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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.
Okay, Panther is due out RSN - and Longhorn is due in, what, TWO YEARS? I guarantee you, OS X will be much farther along by 2005, and the effect on OS X by the PowerPC 970 & succeeding processors (we'll have at _least_ the 980 and possibly 990 by 2005!) will be pretty astounding, if early, unconfirmed reports are even halfway accurate.
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Okay, now about making windows do silly things - I gotta agree here - the first thing I do after installation of any system is turn off all window animations & effects. I want that extra millisecond!
I'm stuck temping on a weird laptop that keeps turning on window animation after every reboot - bizarre behavior. Plus it's Win98SE *sigh*. I haven't had to endure _that_ for quite some time.
I like OS X, and plan to switch to a Mac when I can afford a PPC970 machine (hopefully this year), but I must admit that I could do without all the extra window chrome in OS X. I don't even like the extra window chrome in Win Me/2000/XP (I turn it off, but it's still there in some apps like Windows Media Player), but in OS X, it's extra pixel hungry. And that frickin' metallic theme that Apple puts on everything now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed metal looks good on hardware, not on software.
I think the nickle summary is that Microsoft and Apple are madly hurrying to add stuff. They're not sure exactly what anyone is adding except they've heard there are rumors. Then they suggest you use google to go dig some unsubstantiated stuff up. Sheesh.
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
What do you mean Panther will tear up Longhorn? Apple to suddenly have 90% market share?
Shiny spinny stuff is cool and all that, but windows doesn't have huge market share because of an amazing interface.
It is because they arrived at market at the right time, with the right product, with the right marketing strategies. (Perhaps not morally right.. but the proof is in the pudding as far as $$ go)
Okay, 3d is a neat thing. It's really neat because it creates entire new genres of video games. And it also make really cool animation for movies and such possible. However, for user interfaces 3d is bad unless it's a hologram, and we're still talking flat monitors here. It's one thing if you use the 3d stuff to make it look cool. Say an icon is a spinning 3d image of a disk instead of a pixellated icon of a disk. That would indeed be cool, if useless. However, making the actual interfact 3d is bad. 3d implies depth which means something is behind something else. Behind is bad in UI, because it's obscured.
What I would like to see is a vector graphics based user interface. Right now my task bar I have to set the width in pixels. I have to select one of 4 sides of the screen to put it on. All of my windows are rectangular in shape. With a GUI based on vectors I could have a round web browser. Or an oblong winamp. My task bar could be a triangle in the lop left of my screen. I could change the shape of existing windows to make room for new ones. Usually if I've got 3 or 4 windows open on a desktop all the room is used, but a small piece is left over, or one of the windows has to be sized awkwardly to fit. The awkwardly sized window ends up having it's internal ui elements messed up. With a vector based ui you could morph each window to maximize use of screen space.
Microsoft is using 3d because they can. They are thinking about keeping a hold on their 3 year upgrade cycle. Apple, while not making a vector based ui, is thinking about making a good ui.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Apple playing catch up? What article did YOU read? It was about Apple being ahead now and Longhorn will catch up in 2005 to Jaguar... which by that time Apple will have released some other OS X cat name...
Apple constantly is putting out OS upgrades, and MS has one big release every so often. Microsoft says it will have a whole lot of things, and then Mac will already have released them and they will be done better.
"I do believe by 2005 when Longhorn is out, Apple will have made amazing OS X gains, heck it might even be OS XI by then, but I do NOT buy first to market wins."
I think the premmise of the article was that because Apple was so far ahead now when compared to XP, the introduction of Panther in a couple months will make that lead massive. In two years time that Massive lead will be growing exponentially.
While Longhorn may (or may not) be an innovative update, the article is simply saying that it will have to be absolutely INCREDIBLE to catch up to the hights that OS X will have achieved by that time.
Since its initial release just 2 years ago, Mac OS X has had 2 major revisions and numerous minor updates with significant performance gain and countless new features. In contrast, Win XP remains virtually unchanged apart from a single service pack and a large number of security patches.
.NET, Longhorn, speech recognition for so many years, but failed deliver any meaningful result. Now we know that Longhorn is at least 2 years away, and WinFS is just a Windows Service on top of NTSF rather than a revolutionary file system. The only things really worth mentioning in Longhorn appears to be the Aero GUI and Window rendering through GPU, basicly a second rate imitation of Aqua and Quartz Extreme.
