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Tiger's 200 New Features
An anonymous reader writes "If this hasn't already been posted, Apple set up a page listing,
by software section, all of the new features for OS X.4, or Tiger.
Given that every upgrade touts over a hundred features, it is interesting to see all of the enhancements to this upgrade to see what adopters get out of the box.
There are a lot which are tweaks, some new non-Spotlight oriented features and a few that are interesting, mostly security related features.
2 words: stealth mode.
"
If this hasn't already been posted
:-P
I think you really meant : "If this has already been posted"!
O yeah, My first first post maybe?
I'd rather be sailing...
It seems to run a bit quicker with every release, unlike my poor SP2 machine. Go OSX.
This new feature allows you to use different systems like base 8 or hexadecimal. Take that Microsoft.
of Longhorn another 6 months.
Coincidence?
I think not!
Creative Commons music that doesn't suck: emptydrum.com
There looks like there will be some great new features in Tiger, but I think they are stretching it with things like "Import contacts into Address Book in a variety of formats, including tab-delimited and comma-separated text." and "Print a handy pocket address book to take with you anywhere."
By including this type of thing in the list it threatens to swallow all of the real new features like Dashboard and Spotlight.
Looks like they took the burnable folder feature straight out of Gnome.(eg. the burn:/// folder in Gnome)
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
It's essential for any respectable firewall, and both e.g. Kerio and ZA even for Windows should have this, and both are available in free versions.
And firewall log?? Hmm, excuse me, but is the news Tiger just got a standard quality firewall or what? That's be more reason to blush than be overjoyed IMHO.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
10.3.x is a point release, not 10.x and trust me the whole OS feels different.
keanmarine.com
Are you serious? How many "features" did SP2 come with? A firewall. Wow, what a huge addition. Wait, actually that is something that should have been there since Windows 3.1. This is a MAJOR release. Wait until you actually see all the improvements first hand. I can, without certainty, see you pulling the foot out of your mouth. I'll never understand how people can comment on something they know nothing about yet. I have my (LEGAL) copy of Tiger already, and I see posts like yours and laugh.
*sigh*
OSX is widely regarded as a fairly secure system. XP is widely regarded to be as secure as a barn door.
Tiger gives you features and a speed bump, SP2 gives you application incompatability and some security features that should have been there in the initial release. No wonder it's free.
Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -i ! eth0 -j ACCEPT
/bin/echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all
iptables -P INPUT DROP
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I think a lot of network admins will breath a sigh of partial relief when they see the Password Helper. There will always be the "[kids_name]123" password people, but there are a decent number of users who want something secure but easy to remember, and to know roughly how secure a particular password is.
Please help metamoderate.
Am I missing something or is this just a way to trap e-mail addresses? Does anyone know what paths/mechanisms are being used to send the e-mail? Perhaps it's simply using configured accounts in the Mail app.
The XML suite will be usefull, I hope, XML tools on the Mac side are pretty paltry. Though Oxygen has a functional kluge, the interface is dismal.
Apple uses a different version numbering system. Just because it is called 10.4 doesn't really mean anything - it could just be as simply called Mac OS X 2005 or v4.0 or Mac OS Tiger for all it matters.
10.3.6
Comparing to Windows Service Packs, there has been two for XP. Apple has released 9 "service packs" for Mac OS X Panther.
10.3.1
10.3.2
10.3.3
10.3.4
10.3.5
10.3.7
10.3.8
and now 10.3.9.
These have added new features, tweaks and improved security also.
I am sick of people whinging about apple charging for "point updates;" it's is an old and worn out argument and it comes down to the simple point of if you don't want it, don't buy it.
Your comment just lost a couple of cool points in my book.
Cats rock!
I was just sitting at my freelance gig, reading some online encyclopedia (win supersite, I believe) and the scientist there said that there are only 2 features: spotlight and something else. He stated that all other ones are pretty much nothing.
He also said, and I'll have to agree with him on this one, that SP 2 is a much better update than Tiger, and it's FREE!
I don't even know what you MAC people are cheering about, you're not even getting a firewall OR pop-up blocker, not to mention malicious software detector with you're upgrade your paying $$ 4! LOL!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Grapher: Create 2D and 3D graphs with this full-featured equation grapher.
How about that? Not bad.
Admittedly, over 50 of their new improvements were aspects of spotlight, dashboard, dashboard widgets, etc. But there was actually more there than I'd expected.
Yep, I agree. Just as I agreed with Thurrots review of Tiger,
It's basically 4 new features, others are just a small case improvements, that probably don't deserve being called feature.
1/3 of them contains Spotlight (addresses, fonts.... being able to be searched in spotlight? This is one feature not a lot of them).
Being able to compose HTML mail???
And after all MacFan bashing over gimp??? GIMP Printer Configuration
Birthday Calendar ??? New feature????
Calendar Printing ??? C'mon it's year 2005. Now every calendar software should be able to print
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Why is a barn door not stable?
From the list:
Use command line file commands on HFS+ items with proper results -- utilities such as cp, mv, tar, rsync now use the same standard APIs as Spotlight and access control lists to handle resource forks.
Being both a Mac User and a Command LIne Junky. This makes me happy.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
I think the most interesting new features of Tiger are under the hood. Those four new frameworks add an incredible amount of functionality into the base OS, which can be easily used by future applications. For examle, CoreImage adds tons of image processing features a la Photoshop, is extensible, and uses the GPU.
