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Mac OS X "Tiger" Enters Final Candidate Stage
Orangez writes "Apppleinsider.com reports that 'Tiger' reaches the final candidate stage. 'With massive software projects such as Tiger, Apple will sometimes seed several final candidate builds before one is declared gold master...'" The final release has widely been speculated to be in the next month or two.
I woulda got first post but Bittorrent is using all my bandwidth downloading OS X Tiger Final Canidate.
sgarringer@gmail.com
I'd like to see them ship this sooner rather than later. People are excited about this release and we'd like to get our hands on it to become familiar with it.
I hope this release sticks around for a few years and Apple chooses to update it rather than come up with some new cat name and ask people to pay for it. I doubt that, however, since OS updates seems to be a major cash cow for Apple.
They are inadvertently (or purposefully) creating a situation where people are running 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and now 10.4...makes it very tough for developers. We can't assume that everyone has the money to upgrade their OS all the time (and yes, I know they should).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The fact that it's a a point release is basically just semantics. Apple sort of painted themselves into a corner with the name OSX. It's sort of the 10th version of the Mac OS, but the X was to make it sound cooler and sort of clever, but what comes after? OS XI? That looks weird. And a little too close to XP. So they've gone with 10.whatever, and used 10.x.x for what'd normally be considered a point release. 10.4 has been a long time coming, and it's got plenty of big changes over 10.3, such that a bigger name change wouldn't be that surprising, if apple could come up with a better name for it. That's probably why they've been making the big cat code names more official. Jaguar, Panther, Tiger...
If you want, you can complain that Apple's devaluing the normal versioning numbering system, but I don't think they'll care much if you do.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
No, this is nothing new.
Yes, the version number seems to indicate it's not a new version but only an update. You have to simply ignore the leading "10.". It ain't that hard.
Yes, this is actually like Microsoft charging you for XP (NT5.1) after you already bought Win2000 (NT5.0) or NT4.0 or NT3.51 - the leading "10." is like the leading "NT" from Microsoft.
Yes, this is old news, but the issue comes up every time Apple releases a new version of OS X.
You're clearly being facetious, but not everyone will pick up on that. Thus, a point of explanation:
It's a mere point release, but that's an artifact of marketing. The number and magnitude of changes under the hood is incredible, with huge advances in developer productivity through tools like CoreData, CoreImage, and CoreVideo. The rendering subsystem has been worked over to the point where some operations are hundreds or thousands of times faster than they used to be, and the system takes advantage of modern GPUs to offload even more processing (formerly it was just compositing, not it's a whole lot more). Add to that new versions of Safari, Quicktime that's build on CoreAudio, and a ton of other neat stuff (Automator). You get a lot for your $140.
And remember, the 2.6 kernel was just a point release!
Looks like there will be a 10.3.9 update soon, interestingly enough.
I worked as a Mac Genius when Jaguar came out, and there was an official cut-off date about 5 weeks before the official release. If you purchased a mac between then and the release date, you got the free upgrade. Not the stand-alone OS install, mind you, but the "drop in" upgrade discs that they toss in the boxes of new macs at the store that don't have the OS preloaded. They do have a little give around these dates if you whine enough (hope I'm not violating my NDA...=)
You CAN install the OS from scratch (you aren't forced to do one of those nasty upgrades), but you MUST have the previous OS installed for the discs to work. Which you do, so don't worry. It just means if you ever need to reinstall your OS in the event of a disaster, you'll have to install 10.3 first, then do the format-(or archive)-and-install with 10.4.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
All this talk about "point releases" is just semantics. I know most Slashdotters aren't zoologists, but all significant OS X upgrades are SPECIES updates.
Jumping over to Family Canidae from Family Felidae, would you upgrade from a Chihuahua that shits on your keyboard to a Golden Retriever that fetches beer and Hot Pockets? I sure would.
That's about the difference that Tiger is going to be over 10.0 (Cheetah).
It seems to me that Apple are doing versioning right.
The way it should work is x.y.z
z: Bug fixes
y: New features
x: Backwards compatibility break
Since 10.4 appears to have new features, but not break backwards compatibility, it's the right version.
11.0 Halle Berry
11.1 Eartha Kitt
11.2 Julie Newmar
11.3 Nastassja Kinski...
meow!
I like microcars
I mean, if you stick with Microsoft you'll only have to pay for a new OS every 7-10 years or so!