MS is just full of puffs and bluffs. They have been talking about
MS is just a slow dinosaur that has to die sooner or later due to its total incapacity to innovate. Apple is 60 times smaller than MS, and yet makes more and better software than the Redmond beast, in addition to cool hardware innovations like Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, iMac, PowerBook, and so on.
Although Win XP has some nice features, but it just doesn't feel nearly refined as Mac OS X. Judging from the recent leaks, Longhorn can't even match Jaguar, let alone Panther. And no one can imagine how much better OS X would be by 2005.
... but slowing down the video card kills perfomance in anything video related, kills performance when you try to do something like oh... move the quicktime window with something playing.
You know not of what you speak. You've obviously never used a Mac with Quartz Extreme. If you had, you'd know that this is exactly one of the situations that benefits the most from QE.
Kills games and anything else that needs redenered.
Once again, you're an idiot. Games are generally fullscreen, and write directly to the framebuffer. They go completely around the rest of the interface as if it weren't there. That's the way it was before QE, and the way it is now.
More important than real performance of course is that it makes the system FEEL slower.
Your entire argument seems to be that a feature that speeds up interface performance makes the system feel slower. Pardon me if I go away from this thinking that you're a drunken retarded child, because I can't think of anyone else that could come up with something so stupid.
The second and third videos don't look like they're realtime to me... I imagine its just clipped video scaled, rotated, and alphamapped ...
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If she was hitting the "Start" key and the menu was being build and displayed, and all that, I would be a little happier with what I saw. But as it is, and knowing MS' track record of shoddy demo's, I'm gonna pass all judgement on Longhorn until I hear chimps talking about it on the bus.
Until then, ho hum
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Maybe I'm not the first to mention this, but the article is full of inaccuracies. OS X has had the "ability to create profiles that travel with them among machines," since it was still NextStep (and it had shared directory services before Active Directory was a twinkle in its daddy's eye). I'm not sure what "Terminal Services' access to multiple desktops" means, but Apple Remote Desktop (or the free VNC) will give you most of what Terminal Services gives you. Also, they spelled "Lifescape Solutions's Picassa" wrong (it only has one s). I don't mean to be a nerd about it, but it kind of shoots their point -- which I don't think is far wrong -- in the foot.
You were moderated up as "Funny" but I fear you are not joking...
Linux nerds need to pull their heads out of their asses and simply realize that Linux needs to be retardedly easy to use!
Only if your goal is to have everybody and their mothers use it.
What I want, on the other hand, is something totally different - I want power. And I don't care about world domination. I love Linux the way it's now. I think I'm not the only Linux nerd who thinks that way. Retardedly easy to use is for retards. They can use Windows or whatever, I don't care.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
If you watch the video's you find at the last page of ExtremeTech you see a huge difference in filesize between RealMedia, Windows Media File format, and QuickTime format. Gives the average visitor the impression that WMF has better compression ratio.
What you don't see if you don't open all formats, is the higher quality of the QT version.
Near fraud - or pseudo journalism.
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* Sigh *
> 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
That's why all of this stuff is being moved to the graphics card. The advanced card capabilities are just sitting there twiddling their thumbs until you start real graphics work, so why not use them!
To be honest, this article didnt say very much about why "panther may tear up longhorn." It did however point out that panther is due out this summer, and longhorn not till 2005, making the comparison somewhat of a bad one. Who is really comapring the two anyway? Seems like we ought to wait until the 2003 mac OS to compare.
Aside from that I have one more question. Does anyone know if there will be a 64-bit version of longhorn, or if it will be exclusively 64-bit?
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
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.
No it doesn't- you haven't read the docs on what Quartz Extreme actually does... There are a few processes Quartz has to use to get stuff onto the screen, one of which is compositing. The compositing stage is where OSX takes the generated windows from the window manager process and slaps them together. That is all that QE accelerates.
In other words, when you control-click on a menu item on a non-QE machine it has to generate and draw the view (window) along which includes having to calculate the drop shadow, icons, etc. Then the window manager has to composite it over whatever it behind it and generate what you should be seeing (ie, if there is a blue window behind it the menu will be tinted blue as it's slightly transparent).
