Slashdot Mirror
Why Panther May Tear Up Longhorn
Sophrosyne writes "Microsoft Watch has presented an article on Longhorn, which is due not before 2005, and compares it with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), which may be released this September. The article touches on some of the areas where Windows is ahead in operating system design and technologies, as well as how Panther plans to compete. Included in Microsoft Watch's article were links to a Extreme-Tech article on Desktop compositing, and 3D User Interfaces. It also contains videos of Longhorn's 3D Quartz-like user interface in action." If processor power is so important, why are we so willing to waste it on making windows do funny things when we move them around? Just wondering.
What the /hell/ are you on?
1. NO 970 MACHINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED BY APPLE YET. Say it with me, dammit. While it may be likely, don't take as canon rumor sites and IBM press releases that don't even mention Apple Power Macs. Jeez. You're already a Mac user, eh? (And I say that being one.)
2. 980? 990? WTF? At what data are you looking? Search Google for "ibm 970 chip" and the only info you find are two random comments in some forum somewhere; search IBM for roadmap info on PowerPC, and you will find their "9xx" selection, and the only thing under that is this:
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/tec hdocs/A1387A29AC1C2AE087256C5200611780
Lastly, with the release of the 970 being sometime in the second half of this year , don't you think saying we'll probably have a "990" by 2005 is a little premature?
Meh.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
It is 3d in the resect that the content of the windows are treated as textures which are mapped onto planes. That allows the compositing to be handled by the video chip instead of the CPU.
Apple introduced this in Jaguar as "Quartz Extreme". Basically some of the CPU intensive stuff in the interface is offloaded into the 3D functions of the video chip. It requires a fairly hefty video chip (Radeon, or GeForce2+), but those are common now. The upside to it is that Quartz Extreme makes some of the flashier features (e.g. transparancy) available with no additional CPU cycles. It uses the video chip (which is largely untaxed anyway unless you are playing a game). In fact, on a Mac with QE, you can play a quicktime movie under a transparant terminal window with no slowdown and no increase in CPU use. You can use an OpenGL screensaver as your background with no significant CPU use.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
On windows xp, reassociate movie files with "mplayer2.exe" (comes with the OS), and you can have back the stable old simple interface movie player from Windows 2000.
7 years ago was... 1996? I'd imagine that Windows 3.1 was old news by then.
I mean... there's a reason they called it Windows 95 - and there were releases delayed much earlier than that (back when it was called "Chicago").
And the new tech coming out on Windows first? I believe the Mac was the first with a widely commercially used windowing GUI.
Oh, and Apple won't break the MS monopoly, no matter what eye-candy they come up with. Linux/BSD will - because it's free, looks good enough, and it gets the job done.
The 970 if not used by Apple has had some very strange design decisions. This is the first chip that IBM has made that has the Altivec/VMX implemented. Maybe they want it for linux. But common sense tells us that it's more likely that Apple has indeed requested that feature be implemented because they rely heavily on it in their OS. Having encouraged everyone to use the instructions has kinda locked them into useing them.
Also, as everyone knows, Apple is famous for not saying anything until the product is in trucks, and heading to stores. So while it is not a guarentee that they will be using it, I would put money on the fact that the next step in the evolution of Apple computers will be twords the PPC 970.
I do agree that 980/990 prediction is a little early at this stage in the game though.
Quartz is vector-based. It has a built-in path rasterizer and support for floating-point coordinates (among other things). It can also do nonrectangular windows (and change their shape on the fly), but no one really takes advantage of this outside Apple's sample code.
With OSX you don't lose CPU cycles for all the extra animation. Quartz off loads the Open GL and most vector processes to your video card. This frees up your CPU for real tasks.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
"Don't forget Microsoft OWNS a rather big hunk of apple"
They don't anymore, and $150 million worth of shares in a company that has $4 billion in the bank isn't really a "big hunk" of the company anyway.
dhovis wrote: "You can use an OpenGL screensaver as your background with no significant CPU use"
I have to disagree with you there -- on my 466 MHz G4 with a Radeon 8500, the Flurry screensaver running on the desktop takes up about 8% of the CPU, and the Window Manager process goes to 20-30%.