If it works as well as Quicksilver, it will be impressive. But this kind of feature isn't for everybody, to be sure. With Quicksilver, one can spare oneself a lot of poking about and futzing with the mouse -- once accustomed to how it works.
Even better! The features of SP2 overwhelm me. If I hadn't already updated to it when it came out, I'd most certainly do it now when it's being forced on everyone, regaurdless of wants or needs.
...at $129 yet again, but I've got the family pack on pre-order, so amortize the $150 after the Amazon rebate across 4 Macs and it's quite the bargain. They should really provide upgrade pricing, but the $129 list is still wayyyyy cheaper than XP Pro, but twice as expensive as my SUSE 9.2 boxed set.
I would, too. But, as much as I work via the CLI, I also need a mature GUI. OS X is the only game in town in that regard.
("Damn the electric fence!")
Hmm, I wonder if font book is scriptable.
Also, Playing DVDs in the dock is by far the only reason I am getting Tiger.
I could have sworn there was a firewall in previous releases of XP, they just tightened up the rules a bit and confused the heck out of everybody.
More than anything, XP SP 2 was designed to relieve a huge embarrassment to Microsoft, the security issues. MacOS X has security issues fixed at no charge through software update, so it's really no different.
If early accounts are any indication, Tiger will have significantly improved speed yet again. My ancient 400mhz PowerBook G4 is already faster under Panther than it's ever been and I'm looking forward to further improvements. In the same time period, MS has gone from 2000 to XP, and enormous increases in bloat and dramatic reductions in performance have been the result.
Spotlight is a feature Microsoft was trying to create in Longhorn, and it looks like their version might be cut from the Longhorn release so MS can make its deadline. Again, this is clearly something both Apple and Microsoft were planning to charge for.
Finally, features have been added to Tiger that will allow programmers to substantially speed up their processing of video, which will help applications such as Final Cut Pro. It's pretty cool to see them in the OS so that third-party programmers can use them, not just FCP. So even though buying Tiger + FCP is more expensive than getting FCP alone, I'm confident that these changes will improve third-party software to the extent that it's worthwhile.
So in conclusion I certainly don't think Tiger is in any way comparable to SP2. It's nice that something's free, but it doesn't have the comprehensiveness, new features or speed increases Tiger brings to the table.
D
Because a high wind blew through a stable and knocked it's door off, so they had to put in a barn door, and now the barn is left without a door.
(This is an issue because, if the cows get out of the yard they might end up inside the barn and make a hell of a mess.)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Yes! Windows XP does. With Windows XP, there is no need for third party firewalls.
Why is it that zealots, such as yourself, are only wiling to compare new products, like OS X, with Windows 95 rather than Microsoft's new product, Windows XP?
Nat Friedman said it at BrainShare 2005 and it never ceases to amaze me, most Linux users bashing Microsoft haven't used Windows since Windows 95. Here comes the clue train, there have been a few changes.
Spotlight, Dashboard, Quicktime 7, H.264, CoreImage, CoreData, X Code 2, ... are hardly "tweaks." The list goes on and on.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
You're right, that didn't need a GUI at all.
I just wanted to point out that I have been on slashdot for a while now, and I have *never* seen a thread with so many posts moderated as "troll", "flamebait" or "offtopic". Many of the posts are valid points, and if they were discussing microsoft, they would be modded +5 funny, or +5 informative. It seems to me someone is taking things a little too defensively.
For the record, I hate microsoft, and I am a unix guy at heart. That doesn't mean that everyting apple feeds to me I have to love. A little healthy criticism does everyone good, including apple.
I think coreaudio, corevideo, and especially the new xcode warrants a new release. Besides they're supposedly a hefty speed boost.
Similarly, now that I look at it, win95 to win98 didn't seem like a huge difference in terms of what was offered. I'm probably wrong, but the only things I recall was stability and performance (the performance is sure there from 10.3 to 10.4.. stability was always there). Maybe easier networking? who knows?
"What seems to be the problem, osciffer?" (pronounced aus-if-fer.. bah forget it)
You're looking for a file containing the word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (sic?)
In any case, in spot light you type "superca" and the list refines itself enough that you see it and start working with it.
If it waited for you to hit enter, how far would you type? Would "superca" be enough? Maybe you would type "supercalifra" to be safe. Maybe, if you were like most users, you would think you needed to type the whole word out... then you spell it wrong (like i probably did above) and it doesn't find anything.
Live search minimizes your typing. It's the same reason for type-ahead find in firefox. It just works better.
Do you honestly believe that every feature in every OS release for every platform is going to have nothing but huge new features? OF COURSE there are going to be small features that no one will ever use. Are you trying to HELP your case, or hurt it?
(As far as the subject goes, a . release in OS X is much like a major release or at least 0.5 anywhere else - they just want to keep 10.n because OS X is supposed to mean OS 10.)
Nothing like Spotlight OR Dashboard OR Automator as far as order of magnitude goes got added to SP2. SP2 brought a better firewall - so does Tiger. SP2 brought vastly improved security - so does Tiger, to a certain degree (the reason SP2 could deliver vast improvements was because there was a lot of room for it - OS X may not be *all that*, but it's been more secure than XP from day one, for whatever reasons). SP2 brought better handling of wireless network - wireless networks have been way easier to handle on OS X overall.
We haven't even looked into the new stuff, like the new improvements in QuickTime and the addition of Core Image/Video which basically relayers the whole graphical layer part of the OS and allows for much better performance.
