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.
between Longhorn's Windowing System and Quartz is IE will have it's css extended to allow you to do crap like that to arbitrary windows, so popup ads will be mesmerizing.
the groundwork is in place already. It's only a matter of time before it's applied to the windows themselves.
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.
:)
:(
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.
Did anyone watch this clip of the new prototype GUI?
This is it. This is what e-mail viruses are going to look like in four years.
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)
Yet another way windows can useless tax the entire systems resources. It seems as computers get faster, windows gets more uselessly taxing. We never get to experience something new in how fast windows load and apear because windows adds so much to take advantage of everything we have.
I was a UNIX head 10 years ago, then I was a mac head about 7 years ago, and finnaly I moved to windows when windows 3.1 came out. Now I am going back to UNIX/Linux/Mac. I would like to redefine windows use as a proff of concept platform. When a new tech comes out it seems like it only works for windows for a while, then it moves to Mac and later UNIX/Linux. Windows is so restrictive and not very powerful. It forces me to things their way and conform my system to them and their products and technologies. Unfortunatly they have a software and hardware dominace in the market place. I think thats what they call a monopoly. Well I hope this will change with the new release of the Mac OS. The new MacOS already does things that Microsoft says it will include or be able to do later. Maybe this will end the monopoly that they hold if more companies switch. Go Apple!
No.
microsoft single largest source of revenue is licenses bundled with the sale of new PCs. If they release something new that runs just great on existing old computers they lose *tons* of revenue. All MS operating system and software updates will require new computers for that reason.
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.
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...
What I got out of the article is that because OS X 10.3 will be released before Longhorn, it's gonna "tear up Longhorn".
What a load! I love OS X but just because its out first doesn't mean it will be better than Longhorn. That list of longhorn's feature set is full of HUGE features and while Apple doesn't have to worry about things like providing a digital image catalog (a la iPhoto), other things like file system search features that takes english language strings and not query language are not so easy to deflect.
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.
Resistance is futile.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
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.
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.
For a while now, I've been thinking that OSes ought to have a couple of different graphics modes. When you're just sporting around the internet or moving files about trying to look busy, the windows should dance and swoosh and have shadows and transparency. Use up all those extra processor cycles. When you start rendering your hour long video composition, they should chill out. Window borders should drop down to 256 colors, shadows should disappear, windows should just close, rather than slither away. It would be nice to have a switch somewhere ( EyeCandy: On/Off ), and even nicer for the OS to flip that switch automatically when the processor load gets really high for more than a few seconds. My 2 cents.
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
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.
Because flapping-in-the-wind-flag-like windows are something that will REALLY boost productivity. Windows is now nothing more than a screensaver. "Oh, that's cool, what is it?" "Oh, that's my new screensaver, Windows" "Cool, can I check my email?" "Sure, let me reboot into Linux"
Actually what apple has that STILL blows ms away is the ability to script the UI, it's called applescript, and it's little spoken of and even more rarely seriously used because people on macs don't like to do things like type. So apple made it possible to record your actions and it would make the script for you... people still don't use it *sighs* that does more for the UI and productivity than any flashing, animated, wiggly, snap to dock effect could ever begin to consider. They develop these things because sadly enough people don't often buy things for real features and benefits... they buy what's pretty.
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...
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.
And this presentation coming from Microsoft I wouldn't be surprised if it ran on a Mac.
Regarding Extremetech's article: How extreme can their IT knowledge be if some forum member (!) has to enlighten them on that "Apple has being up and running with their Quartz Compositor engine in OS X, which is now hardware accelerated as Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and that MS is once again playing catch-up and acting as if it's new stuff." Hiding under stones much?
Besides: The public beta of Mac OS X came out September 2000 and Quartz was demo'd to the public half a year before that by Steve Jobs. So implementing wiggly windows takes MS 5 years. More like 6 (see above)...
> 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
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
It is like comparing a 2003 car to a 2005 one.
But the scariest part is that the 2003 wins. gofigure
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.