Processes: 91 total, 2 running, 89 sleeping... 326 threads 22:25:34
Load Avg: 2.44, 1.97, 1.75 CPU usage: 62.7% user, 21.3% sys, 16.0% idl
SharedLibs: num = 70, resident = 22.5M code, 2.08M data, 6.78M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 13696, resident = 263M + 24.8M private, 242M shared
PhysMem: 96.3M wired, 454M active, 525M inactive, 1.05G used, 76.3M free
VM: 7.34G + 43.8M 89098(0) pageins, 30217(0) pageouts
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
4052 Window Man 28.9% 88:27.41 3 495 1341 11.5M 102M 105M 287M
8877 OSXvnc-ser 23.6% 0:15.00 5 72 124 1.65M 6.84M 10.4M 109M
8894 top 14.1% 0:01.85 1 15 18 316K 380K 612K 13.6M
8891 ScreenSave 8.2% 0:03.45 3 72 178 2.24M 15.1M 14.7M+ 125M
[snip]
seems pretty significant to me...
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
> now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed
> metal looks good on hardware, not on software.
Brushed metal is indeed annoying. Fortunately, it's simplicity itself to be rid of. Wether an application used Aqua or brushed metal widgets is defined by a single variable in an xml file inside the application bundle. Change that variable, restart the application, and the accursed brushed metal is gone!
There are free programs that'll demetallify all your apps in one step; or do so on an app by app basis, and keep track of the altered ones in a central location.
If you're some kind of freak, you can even ADD the brushed metal skin to applications that didn't use it in the first place!
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Speculation on a 980 is actually fairly realistic. The big brother of the 970 is the Power 4. The Power 5 is just starting to replace the Power 4 and it would be realistic to see a cut down desktop chip based on it coming out in the near future as well. This is supposed to be the 980. A 990 to follow on after that is mere hyperbole. They're just going to be ramping up the 980 during the 2005 timeframe.
Windows can do nonrectangular windows since many years ago, but I have seen few applications and even fewer tat actually looked good/worked well.
This isn't informative, mods. It's /still/ speculation.
The Power5 isn't "starting to replace the Power4", since it isn't going to be released until 2004. (See also here if you want more than once source on that.) 980 speculation is still that: speculation.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
You are supposed to think of an actual panther (the big animal) fighting with a longhorn bull or whatever a longhorn is. Both codenames are animals.
The reason these features are important is that application developers build on them. I plugged a new printer into our AirPort base station today and it just appeared in the printer lists on all of our Macs with no configuration, thanks to Rendezvous (ZeroConf networking). Also, our TiVo looks on the network for iTunes music and iPhoto albums and shows them on the TV. The music and photos can be on any Mac and they just show up on the TiVo automatically.
Until MS Windows has Rendezvous, MS Windows users are going to have to configure that stuff for themselves. Apps are going to be stupider on Windows just because Windows is missing that one feature.
So if Mac OS is so far ahead of Windows right now, and Panther is coming late 2003, while Longhorn is 2005, then what kind of apps will we be running on the Mac until 2005? What improvements are making our lives easier and our work better and faster between now and 2005?
The tearing up is what Mac users are doing to Windows users right now and will do at a faster pace from now on. My Macs have all crashed once in the past two years. That kind of stuff is a huge advantage and as the gap gets wider the advantage grows.
Also, all pro Mac hardware for the past few years has shipped with Gigabit Ethernet, and all Macs since 1999 have AirPort (Wi-Fi). There is a lot of hardware out there for new versions of Mac OS to do interesting things with that Windows really can't expect to find in every machine. Making DVD's is old, old news on the Mac. Kids make DVD Video discs on iMacs and it's easy and the results are great.
Yeah, stop with the "eye candy". Just because you've only seen OS X in screenshots doesn't mean that its features stop there.
... the stuff that the regular user doesn't interact with except that it works.
... our network here just configured itself, including the printer that's on the base station appearing on all the Macs, and music and photos that are shared show up for browsing on all the other Macs and also our TiVo. Mac OS X doesn't crash. It moves between networks transparently, even between Ethernet and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The whole GUI and many apps are scriptable. The file system is Unicode and can hold $ and ? and * in filenames. Searching for something takes milliseconds, and you can fsck a 120GB disk in 10 seconds. You can turn any folder into a virtual disk file, with optional AES-128 encryption. There is a complete 32-bit audio subsystem and full MIDI routing. Consumer-level movie editing and DVD creation is built-in. I could go on and on and on.