SP2 is an example of constantly improving the OS, yes, but so's Tiger, and to a much larger level of magnitude if you look at all the facts. I'm not exactly jumping with joy over having to pay Apple $129. And I'm not exactly the guy that'll take advantage of every single of those 200 features. But I'm liking it for what it is - steady improvement of the OS, so that people won't have to get used to ages of stagnation, be it the way it was with System 7 or the way it is with Windows currently, where security has developed into a feature.
(And yes, Linux is steadily developing too. This discussion is about SP2 vs Tiger.)
Great God, only on /. could such a comment [i.e. insightful] be modded "funny". I guess some 3 year old 6pack didn't have his morning coffee. Next time please mod some joke insightful, oh wait, that's nothing new either.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
One of the new features is that Mail.app supports Exchange servers - but I have a feeling this is just imap support and won't handle meeting invites, etc.
So, I'm stuck using Entourage. Does anyone know if Spotlight will be indexing Entourage emails, etc? I sure hope so! My corporation has ignorantly banned Google Desktop search on the windows machines, so I no longer have a way of finding emails I need in a snap. Entourage + Spotlight puts me back in the game on that front.
Seeing as how all Apple computers come with some version of Mac OS - wouldn't you say that this IS upgrade pricing?
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I'm surprised that they have Access Control Lists as one of the features.
/. community isn't all over that feature.
I mean, that is something I've been wanting standard on Linux for a long time (I haven't used Linux in a while now so let me know if it is standard now).
I'm also surprised that the
I would have expected apple to bang the drum a lot more on that feature. But I guess that apples target group aren't that enamored with technical points.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
ciao
i doubt that. the finder and search features of os x needed a massive overhaul . searching in Panther is way to slow. i doubt they needed M$ or google to tell them they had to do something better.
iptables -t filter -A INPUT -j MIRROR -m psd
Bring it! You 1337 h4x0r, you.
If you use computers, you should care. Apple has consistently 'led the market' in computing, meaning if you watch Apple now, you will have an idea of what will be a big deal in a few years in general.
It's not necessarily the case that Apple can get 'credit', so much as Apple was first to 'get it right'. If not Apple, then someone else would have, it was just the fact that Apple was first that it matters. Examples include:
Windows, mice, folders, desktop metaphor in 1983 with the Lisa and 1984 with the Macintosh -> Windows 1.0 in 1985
Networking, introduced in 1990 with AppleTalk and AppleShare in System 7 -> Windows for Workgroups and Windows 3.11 in 1992
Quicktime, also introduced in 1990 with System 7 -> Video for Windows/AVI in Windows 3.1/3.11 in 1992
Color support, which allowed for Photoshop and other image programs, in 1988 with System 6 (Photoshop came out in 1990) -> Windows 3.0 in 1990 (And Photoshop in 1992)
Desktop publishing, Word, and WYSIWYG came out for Mac in 1985 -> Windows version in 1989
See a trend yet?
So what features does Tiger have that will probably be common in a few years?
'Quartz' 3d accelerated OS
'Spotlight' integrated OS wide database driven search
'Core Image/Video' hardware accelerated image and video libraries
'iSync' computer to computer 'synchronization' (bookmarks, preferences, etc)
'Apple Remote Desktop' built into the OS
'Target Disk Mode', which transforms your system into a 'plain' Firewire hard disk when it is booted.
'Xgrid' transparent, p2p distributed computing built into the OS
Who knows, maybe only half of these things are big deals, but I suspect most of them will become 'standard' by the time Longhorn ships.
GPL Deconstructed
I could have sworn there was a firewall in previous releases of XP, they just tightened up the rules a bit and confused the heck out of everybody.
Quite right, and I have to add, both fraggin' useless too. [To other flame kids: you can argue over this, but it's hard to erase real experience.] On contrast, you can use ipfw on osx, which is 'the' tool one needs.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
With Quicksilver, one can spare oneself a lot of poking about and futzing with the mouse
With Bash, one can spare oneself ALL use of the mouse.
and I'm sick of us been labelled trolls just for having a view contrary to yours.
Nope, you get modded trolls for the lack of the ability to prove yourselves with credibility. Also, ignorance won't help avoinding trollness. Just count how many times the 'point release' crap is being mentioned from windows freaks up above, or the quite pointless forced comparing to sp2.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Being both a Mac User and a Command LIne Junky. This makes me happy.
Ditto here!
(ducks, runs for cover)
Please help metamoderate.
Ciao
I think you're missing the main point of Spotlight. It's not type-ahead searching. The 10.3 Finder introduced that.
1. It's system-wide, so it's available in every app.
2. It searches content and metadata that has never before been indexed.
You can quickly search for documents by their color space, bits per sample, aperture, pixel dimensions, author, media length, codec, copyright (about 200 different pieces of metadata in all).
I think there is a whole page on this feature if you'd like to know more.
It shouldn't be useless.
That's like saying, "Isn't Google sorta useless?"
Spotlight does the exact same thing that Google does, except it does it to your hard drive instead of the internet.
1) Index and catalog all your files
2) Provide an interface to find all those files
IE, if you have a PC, try out Google Desktop, to find out what it might be like. Even better, if you use Thunderbird, create a 'saved search', and that's half of Spotlight's promise since it can do a saved search on everything on your computer (Google Desktop++)
GPL Deconstructed
maybe you should look at core before you open your pie hole
First of all, I am *far* from a windows freak. Doesn't it seem interesting to you that the same argument is being made over and over again by different people? Thats when its time to try something new, and actually *listen* to what they are saying.
