Slashdot Mirror

[...] there are some academic papers showing that heterogeneous cores are a good idea.

larry

A modern x86 processor is basically a RISC processor internally, the core design probably has more in common with chips mentioned in the parent than they do with the 486.

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.ht ml

I used to think that graphical filemanagers all suck. I didn't like Windows Explorer, pre-spatial Nautilus, gmc or Konqueror. I used only command line for file management. The first time I tried spatial browsing was on MacOS System 7.5 running on Basilisk II Mac 68k emulator (this was a few years back) and after 15 minutes or so I found that it was something I actually enjoyed using. I thought: "This Finder thingy is insanely great. Why can't GNOME or KDE people do something like this?" And then, soon after GNOME 2.6 was released, I bought a new computer and installed Slackware 10 on it. Using spatial Nautilus and the entire GNOME 2.6 environment was absolutely wonderful! It was the best user experience I had ever had (I have used Windows, OpenLook, CDE, GNOME 1.x, KDE, FVWM, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, OS/2 Warp and Indigo Magic (on SGI O2 workstation running Irix)). Now I use GNOME 2.10 on Ubuntu and FreeBSD. I do most of my personal file management tasks using spatial Nautilus. I actually use command line only for file management related to system administration (bash + vi rule in those tasks). I have to wonder why I like GNOME 2.10 and spatial Nautilus so much?

One reason for this is that spatial nautilus is extremely simple and fast to use. For me using spatial file managers is very intuitive and natural. A good analysis on spatial filemanagers is found at: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars

Other parts of GNOME 2.10 are also very nice. I really like the way GNOME 2.10 handles filetypes and connecting them to certain applications. It is so intuitive and effortless to use that it puts the abomination known as Windows Filetypes dialog to shame!

GNOME dialogs are also awesome. The new open and save dialogs are finally usable (again: simple, fast, effortless, efficient). They are vastly superior to the pre Gtk 2.4 dialogs. As for other dialogs, they are also extremely nice and logical. Finally we have gotten over annoying "Yes/No or OK/Cancel -dialogs should be enough for anyone". Using verbs in dialogs (when it makes sense, that is) is a huge improvement!

In my opinion GNOME has become a lot better desktop environment than anything Microsoft has ever had. I used to hate gnome in the 1.x days because it was just like Windows 9x. If I wanted to use Windows-like environment I would probably use Windows.

How about: "You'd still be wrong"?

There was no cash involved, only bargain Apple stock options for Xerox (it was already clear how big a success Apples IPO would be).

And what Steve and his engineers saw at Xerox was nothing more than this:

http://media.arstechnica.com/images/gui/7-AltoST.j pg

They still put a lot of their own work in the GUI. Well, that and hired ex-Xerox employees of course.

When I looked at this picture of the NLS, I recognized it immediately. Mine's almost the same, probably a later version. I can't figure out why they used such a big display however.

Don't show the Gnome devs this:

Alto File Manager

it might end up being the next version of Nautilus...

UWB has been the latest buzz for a while. Reminded me when I, Cringely was all over it making it out to be the next big thing. That was in 2002 though. Time will tell....

Never. As I understand it, the stuff that broke networking on a lot of applications are fundamental changes in Tiger's APIs that can't be fixed without going back to the old (Panther) way. Every major revision of Mac OS X has broken compatibility with at least a few apps.

Compatibility issues with applications will have to be fixed by the individual software vendors, specifically, they'll have to switch to the new APIs.

The good news is that one of the big things about Tiger is that Apple has supposedly reached a point where they're done making changes to the APIs that break things. This is mentioned in the first page of Ars Technica's Tiger review.

(Apparantly M-Audio decided the perfect time to roll up their sleeves and start making 10.4 drivers for their Mac hardware was a week after the retail release.)

M-Audio has a history of doing that. When Panther was released, it took awhile for them to get drivers out for my Revolution 7.1.

If the Ars Technica review is right, this shouldn't be as big of a problem for future Mac OS X releases. See this for more details.

Other things, like Quartz 2D Extreme which is desigend to offload almost all the UI work to the GPU, was buggy enough to be disabled in the Tiger release.

According to Apple Tiger's Quartz Extreme page, this is not the case. Perhaps you need to take a look at the Quartz Extreme Requirements.

For a balanced evaluation of Quartz 2D Extreme, check out this April 28th review by Ars Technica.

" ...you're showing links to retail sales, when the vast majority of sales are OEM, not retail."

Did you read the article? The first sentence says "US desktop PC retail arena"

They are speak of CPU's that shipped inside of PC's sold in the retail market. That includes OEM sales. Why do people not what to believe things when the facts are staring them in the face? Is it somehow humiliating to you that Intel has lost the desktop market to AMD? It's a fact.

If you want more facts, read this article on which includes links within it to prove it's truth. This article includes the most recent numbers available. Everyone else is offering numbers for total CPU sales. I am pointing out that AMD owns the desktop. That is far more than just a foot in the door. The door is wide open and they are poised to step through. The real question is will intel be able to shut the door again before AMD does it.

