's need to eventually supplement OS X with a first-class managed code language and runtime:

I'm sure there are Mac developers reading this that don't see any problem at all, in 2010 or otherwise. I could go off on another tangent about how programmers always seem to think the language they're currently using provides exactly the right amount of abstraction for the task at hand, with anything less dynamic being considered barbaric, and anything more dynamic seen as crazy and unsafe, but I'll spare you and save it for a blog post.

(As much as I love working and programming on the Mac, seeing how nice .NET is really gives me concern for the long-term future of Apple's platform.)

On the other hand, if you're not interested in all this technical mumbo-jumbo and only wanted to catch a glimpse of the new intro movie, here it is.

After having used Leopard for the past four days, the one feature that I so far love to (almost) hate is Stacks. From a theoretical standpoint, Stacks sound great, but Apple's implementation leaves something to be desired. In it's current incarnation, Stacks are barely usable, especially if you relied on the old Dock functionality that turned any docked folder into a nested hierarchal menu.

There's currently a debate going on in the Macintoshian Achaia over at Ars on whether or not Stacks are a useful addition to the OS, or a horrible mess that should've been sorted out before Leopard's release. My personal opinion is that while Stacks show promise, making them a substitute for the old functionality (hierarchal menus) was unwise (to put it kindly). Stacks should have been an addition to Dock functionality, not a replacement for a widely-used system of navigation.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/16

(down the page, you'll find it)

This is very similar to the Rocky Ipod issue from Target store.

The issue with this would be to see who changed the real product with the rocks or tiles, was it a customer who returned the fake products or a member of staff?

Got to love those stores... that's why video-mobile phones are good for, take video while opening the product IN the store in front of someone working there.

In this situation, just take it up with your credit card company if you bought using your credit card. Otherwise, you're in trouble, no?

Virtually no wafer fabs are located in China, for several reasons. The labor needed for a fab is skilled labor, so China offers no real advantages there. There are also a lot of issues regarding the export of "high tech" stuff to China. Most wafer fabs are located in the US, Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore.

Intel is actually currently talking about building a fab in China. In order to stay on the good side of US regulators, it would be an "old tech" 90 nm fab. They would use it to make more "mature" products.

Now, that's not to say they don't have any manufacturing facilities in China. In fact, they have 2 package and test plants located in China. AMD has one as well. These facilities are the next step after fabrication.

Intel provides a full list of where its fabs and package and test facilities are.

I know you were kidding, but believe it or not there are some types of manufacturing that are decidedly not being shipped to China.

Good question, how about two weeks ago?

There are two big problems with this case:

1 Malone's parents had the GPS system installed in order to track the whereabouts and speed of their son, whom they readily admit has a lead foot. In fact, he has already been grounded for having gone over 70 MPH after the GPS was installed.

2 The debate is likely to come down to how often the GPS device calculated and reported ground speed. Petaluma police lieutenant John Edwards told the AP that since GPS is satellite-based, there's a delay involved, and that Malone may have sped up and slowed down in the window between measurements, which could be as long as 60 seconds. My GPS Proves Your Radar Gun Is Wrong

I don't know Petaluma but I do know roads which have been posted at 45 for damn good reasons.

Wow, this story is so unrelated to any technology that I just can't stand it anymore. I've come to the conclusion that slashdot is nothing more than a group of radical left communists hell-bent on circle-jerking over anything they can remotely blame on Bush. There hasn't been one good technology story come through in weeks. Most of this crap is made up or the story summary is completely misconstrued instead of describing the true meaning of the article. Thanks for being such a waste of time and bandwidth. I'm going to Ars Technica. http://www.arstechnica.com/

Captcha: mislead - perfect description of this site

The government removing a tax? You must be new here.

We aren't paying taxes on long distance phone service to pay for the Spanish-American War anymore. That's one down.

Speaking of which, is there any update on repealing that same "federal excise tax" for local service yet?

Riccitiello paid off some friends and himself with his acquisition. Bioware and Pandemic aren't worth $840 million, since their total accumulated revenue since inception has barely been higher. Riccitiello made gobs of cash, his buddies made gobs of cash, and Bioware and Pandemic will be gutted for the sake of efficiency. There's nothing else here. If anything, this will only be the milestone where EA will have started to go downhill. Goodbye Bioware. I hope the founders made enough money to start from scratch again.

Microsoft again shows that it is composed of ignorant idiots.

It isn't almost Unix now, it is Unix.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/08/01/mac-os-x-leopard-receives-unix-03-certification

it doesn't say anything about not suing customers

" "Terms of service subject to change without notice." If it isn't nailed down in your contract, you have nothing to take into court."

Probably not. Certainly the TOS change part has been contested in court heavily here. As for the rest of the argument, please read my post. I don't have a comcast TOS in front of me, but I can bet it doesn't include a promise to never interfere (accidentally or otherwise) with packets.

What I can say is that a case is liable to include material external to the contract between customers and the company, company emails, advertisements, etc. this would be necessary in order to determine intent, and the scope of business that Comcast was offering and advertising.

While I think that there is virtue to being pithy, I don't think that this can be boiled down to two sentences.

Well, 47 comments, and nobody is quoting from the article because there is no link to it - just to ars' front page.

For the linky-impaired: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071018-battle-brewing-between-pirate-bay-recording-industry-over-ifpi-domain-coup.html

Just in case anyone wants to go against tradition and actually RTFA.

Further, the AP says that when it performed traffic analysis on another computer torrenting files over Time Warner Cable, over half of the reset packets came from the addresses of Comcast subscribers. This is curious, since Comcast's 12.4 million subscribers only make up about 20 percent of US broadband subscribers.