Assuming that people are only saying something because they are bigots is total ignorance. I own a mac (as well as several sparcstations, and o2, and a few pc's running linux/windows). If this post were about any of the above, I could possibly comment on what shortcomings those os's had. That doesn't make me a fanboi of the competing os, it makes me *open minded*....
It is called "Burn on the fly", and please don't make rocket science out of this. It was year 1995 when most of the burning software already contained this feature
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
..as advertised. This is what graphic artists have been waiting for, a font manager that's STABLE with thousands of fonts. Suitcase is, but the interface is pitiful. FontAgent is easy to browse, but unstable with lots of fonts and if you turn on WYSIWYG in some views. There's been a big hole in the font management area for a long time now. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fontbook/
You have a point. If you add up the amount of cash you'd've spent since 2000 updating OSX, then you're looking at around $380 including 10.4.
However, while each one does contain a substantial number of bug fixes and roll-ups of previous patches, they also contain a large number of additional features, and I assume that the underlying codebase has changed enough to warrant the 10.x change. I personally think Apple are allowed to do this. It certainly doesn't need an 11.x moniker, but is related to the same family of OS - a bit like Windows 95, 98, 98SE and ME. So in hindsight, OSX's current five year history of changes, fixes and additions pretty much parallels the Windows 95 to ME path; same codebase, different versions.
I can see where you're coming from though - the point update does seem a little strange, but with OSX, I guess Apple need to get a little more mileage out of their 'X' symbol. You certainly shouldn't have been marked a troll, I think it's a valid point.
1 word:
Oh.
Like somebody else already pointed out, stealth mode is something firewalls should just have.
ciao
Oh, I can just see telling my 80 year old mother to type that in!
FTFA - How is this a feature?
Buy Printing Supplies
Easily purchase supplies for your printer right from Mac OS X Tiger.
I (and I think many others) don't want their operating system selling them crap.
RSS feeds as a screen saver. It's actually pretty cool. :)
Apple also posted a more readable comparison table with Panther and Jaguar at http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/compare.html .
Most of these things have been around for years. Not much in Tiger is actually new technology, but most of it is refined technology, and it's right there in the OS when you boot it up for the first time. That's what the fuss is about. There are lots of minor fixes in those notes, but that's in the interest of disclosure and backing up their claim of 200+ new features, not in the interest of claiming everything groundbreaking.
Minor points:
* "emulate Konfabulator" is a misnomer - widget environments have been around for ages, and a lot of them came *before* Konfabulator.
* "Safari RSS" is a pen name from the hype machine and so's "iChat AV"; they're named Safari 2.0 and iChat 3.0.
* Yes, everyone can obtain new fonts over the internet; big whoop. Why aren't you taking Microsoft to task for hyping their new fonts *more* than Apple's new fonts, for precisely the same reasons? I love new fonts, and I love the new Longhorn fonts in particular, but this reeks of hypocrisy.
Windows 2K = Win 5.0
Windows XP = Win 5.1
Windows Server 2003 = Win 5.2
With PCs it's somewhat a matter of survival - if a malicious hacker finds your windows box, well, it's his.
With Macs, it's simply a matter of privacy. And tiger does this out of the box, no need to buy any additional software as you point out.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Whatever you are smoking, we want some of it.
Because you can't possibly be that incapable of recognising satire when in your natural state, can you?, or that the actual topic of the parent post was the typical Windowsite reaction to Mac OS updates, the wideness of their Weltanschauung, and its relation to certain categories of news souces (extensible to the mainstream microcomputing press). Not mindless Apple-bashing, although the rest of the comments page holds vast quantities of it for our entertainment.
I suppose we already knew that Jonathan Swift was ahead of our time.
Calm down man... Longhorn will be here in... hmmm... sometime. ;)
I do hope that they have fixed hfs+ and hard links.i nports/20 04-November/022708.html
see this opendarwin mail thread:
http://www.opendarwin.org/pipermail/darw
What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion
Of course every version of OS X is faster (though 50% is a fucking pipe dream) - 10.0 was pushed out the door way before it was ready - a slow, kludgy mess. OS X shouldn't have been released to the public before 10.3.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Target Disc Mode is standard on all Mac OS X releases, not just Tiger. Certainly my 10.1 iBook can be turned into a firewire drive by holding down "t" during startup.
it almost certainly will have speedups, every release has gotten faster on same hardware
maybe you should investigate core
Hmm... No. Spotlight is great.
'Apple Remote Desktop' built into the OS
Already in XP. Terminal Services/Remote Desktop is standard.
On Konfabulator- Understood, although I was more referring to Windows users who also use Windowsblinds/StyleXP to "dress" their system up like OS X, in which case they are often emulating Konfabulator, although you are correct. Aqua-Soft Is one site dedicated to it.
On MS's new fonts- Because MS's new fonts are free, even to OS X users ;)
I hope my post doesn't have tinge of Mac hating to it, becuase I love OS X, I just don't like Apple for their arrogant marketing.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
a) they dont mind posting a dupe
Neither do Apple - "Scriptable Font Book" counts as two seperate features.
apprently it is.k /
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fontboo
look at side bar on lower right
and you are pathetic, really pathetic...
Agreed. 10.2 was the first half decent version.
Mac OS has had the abilitiy to do this "firewall stealth mode" since IPFW was bundled. (10.0? 10.1? not sure...) What they're talking about is now there's an improved interface to ipfw. I run 10.3 and I've already turned on this "stealth mode" with a few ipfw commands in a startup item.