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1085431607.html

I have an image of it stored here aswell.
This is almost a year ago, though.

Sorry, but this seems rather unlikely. Do you really think Core Image is going to use more video ram than Doom3? And if it was such an amazing breakthrough for Core Image, why wouldn't ATI have advertised that at least a little? G-d knows they've got no reason anybody else can figure out for releasing specs for this particular card.

Are you sure? You make no indication of having read the article that I linked from Ars Technica, which more or less states in its discussion of Quartz 2D Extreme that Tiger will use all of the VRAM that you throw at it. FWIW, today's post about ATI's 512MB video card discusses this topic as well. See, for example, this and this.

Ars Technica has an excellent presentation of how Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" uses VRAM to store graphics processing code, cached rasterizations, and window backing buffers. And, yes, I can see how this could easily consume much more VRAM than DOOM3 does.

Section 13: Quartz
Section 14: Quartz 2D Extreme
Section 15: Core Image

Ars Technica has an excellent presentation of how Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" uses VRAM to store graphics processing code, cached rasterizations, and window backing buffers. And, yes, I can see how this could easily consume much more VRAM than DOOM3 does.

Section 13: Quartz
Section 14: Quartz 2D Extreme
Section 15: Core Image

Ars Technica has an excellent presentation of how Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" uses VRAM to store graphics processing code, cached rasterizations, and window backing buffers. And, yes, I can see how this could easily consume much more VRAM than DOOM3 does.

Section 13: Quartz
Section 14: Quartz 2D Extreme
Section 15: Core Image

Ars Technica has an excellent presentation of how Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" uses VRAM to store graphics processing code, cached rasterizations, and window backing buffers. And, yes, I can see how this could easily consume much more VRAM than DOOM3 does.

Section 13: Quartz
Section 14: Quartz 2D Extreme
Section 15: Core Image

According to AnandTech, the 512MB card can't outperform its 256MB counterpart and costs 50% more.

Mac OS X Tiger loves graphics RAM. Check out the Ars Technica article to understand why on a Mac, more VRAM is always better.

This card, or a card like it, would probably be most useful to Mac OS X Tiger. With Quartz 2D extreme enabled it stores everything graphics-wise in video ram. It's not so hard to conjure up situations where the 512 megs come in very handy.

Once a Mac version of this is available, Core Image and "Quartz 2D Extreme" will put the extra vram to pretty good use.

Ars has a pretty good explanation about why the extra elbow room will make a difference, namely, the GPU won't have to hit its backing cache in RAM as often.

The extra memory is to keep the CPU from having to busy itself writing graphics to backing-stores in the RAM.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 14

Mac OS X should have support for this in the next version as well. In fact, it already does, to some extent. It is possible in 10.4 Tiger to scale up the UI on any application using Quartz Debug (example, halfway down the page). I would imagine by 10.5, the bitmaps (or maybe vector art?) that make up the UI elements will be at a higher resolution so that this is prettier.

32MB [of VRAM] is plenty for anything you can do on a 1.25GHz G4 -- more would just be a waste.

I'm not sure if the conventional wisdom about VRAM -- that it's only used as a dumb framebuffer and so the amount you need is a strict function of the screen resolution and color depth that you use -- is necessarily true anymore. The impression I got from reading the Tiger review on Ars Technica is that Tiger basically uses the GPU for everything it possibly can in order to avoid system bus bottlenecks, and thus it actually helps to have more VRAM.

However, this isn't really an area in which I can speak comfortably or with any sort of authority, so I might be dead wrong, and please correct me if so.

Oops. That's memory, and here's a link to the ars technica article describing the Quartz graphics engine and rendering pipeline.

Troll.
Quartz 2D Extreme has been a long time in the making. It's more likely you clean the toilets at Apple than it is that you do any programming or OS design work.
You're trying to convince us that Adobe doesn't use Quartz 2D at all? Very funny.
http://kb.indiana.edu/data/ajeb.html?cust=760016.5 9534.30
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 14

A huge number of common drawing operations fit this "upload, cache, and reference" mold. For example, nearly every user interface element in Mac OS X is a bitmap: buttons, checkboxes, window widgets, window background textures, etc. The first time these UI elements are drawn, the bitmap graphics are uploaded to the video card and cached in VRAM. All subsequent UI widget drawing commands can then execute as fast as possible, pulling bitmaps from the VRAM cache as needed.

Perhaps surprisingly, text is the other common example. The first time text is drawn at a particular size with a particular font, the characters shapes (glyphs) are read from the vector-based font definition and then rasterized into bitmaps at the specified size. These rasterized glyphs (bitmaps, really) are then uploaded to the video card and cached in VRAM. All subsequent text drawing using the same font and size can then simply issue small drawing commands ("draw a capital letter 'A'") without any further need to upload bitmaps. Since most text consists of relatively long sequences of glyphs in a few fonts and sizes, this is a big win in practice. Of course, ransom notes that use a different font and size for every single character might not benefit as much...but then, that really depends on how much VRAM you have, doesn't it?