Same CPU, not a faster one, so the post is flawed.

why did Jobs say there will be only web based sdk?

The first reference quotes an alleged anonymous source from Apple, and the second one doesn't appear to quote anybody (it has a slide from a Jobs presentation, but "no SDK required" isn't the same as "no SDK ever"). Do you have a source for Jobs explicitly saying "no, we will never let you write anything other than Web apps for the iPhone"?

Scary to think that a team of grown, (presumably) reasonable adults can be convinced to kick down your door and point a gun in your face just because a random report on a computer screen says so--with absolutely no confirmation at all from an superior or actual living person involved in the case.

Yes yes, Hallowed are thy Mac fanboys. I know my post is flamebait, but why did Jobs say there will be only web based sdk? And now after hackers hacked iphone, he says there will be one?

So what is it, did they screw up on there DRM scheme once again or did they finally make one properly usable device?

Not that it matters much, it will take a lot more before I start buying Sony again. For starters, I'm not going to spend a single cent on a company that calls me a thief for making a legal copy of legally acquired music. That's just sponsering an upcoming lawsuit against myself, which to me seems really stupid.

No considering copying music you own is stealing.

Amiga was about a year late, and never had the penetration that the Mac did,

Apple's market share was comparable to that of Amiga and Atari combined, at times a little ahead, at times a little behind (here). And as soon as Microsoft Windows came out, all of those were negligible. To say that the "average" consumer was introduced to the GUI by Apple is simply false.

The GUI was the thing that drove the dedicated graphics processor, something that Apple always had good support for(shape tables)

Shape tables were purely software, and so was the Mac toolbox. Trying to create hardware that was compatible with Apple's idiosyncratic graphics software was hard, which was why it took Apple a long time to get accelerated graphics.

The point remains. The google phone was not in response to any existing mobile phone technology, but in response to a changing mobile phone environment, of which Apple is a part. By the time the Google phone comes out, the technologies will be cheap enough to use on a commodity phone.

I have had a touch screen phone with a high resolution screen for 1/3 the price of the iPhone for a couple of years. Apple has done nothing to drive down the cost or add functionality, and their carrier locked model and closed OS are steps backwards compared to Palm, Nokia, and Microsoft. Apple did not prepare the market for Google. Apple didn't even invent the sleek touch screen phone and they weren't even first to market (LG was).

OTOH, the computer is not hindered by support for 20 year old technology.

That is exactly what the computer is hindered by, given that OS X is built around NeXT's Objective-C and OpenStep technologies, software from 1987 whose basic design and architecture has not changed much (at least Objective-C 2.0 adds garbage collection).

Features fall in and out of the Mac much faster than other computers,

This is a good thing on balance in my opinion. They also have great designers and a killer marketing team. But they are not particularly innovative or visionary. And when it looks like they are "leading the industry", it's usually simply that they have been working on the same stuff as everybody else and they get to market a little earlier because they have less backwards compatibility to worry about and don't mind breaking standards.

Now now, the CSIRO are actually a respectable scientific body that research and develop countless products, dont believe me? Have a look at 802.11n (for example)

From the Article:
"This plastic will help solve problems of small molecule separation, whether related to clean coal technology, separating greenhouse gases, increasing the energy efficiency of water purification, or producing and delivering energy from hydrogen," Dr Anita Hill of CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering said.
"The ability of the new plastic to separate small molecules surpasses the limits of any conventional plastics."
"It can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas."

All wishy washyness about the abilities of the substance is the editorialising of slashdot and the writer of the article

(802.11n link with a fairly complete look at the picture: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070924-dark-australian-patent-cloud-looms-over-802-11n-spec.html though it does kind of skirt around the fact that the CSIRO were ripped off in the past by the worldwide adoption clause and they are attempting to avoid the same again )

TFA is pretty misleading (though not as bad as the summary). This "mind-reading" would apparently take place at the design stage. Ars's coverage is a little more level-headed.

The case looks like a Supermicro SC750
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1298/sc750a.html

It's a nice case. Mine recently got its guts replaced for the umpteenth time in the past decade; it still houses my primary workstation. At (currently) $41 with free shipping, that's not a bad deal for a solid chassis.

$50 being too much it seems.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070525-windows-tax-is-50-according-to-dell-linux-pc-pricing.html

I wonder how much of a discount he woulld get from Microsoft if he stopped selling Linux machines? Could Microsoft even ask for that I wonder, given the anti trust case?

I would too, after reading this. (Warning, PDF content)

In essence Sprint is just a reseller of at&ts' product. Let them come out with their own product to compete.

In Canada, the biggest telco, by far, Bell Canada, was for a very long time a state sanctioned monopoly and thus recieved tons of public funds to help build its infrastructure.

Due to this fact, the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC, but usually with a clue), forces Bell to allow access to its lines to competitors. Results? Unlimited, uncapped DSL, which would cost me 45$ with Bell cost me 28$ with one of its competitors because Bell has to lease them the line for 22$/month (a price point at which they still make a profit, I feel it must be pointed out).

So, basically, you got it all wrong, mandatory line-sharing is promoting competition, not lowering it.

There is a good article in Ars today related to this btw.

>wiping the hard drive after she got in trouble

Sorry, not so. ... Unless you picture her as intentionally sabotaging her own computer before sending it to Best Buy. Or assume the Geek-squad guy was lying as well.

Try again for your obvious evidence of guilt, please.

Walmart competes on price, and its pretty successful. Target, knowing that it can't beat Walmart on price, competes by having brighter stores, and higher quality goods

Yeah, I have heard that those rocks that Target sells are quite HiFi. However, I am not sure how "portable" they might be...