But this isn't something joe sixpack can do with just a click. Oh wait, now there's tiger. Nevermind that.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
One thing sorely missing from Panther was the ability to AppleScript power management features. It would come in handy for putting your Mac to sleep after a long task, or to wake it up upon certain conditions.
In order to do that, IIRC, you had to buy a third party extension/dictionary/API. A workaround was also to script at the UI level and simulate clicks in the menus - very inelegant, prone to failure and useless for waking up the machine.
The new features list in TFA doesn't cite this addition. Does it mean users will still have to resort to third-party software for this basic ability? Automator might help, but still it's not the same as a full-fledged AppleScript dictionary...
How high is your annual antivirus, firewall and maintenance tax for XP? Microsoft has released two service packs for XP which was released mid-2001; Apple just released their ninth service pack for Panther, released in late 2003.
Detail some major parts Microsoft has added, upgraded or improved for free since XP was released. This should be interesting.
Yeah, Linux GUI is way better than Windows, but its no where near OSX. Sad to say, since I'm a big fan of Linux (I use Gentoo actually) but it's the truth. The OSX GUI let's you get work done so much faster, but still lets you fall back on its unix command line.
A big part of this, I believe, is it's lack of theme support. At first thats a really annoything thing. Even for colors - you have the choice of Aqua or Slate. Think about it though. This means that apps always look the way they're intended. Setting the Main BG color in linux/windows to black causes alot of problems, some apps dont use the system colors for fonts and use black automatically, and buttons can sometimes look out of place with the rest of the colors (more so in windows, those buttons are damn ugly) in OSX you don't have to worry about that. Luckily the default theme is beautiful, unlike default KDE/Gnome/Windows etc.
'Apple Remote Desktop' built into the OS
Terminal Services, RDP has been in XP since 2001.
'Spotlight' integrated OS wide database driven search
I guess you could blame this one on Google, who pretty much had the first desktop search out there. In fact, they'll even sell you a search appliance for your intranet.
'iSync' computer to computer 'synchronization' (bookmarks, preferences, etc)
XP's files and settings transfer wizard, since 2001.
Thing is, there are a lot of things sat in both Windows and OSX that a lot of people did way beforehand, only to disappear from sight once MS or Apple built it into the OS. The same probably goes for Linux GUIs too - heck even the Amiga had some of the points you mention above before the Mac did.
At the end of the day, they both have some serious credit to give to Xerox PARC, which does pretty much define how we use computers today.
Not having used XP all that much (OK, never), I'd like to ask someone more knowledgeable to list all of the features that were added to XP after its original release. Let's leave out the bugfixes and the security patches, please, just put down the cool stuff. Oh, and I'm curious, does IE have tabs yet?
Most of your rebuttals start with "you can get...". You seem to overlook that these are built-in to Apple's new OS, meaning there's no getting - it's already there.
You correctly point out that most of these features aren't strictly new. However, you overlook the fact that none of these features has been implemented even half as well as Apple's done them for Tiger (yes, I *have* tried them). Most people don't understand that there's a difference between doing something and doing it well. If that's you, fine. If not, do some more research before making a fool of yourself.
2D acceleration != 3D acceleration. Apple's using 3D acceleration for their 2D UI, which *is* new.
Unlike Google and the others you cite, Spotlight is updated instantly - no need to wait for the search tool to see the change, or to run updatedb.
Core Image/Video allow you to do things that were formerly only possible in Photoshop/After Effects - all in realtime, without special hardware.
iSync - doesn't sound terribly new to me.
ARD - sounds like catch-up to me too (though ARD has been around for years, just not built-in to the OS).
Target disk mode - been around for years. Just Works.
Xgrid - built-in, no setup to worry about. Just Works. Unlike, say, Beowulf.
So basically, Apple has refined a load of features than can be haphazardly cobbled together using other OSes and combined them into a system where they're implemented *well*.
Sorry loser, but you sound about as well-educated as the average American 15 year-old.
Well, regardless of how far you can count, you obviously didn't look very hard for changes. The improvements to web-kit alone are major, and have also been back-ported to OS 10.3.9 for free (the latest minor release). The features you list
Spotlight
Automator
Core Video
Are not currently available in any other desktop OS (though Linux has beagle). In fact Longhorn won't now have WinFS (perhaps a more flexible solution than Spotlight but unfortunately vapour-ware).
You missed out:
Dashboard
Core Data
Web Core (DOM API accessible in cocoa etc)
xGrid
PDF annotations and forms (plus various preview.app enhancements)
Jabber, H.264 and multiple video IM
etc,etc...
Consider Microsoft's approach - renaming Windows 2000 to Windows XP (now with hideous colours), service packs for bug fixes, a monthly scramble by customers to install updates for remote vulnerabilities before they're exploited, and an attempt to move their customers to a subscription model (which looks like it's failed, but that's their goal).
Compare and contrast with the consistent and regular updates to OS X - major updates which you can *choose* to upgrade to every couple of years, augmented by regular updates every month or so fixing bugs and adding minor features.
I know which world I prefer to live in.
Just why should Apple give this update for free to all its customers, they already update the OS around every month for free? Sounds to me like you're the one who is cheap.
The fact that the site is called winsupersite.com should give you some hint of bias from its owner. Of course, it's not iluvwindozecuzitskool.com but it's getting there. I wouldn't call Thurrot an "experienced reviewer". The first paragraphs about how he claims to be a Mac fan because he had at some time an Apple IIgs are particularly laughable.