It's more about what's under the skin
FireWire is always there and always works. Bluetooth is fully-functional. Wi-Fi(g) is done and I'm sending this over a g network now. Rendezvous is zero-configuration networking
The eye candy is the least of it. Bill Gates complained at WinHEC that Windows apps look like crap and asked developers to take advantage of the 3D video cards that are only used for gaming on the PC. On the Mac, our video cards work just as hard as every other part of the complete system, and things that look like eye candy come with no performance penalty. Steve Jobs says something like, "we've got a 64MB NVIDIA card in there that can do amazing things with OpenGL, so why not use it?"
Also, all Macs are dual display and have TV out. These features really work for you when you have them all there at once and they are easy to use and work every time.
Developers are exploiting this stuff in new ways and users are loving it. You are missing out on so much if you haven't at least given a Mac a test drive at an Apple Store.
Mac OS X is 3D.
No it's not. If it was 3D I could move my orientation around 3 axis, as in Quake. Doom wasn't 3D, even though it could give the impression of depth.
The frontmost app's windows are closer to you than all the other windows. All the background windows are stacked on each other and everything casts a shadow of the right depth.
The front-most window has a slightly deeper shadow, true. But I'm just having a really hard time believing that all OS's have been needing are drop shadows in place of thicker bars.
The key is that it's not a trick.
Of course it is. That's like saying anti-aliased text isn't tricking your mind into thinking the text is smooth, or that TV's updating faster than your eye can see aren't tricking it. Just about everything you see on a computer is using tricks to give an impression. If you can honestly tell me that the drop shadow under the menu bar isn't there to give an illusion of depth just as a drop shadow on my company's logo on my webpage isn't made to do the same thing, then well you have bigger fish to fry. I mean you don't think iTunes is really made out of metal, do you? Or that when you minimize a window, that the genie effect is a real 3D window being transformed?
It's not a mock up made by an artist in Photoshop, or a black line drawn along the bottom and right side of a window as a faux-shadow.
Que? I can't imagine anyone thinking that all the screenshots they've seen of OSX are photoshop mockups... As for the drop-shadow versus the thicker bar to denote some depth... the drop shadow is of course going to be more natural at conveying it, but it doesn't mean it will be always be as successful. A good case can be made against OSX that without those window bars (and just the drop shadows) the UI has a tendancy to "blur together" rather than have distinctive windows.
The interface is drawn using OpenGL and the huge NVIDIA or ATI graphics processor in every Mac.
*shakes head* No it's not. The interface is drawn by the window manager, and then it hands the views to the hardware (if it is AGP2x, and has 16megs of video ram... this covers current mac models but not even the original 500MHz and 550MHz tiBooks and iBooks) and the hardware then composites those views together. Those drop-shadows you're so hot on are drawn in software, but with QE hardware is able to composite that drop shadow over the other views. When you minimize a window with the genie-effect, the window manager has to calculate how each frame of the animation will look, and then has to generate that view- QE just slaps that overtop the other windows saving CPU time.
Understand that you are not seeing an OS being generated in 3D but presented in a 2D metaphor- you're seeing openGL composite 2D windows as views. That's it.
The shadows and textures are done in real-time.
Wait a minute... so the crutch is that in order for windows to have a "3D interface" and all the goodness you think it entails, it has to have shadows around the windows that are generated in real-time? Look here... Drop-shadowy alpha-blended windows goodness. The only difference between it and OSX is that OSX is able to offload the compositing of its shadows to the GPU.
It's not 3D like zooming around in a video game; it's 3D like a trophy case.
Kinda like, "He's not deaf, she just can't hear"? One nonsensical statement deserves another...
It's tall and wide and deep and it has objects in it. It's not infinitely deep; it's only a few inches deep. So your display may be 14" wide and 10" tall and 3" deep. You end up thinking of your desktop as a glass box. If you could reach in you would expect your hand to find the Dock right up against the glass, and the desktop a ways back from that.
Um, perhaps if there were more variations in the sizes of the drop shadows... but I'm not seeing