On a QE-enabled machine, the window manager is able to offload the last part of the process to the video card: compositing. This is still a huge boon, especially in certain circumstances, such as having a transparent terminal window running top will see a speedup, but you STILL have a big hit of overhead due to all the windows having to be drawn as they are in quartz (ie, a ton of stuff still has to be done in software to generate all the pretty stuff).
Apple is NOT a software company as M$. Apple does hardware as well. Releasing its OS to x86 architecture would do more harm then ever.
It is not the $129 OS X sales that brings cash flow to the company, it is the hardware sales.
Today one of the reasons why people buy Apple computers - in addition to better hardware, construction details and the unique approach to the computing experience itself - is the fact that it is the only platform where to run Apple OS.
It would open up the world of Apple to new users. Who would in return very likely go to the Mac Hardware...Any other thoughts?
Yeah-- you're wrong, wrong, WRONG!
1) What makes you think the people who buy shitbox $399 PCs will suddenly be willing to pay significantly more for genuine Apple hardware because then they could use Mac OS X on its 'native' hardware? That's how it is now, and the aforementioned cheap bastards are not seeing the light and beating a path to Apple's door, checkbooks and credit cards in hand.
2) Apple tried letting their hardware be cloned in the 90's, and it almost killed them. The cloners were supposed to fill the low-end, entry-level machine niche and leave the high end to Apple. What they did instead was produce cheaper high-end hardware than Apple ever could. They could do this for the same reasons Dell and Gateway do it-- they're just box stuffers, with very limited R&D overhead. Meanwhile, Apple has to charge more to offset the cost of developing the OS, so their prices are naturally higher. People, being the cheap bastards that they are, usually buy according to price, so they started buying clones and stopped buying the real Macs that paid for the OS development. Result: Apple started bleeding. Heavily. Luckily they managed to kill the cloning business before it killed them.
3) What makes Macs special is the ultra-tight integration of software and hardware-- THAT is why they work so well. Sell a copy of OS X that can run on commodity PC hardware, and it's not going to work that well, period. How do I know this? Because Microsoft has already been laboring for 20 years trying to get thousands of commodity PC hardware components to play nice together, every time and in any combination. They have more people and way more money to throw at the problem than Apple does, and still they have failed. And, if you missed all the news from the WinHEC conference a week or two ago, they are now trending toward doing sort of what Apple does-- working with OEMs so there will be hardware designed from the start to work with future versions of Windows, as opposed to just being on some Hardware Compatibility List that only means "it *should* work, we've *seen* it work, but it might not work when *you* try it-- and that's *your* problem."
~Philly
You can always worry about things, but I think the best reason to assume that Apple (at least) will get decent or better pricing on the chip is just the fact that Apple's interests are aligned with IBM's while they surely aren't with Motorola's. Both Apple and IBM really need an affordable high performance follow-on to the current PPC architecture that doesn't involve Motorola, and IBM has a big interest in having everybody see how screamingly great their new chip is in consumer hardware, since that will (undeservedly) speak louder than all the whitepapers you can write about how well your new servers based on the chip will perform. So I'm less concerned with the price (since Apple will really have to make it more affordable than the current dead tower offerings) and more concerned with ramping up the volume.
That said, the fact that NOBODY is saying ANYTHING officially gives me hope that things are going really well. We shall, of course, see. Hopefully by August...
Babar
Sure, they're only proof of concept things. But one doesn't prove future brilliance by trotting out today's junk. Look at them, especially the last one - chaos, clutter, disarrangement and dislocation, all set ajumble and rotating like Frank Poole after HAL's had his way with him. Who among us used to the differences between Windoze and Apple OS doesn't see in that a sort of perfect realization of Microsoft's design philosophy? Clutter, chaos, things spinning out of control, a world of glommed-on crap with the user left gawping and wondering what (other than paying for the privilege) his incidental role in this GPU-driven wilderness might be...
The documents being shaken out like bed sheets - that could really increase business productivity, if for no other reason than it'll make it even harder to read management's nonsense! ;-)
Give fools more powerful technology, and their foolishness only grows.