The fields that Thurrot covered in his review concern generally the GUI. And, apart from Spotlight, there is little revolution in this area from Panther to Tiger, merely refinements. Most of the people that will upgrade won't notice a big difference in their habits.
There are two points where Thurrot isn't particularly convincing. One is his endless comparision between Mac OS X and what Microsoft offers, that ranges from "It's some kind of imitation of Windows" to "They're the first to implement it but MS had certainly already thought about this feature before and their version will be better". The other point is the new set of APIs brought by Tiger, much welcomed by developers and overlooked by Thurrot.
In the end, many people will be ready to spend $129, not only because they're "Apple fans" or because they expect a revolution but because they feel that 10.4 will be an improvement in many fields (especially speed) and that future exciting apps for Mac OS X will require this release.
For instance, I'll pay for the new version and I see the relative lack of major redesign in Tiger as a sign that major architecture choices for Mac OS X have turned out to be valid. Apple is currently expanding what their OS can do instead of spending time to correct a big flaw. Which is a rather new notion for Apple users. And Apple users love to pay for something new.
Don't know about you guys, but I'm almost creaming myself at the thought of the Korn shell being included. ;)
The other 199 features can go take a hike.
Also includes ground-breaking new usability features, a couple of which weren't borrowed from Mac OS X Tiger (we got them from KDE and Gnome)! New security failure features as well!!
'Spotlight' integrated OS wide database driven search
Sounds like BeOS...
'iSync' computer to computer 'synchronization' (bookmarks, preferences, etc)
How is this different from the "Briefcase" feature in Win95? I've never used either, so I can't compare myself.
'Apple Remote Desktop' built into the OS
If Microsoft integrated perfect remote control functionality, they would be sued by people making third party software to do the same thing.
Yeah, right. The Slashdot editors and community is known to fall all over themselves on everything Apple does. Not. Shall I count the number of Mac-related articles that include the obligatory smart-ass line indicating the authors disdain for everything Mac? C'mon. Apple has done really well reaching out to the nerd set over the last few years. What acceptance they've gotten here is well-deserved.
You want to see slashdot get really stupid? See how everything having to do wth Linux is unquestioningly regarded as The Best Thing Ever.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
'Apple Remote Desktop' built into the OS
In all fairness, the "Server" versions of Microsoft's OS's have had this as far back as Windows NT 4 (and possibly earlier, that's just the first I ever used). The Pro version of Windows XP also has it built-in, even though it only allows one client at a time.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
The reason Konfabulator has gotten quite a buzz is that it's been the first major "widget engine" for OS X, and if I'm not missing anything it's also the first cross-platform one.
.otf, I say.
I wasn't aware that the new C-fonts will be available for free for everyone - despite looking I haven't found a place to download them (maybe they'll be released when Longhorn is). I applaud Microsoft for using OpenType, and I'm still wondering why OS X has its own dfont format for core fonts - just use
I believe Apple should take this opportunity and run with it - Longhorn's not due for one and a half years, and Apple has ample time and media attention to be able to show people that they're ahead of Microsoft, most of the time, and most importantly that they're doing stuff that Microsoft would never even think of, such as Exposé. I don't approve of marketing going overboard or being arrogant, but I don't think the things you bring up are being arrogant (spare for filing fixes as features and splitting things up). They're touting Spotlight as the innovation, not improved RAID performance or AIM profiles.
Oh, I can just see telling my 80 year old mother to type that in!
/usr/local/bin/stealth, and tell her to type "stealth". ... or give it an icon.
[sigh]
Type it in for her, save it as
(As if your 80 year old mother wants stealth mode)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/security/ has this gem:
"Secure Erase Trash immediately overwrites the file with erronious data, so that the file disappears and cannot be reconstructed."
Not only can their marketing drones not spell 'erroneous' correctly, but if the data is erroneous isn't that a bug? I'd hope that they're actually writing 'correct' data, which for this purpose should better read 'pseudo-random', or 'nonsensical'.
Funny, my copy of XP, and everyone else's I've ever encountered, has this built in to the OS. Try again.
I was just sitting at my freelance gig, reading some online encyclopedia (win supersite, I believe) and the scientist there said that there are only 2 features: spotlight and something else. He stated that all other ones are pretty much nothing.
He also said, and I'll have to agree with him on this one, that SP 2 is a much better update than Tiger, and it's FREE!
I don't even know what you MAC people are cheering about, you're not even getting a firewall OR pop-up blocker, not to mention malicious software detector with you're upgrade your paying $$ 4! LOL!
Thanks for this post; the only amusing one in this topic so far. I particularly liked 'the scientist... stated'. Unfortunately the parody seems to have slipped past most moderators so far.
I appreciate the fact that they are using an Install DVD since I don't have to make one now. However, perhaps they should include a dvd-rom on the list of required specs?
It's possible they are including the CD's without mentioning them, but then again this is Apple. I can't recall a lot of extras in the past 3 X upgrades I've done.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
I notice quite a lot of the usual complaining about Apple charging for a point release of an operating system where Microsoft would give it for free.
While those people are right in that they are likely to get modded down by Mac fans, the complaints seldom offer much insight into what is a point release, what is a service pack and what is a full version number. To be fair, the OS vendors, both Apple and Microsoft, don't make it easy on the consumer either.