It seems to me that Apple are doing versioning right.
The way it should work is x.y.z
z: Bug fixes
y: New features
x: Backwards compatibility break
Does that mean Windows XP should really be called Windows 3.15.8734?
I don't know about 10.4 (and if I did know I wouldn't be allowed to say) but I'm guessing that it's not that much different to the way iSync works now in 10.3.
You can sync between one Mac, your phones, iPods, Palms, etc. without requiring a .Mac subscription. However for Mac to Mac syncing you do need .Mac
However, if you have access to your own server somewhere, it is possible to fake it to look like .Mac Here are some instructions on how to do that.
Note: I haven't actually tried it myself (yet)
- It's sad that this has to be said in every single Tiger thread, but Core Image/Video will not refuse to work on older Macs. It has an AltiVec fallback path that is slower than the GPU path but produces the same results.
- The real importance of CI/V is not how cool it looks applying Photoshop filters to movie trailers; it's having an advanced image and video transformation infrastructure built into the OS and available to all developers. Apple is clearly planning for the future here, and the real benefits of CI/V will not be felt until months after Tiger ships and apps start appearing that were designed taking blur/distortion/etc for granted. That 10-20% is only going to grow in the future.
"If I don't want it, it's utterly worthless" is one of the most persistent and insidious memes on Slashdot. Please don't succumb to it.Mac OS X isn't revolutionary. It really is the synthesis of everything that we all wanted in an OS back in the late 1980s. If you take the better features of early Macintosh, Amiga, and all those competing projects that were attempting add a GUI to Unix, and mung them all together and then work out most of the kinks, you end up with Mac OS X.
;)
That sounds more KDE to me! And that's why I prefer KDE to any other non-OS X UI!
Seriously, the OS X UI and Cocoa frameworks are much cleaner and better thought-out than a munged hodgepodge of paradigms. Apple's value proposition is related to not just the technical underpinnings but the thoughtfulness of design and attention to end users. Apple sweats the interface details.
And the real question now is. . . Where do we go from here? After achieving the OS that everybody wanted 15+ years ago, now Apple's OS team suddenly find themselves without a goal. They've resorted to tacking on a hodgepodge of minor trinkets and calling it a major upgrade. It must be hard to step back and admit that they're done with this OS, and that continually adding new features to it may no longer be the right approach.
I'm not gonna try to push Tiger as a huge innovation, I have sympathy for your point here. However, to a certain extent, if maintaining OS X on the cutting edge (which may be a relatively slow crawl at times, if you're waiting for enough hardware to drive the really revolutionary stuff like voice recog or more miniaturization or whatnot) means putting up with continuous point releases to keep engineers working, that's fine with me. The US gov't does this to a degree with companies like Electric Boat: they don't _need_ new ships all the time, but they need to maintain the ability to build them, and they can't afford to let the skilled people become unavailable. If keeping a solid core of engineers at Apple paid and happy means the occasional softball release, so be it.
And honestly, I don't think Tiger's a softball release. For me, Panther was, and for any particular Macista a particular OSX release may be. But Tiger's got interesting stuff at the framework level, and who knows how useful Spotlight and Dashboard stuff will be?
If it was up to me, I would focus on maintenance, bugfixes, security, optimization. . . and de-emphasize the OS as a product. Put the OS back in its proper place, I say! An operating system shouldn't be a featured product, it should be merely a component -- a part of the computer, just like the hard drive, the RAM, the processor, etc. -- that is required for running applications.
Work for Intel then?
Seriously, when it comes to defining the place for an OS, you have to take the user into account. This attitude is great for hardware folks and embedded developers, but for desktop people it's toxic. As an end user, I want someone _else_ to make a lot of these decisions, because I don't want to waste my time on them. Having an 'advanced user' preference pane to offer finer-grained control of things is nice, but it shouldn't be necessary for normals.
The goal should be to provide a stable, efficient foundation for apps to run on, because apps are where your work gets done.
Sounds like a kernel to me, and Darwin does a pretty decent job of this. Cocoa frameworks also contribute, and Apple's OS releases typically contain a ton of interesting framework improvements (like CoreImage and CoreVideo for Tiger for example.. Imagine realtime SGI-like stream filters for video and image effects) that make upgrading worthwhile (and mandatory for the new apps enabled and/or improved by these new optimized libs).