1998 most people were "making do" with drives in the 2 to 4 gig category, video cards with 4 to 8 meg, and 16 to 64 meg of ram. 300 mhz was the limit, and 233 or 266 were much more common (450 and 500 mhz pentiums were only introduced in February 1999).

Quartz 2D hardware acceleration (no idea where this "Quartz 2D Extreme" name came from) only applies to programs that actually use Quartz. Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are all QuickDraw applications. They would receive no performance boost from hardware-accelerated Quartz 2D.

Everything you wanted to know about Quartz 2D Extreme from Ars Technica. Basically, Apple is dropping Quickdraw, and in Tiger they made that very compelling by making Quartz 2D Extreme very fast, even in software only mode.

It seems like the hardware should be up to the task, and now, with OS X 10.4, the software can properly use the hardware.

There is an interesting analysis of databases in filesystems (and metadata...) in the Ars Technica review of OSX: extended attributes managed at system level, an application like Spotlight making (some) use of this, etc. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/
(this link was already given in the recent OSX Tiger discussion here)

Hervé

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2. ars
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.htm l

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2. ars
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.htm l

As Tiger coverage, this is definitely not in-depth. If it is anything, it's the sort of review you can expect after having worked with Tiger for one day. For real in-depth coverage, take a look at Ars Technica's 20+ page review. Other worthwhile information can be found on XLR8YourMac.com. And yet another that isn't too bad: the IT-Enquirer. That site even has a free downloadable eBooklet on Tiger.

So I don't blame Apple for getting rid of that SYSV stuff. It might have been cool back in the day, but it has lost its luster.

1. The Unix layer of OSX is BSD based, and in fact was in sync with FreeBSD as of Panther in 2003, and (presumably) is in sync with ... whatever the current release of FreeBSD is as of this spring, as of Tiger. So there was no "SYSV stuff" to get rid of in OSX.
2. OSX already had their own approacch to startup from 10.0 through 10.3 that looked nothing like any other *NIX I've had exposure to -- Linux (RedHat, SuSE, Debian), Solaris, or Irix. It was their own thing, where bundles of XML definition files and executable scripts (typically Bourne shell scripts, but in principle they could be Perl or Python or something compiled or whatever) live in {/System,}/Library/StartupItems/Service . This system was a little weird, but once you got used to it, the design was very clean.

But "very clean", apparently, wasn't good enough. Now, launchd replaces this entire approach, along with a whole bunch of other traditional Unix cruft. It's actually a radical rethinking of how all these things have been done by every Unix vendor for the last 30 years, and from the looks of it, it's a huge step forward.

I'll be very disappointed if other systems don't pick this up.

So I think what Apple did rules. They didn't ask requirements from anyone, they had a flash of inspiration, created something awesome that works good for them, and then said 'hey, if you want to use this, go ahead!'

They did something similar with an even more important technology: file type metadata. Read the very good overview in the referenced Ars Technica article:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 11

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars

It's a long read, but it's engaging and very informative. I cannot recommend the article more highly.

Man. I really wish we could get critical reviews.

Try this one from ars technica, if you haven't already. It's fairly detailed, and not as amateurish, nor is it worshipful.

Meaty goodness.

The boys at Ars Technica seem to think differently. See what's really changed with Quicktime.

I get half the frame rate (12 fps) on my 1 GHz PowerBook Titanium (133 MHz bus). It's pretty smooth for 12 fps. Interestingly, my 1.7 GHz Cube (100 MHz bus) is more jerky, despite the 700 MHz clock speed advantage.

Reports are that a 1.6 GHz G5 iMac has no problem with 720p24, and plays back 1080p24 at about 15 fps. A dual 1.8 GHz G5 is needed for 1080p24. (Apple recommends a 1.8 GHz G5 and a dual 2.0 GHz G5 respectively.)

To my surprise, one report also has it that a dual 1 GHz G4 will also play back 720p24 at the full 24 fps. A single 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook is close to being able to play back 720p24 @ 24 fps too.

Additional HD H.264 fps reports are listed in this table

For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.

Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.

For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.

Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.

For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.

Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.

For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.

Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.

For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.

Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.

For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.

Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.

For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.

Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.

I did and this video in the ars technica article now crashes Safari.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 9#smart-folder-update

Some specific issues: the mouse cursor sometimes doesn't update correctly when hovering over different apps, contents of Finder columns misbehave when resizing, using the red plus button in Finder windows leaves scrollbars when they're unnessesary, the unified toolbar+titlebar that's used seemingly at random, still beachballs with Finder network drives, lots of issues with the Spotlight UI.

Since you rarely fail in your posts that you're an Apple Insider, tell me, aren't you guys working right now on 10.4.1 that consists mostly of bugfixes? Of bugs that, if found in other products you'd proclaim any Apple engineer would be ashamed to find in a released product?

What, did they really stop cooking their books after the government told them to stop? (That would certainly be a first!)

My theory is they just didn't cook them quite long enough this quarter.