Apple generally gives out their version of point releases (10.x.x) for free, but those point releases usually don't offer much or any new functionality. (Currently I'm on OSX 10.3.9) which includes a new version of the Safari browser (1.3) but that is unusual. Apple also usually gives out point releases of the various software accompanying the OS for free (iTunes, QuickTime, iSight, iPod, Bluetooth etc) and they provide specific security patches as new exploits become available.(although there are currently about two hanging security issues that Apple really needs to fix)
Apple usually includes quite a lot of new extra functionality in the version upgrades (10.x). In the 10.3 Panther upgrade it was Expose, Fast User Switching, iChatAV and XCode and under the hood new APIs (Cocoa Bindings etc). in 10.4, it's Dashboard, Spotlight, XCode 2, Safari 2, Mail 2, Automator and a lot of new APIs (Core Data, Core Image etc.)
Microsoft is a little less consistent with its OS upgrades, pathces and service packs, but also follows a certain strategy. Generally, Microsoft offers API changes and some minor functionality changes in service packs, but rarely major new features. For example, WinNT went from sp1 to sp6 and actually gained a lot of the functionality that was in the Win98 and Win2k userspace, and NT users got those for free. Active Desktop for example (one can argue about how useful that was). Moving from NTSP6 to Win2k would not have entailed major changes for the common user, but, obviously, there was a lot that changed under the hood. Better security model, more stable, some minor UI changes, better networking etc. Obviously, for a user, it was worth paying for.
All the while, Microsoft also offered generally free upgrades to its bundled applications, such as IE, Outlook and WMP, although there was an outcry about the mp3 quality and MS' charging for better quality.
But can the same be said for the Win98SE to WinME upgrade? WinMe had a terrible reputation and was seen by many as an excuse by Microsoft to generate revenue.
And the Win2k to WinXP move, while also having some big under the hood changes (firewall, signed drivers etc), mostly had big UI changes (themes) and Fast User Switching, Automatic Updates (also in 2kSp3 onwards) etc. For the user, and the developer, it was probably worth the price. Since then Microsoft has offered two service packs, both free. SP1 had no visible change but fixed some glaring security and stability issues. During this time Microsoft has released literally hundreds of security patches, thankfully, free.
Now comes the part to argue over. XPSP2 offers a new security center and a firewall on by default. It also upgrades IE. SP2 is free. BUT, the security enhancements for SP2, including the IE upgrade, are not available for Win2k. Microsoft was getting a terrible rap with WinXP up to SP1. It was almost impossible to install a new machine on the net (activation) without getting hit by some of the rabid attacks going on within a few minutes. Microsoft HAD to do something, and, if they had charged for SP2, there would have been an even bigger outcry by an extremely digruntled public.
My personal opinion about Microsoft is that Microsoft, in a way that only Microsoft does well, decided to use the opportunity to both garner some lost respect by including the new security features, but also enforce upgrades amongst its userbase by excluding Win2k. This, I think, is something that Microsoft specialises at, prodding its userbase with new features, but including a catch somew
"apples loud-mouth marketing is pathetic, 200 new features? yeah right...just like the "over 150 new features" in panther?, i could count to about 7 or 8"
;-)
I recommend you not to buy the upgrade.
But be honest, compare with other OS upgrades and you'll see what value is in the package.
For me, the whole widget thing is extremely useful. I've only just explained that yesterday, not about to do it again, but it's a very Good Thing(TM) for me and I think lots of other people. Not talking about the potential, just the widgets that are standard in Tiger.
Spotlight is another thing most computer users have been asking for. Now we get it. And it's a hell of a lot more useful than the Google thing. And maybe next year or the next we can see if Windows will be on par. You don't want it? Don't buy it.
Apart from that, this is not a trivial "update". Just like core audio was a godsend, core video is way out there.
About half of the 200 features appeal to me. That's pretty much. You sir, can't judge this, if you can only count to 8
You'll be happy to hear however that the Turd agrees with you, but sadly that doesn't say much about the credibility of your statement. So please, whatever OS you use, be honest in your assessment.
And I repeat, upgrading is a voluntary process.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I know it's a real hardship to actually read your own links, but perhaps if you had taken this unprecidented step you would see that they list Pagemaker as coming out in "the mid-1980s," not 1980. Further, if you had actually read the article linked from that page, you would have found this: "1985 - Aldus develops PageMaker for the Mac, the first "desktop publishing" application."
If you have any further difficulties with basic reading comprehension, please let us know.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
X is Roman for 10... so it should probably be either 10.4 or X.IV ;)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
OMG, I can't believe you're actually quoting Thurott here on /. But then again, I see you're post is FlameBait, just like Thurott's entire website.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
The advantage of saving a few seconds is just like you said, an advantage. Anything that makes mundane tasks like searching for a file faster and lets me get back to a real task is a good thing, in my book. I think this is what apple strives for, a machine that dosn't get in your way and frustrate you while you are being productive. Until an OS can be interfaced with our brain and already have the files it thinks we might want cached, typing three letters and instantly having the file sounds good to me.
You could pick up a load of these features on OS X for free.
Spotlight = Quicksilver, only Spotlight is better just like it is better than Copernic/Google Toolbar/MSN Toolbar. It's real-time searching unlike Google Desktop Search, it's easily integrated by developers into other apps (like it is into Apple Mail, Safari, and Address Book; those three aren't), it's extendable to search more file types, and since it's built into the OS, it will be widely supported.
I also should note that somehow it was newsworthy to have database driven metadata search when it was going to be a feature in Longhorn.
Safari RSS = Firefox, only Firefox has a crappy non-standard user interface.
Dashboard = nothing on any platform. It's like Konfabulator and those others in that it lets you run widgets, but Windows and OS X both already come with widgets like a calculator and a calendar. What Dashboard is that those others isn't is a free development environment that lets you write apps entirely in HTML and Javascript and that also lets you access the entire Cocoa framework.
AIM profiles in iChat = AIM profiles in AIM, only the iChat doesn't suck and slow you down.
New fonts = New fonts on the web, only these fonts are actually designed to work well and look nice instead of to make your party invitations difficult to decipher. Also, Microsoft didn't release any new fonts, they announced them as a Longhorn feature. Imagine that, an OS vendor plugging new fonts as an OS feature!
RAID Support is a crappy feature, though. Still, the point is that these features are really features. They are an improvement upon what was available before and what's available for other platforms.
Now who's the troll?
Let's list what XP has given for FREE in their service packs (patching giant security holes doesn't count as features).
And lest we forget -- XP cost more for the initial version than Mac OS X. Even bundled, you likely go the crippled XP Home unless you paid extra.
Yup, just like Microsoft gave away Windows 98, ME, and XP. Apple's benevolence is nothing compared to Microsoft's. I mean, Apple doesn't even give away all the free bugs like Microsoft does!!!
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Just love the new feature of word documents to not default to a std Word icon. But show a view of the first page.
...
Dateline future...
Two months after Longhorn released. Microsoft hit with a 5 billion dollar lawsuit from Longhorn user with eye troubles from trying to read the small print on Word Icons. Microsoft comment was. "You should be abble to read small print from looking at our Licensing agrements over the years"! "Not our problem!"
I don't disagree that Apple isn't first.
But Apple is still here.
BeOS, Xerox, Amiga, Geos, all of them had 'firsts' that Apple now can 'claim' not because Apple was necessarily better, but because Apple survived and they did not.
Windows has always had the possibility of doing great things, but they rarely exercised that option. It seems, in hindsight, that Windows was more an exercise in accessibility than an exercise in usability. Apple, traditionally, has been much more useful, but due to pricing, availability, or compatibility, has had much more limited accessibility.
GPL Deconstructed
I think brushed metal only works in the Finder and Quicktime Player where I can't hit the check box to turn it off.
Apple would make a lot of people happy if they brought back an Appearance Manager like OS 9 had so you could change the chrome to whatever you liked.
I want NeXT window trim -- the function, not the chrome; Steve can make them as rounded and shaded and brushed and combed as he likes. I also want a Trash that doesn't keep trying to escape, scroll bars on the left, vi or teco bindings in text boxes, and a pony.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
I did this the other day. Works fine without any other software.
— darco
For once I have to use microsoft as an example of how it *should* be done. Look at service pack 2, you get additional features, tweaks, and improved security. It seems that tiger is comparable to sp2 as far as adding features to the base OS.
Of course Microsoft didn't charge for SP2--it was a bug fix! They sold you a broken OS and they're doing the right thing and trying to fix it--and they made you wait 3 years. Who would charge for that? Oh, wait--Microsoft would. I seem to remember paying a lot for Windows 98 because it fixed Windows 95. And for only $200 too!
BeOS is dead. You can't buy an computer/OS (in a week) except Tiger with OS wide database driven search. You can still download BeOS but it is essentially, like latin, dead.
As per Briefcase: Briefcase doesn't allow you to synch:
multiple computers
iPods
phones
As per Microsoft and remote control functionality:
They would be sued if they did three things (which they HAVE done before)
integrated a third party remote control implementation without licensing, purchasing, or compensation agreements (see Stacker)
integrated a homebrew remote control implementation and released an OS update to break third party implementations (see Quicktime)
integrated a homebrew remote control implementation and threatened OEMs with higher prices if they bundled third party implementations (see Compaq and Gateway)
Apple does none of those things (to my knowledge).
GPL Deconstructed
True, in XP Pro, not true in XP Home.
So Microsoft gets a first in one, but not in the other, and for Apple's benefit, they don't separate their OS into pro/home, just server/pc.
GPL Deconstructed
I really don't see an advantage here other then saving yourself a few seconds.
What's wrong with saving a few seconds? You only get so many seconds in your life--why waste them?
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
This won't change anything! There is still no software available for Macs! They still can't run:
1) Netsky-P
2) Zafi-B
3) Sasser
4) Netsky-B
5) Netsky-D
6) Netsky-Z
7) MyDoom-A
8) Sober-I
9) Netsky-C
10) Bagle-AA
What good are they?
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
I think Panther to Tiger would be more akin to windows 2000 upgrading to XP-sp2 then XP upgrading to XP-sp2
so what if I pay for what people think is a "point-release"
hmmm windows users NEVER do that
Windows 2000 = Windows v. 5.0
Windows XP = Windows v. 5.1
I will gladly pay up for the upgrades in OSX, not to be a zealot,
but because I like to keep current technology on my desktop. Since I prefer Apple's computers & OS then I'll keep current with them; if I preferred windows then I suppose I would fork out the couple hundred bucks to upgrade when they release new OS version. It's a simple matter of preference, not a feud war for crying out loud. no one is being FORCED to upgrade in either camp. Mac users who are happy with 10.3 can stay with it, Windowz users happy with Win 2000 could stay with it. The way I see it it's that simple.
I think MS released beta software, and then improved it for free while the users had to put with the effects of their incompetence. I haven't noticed anything new, cool, innovative, or even significan't better from the XP service packs, at least not on par with the OS-X releases.
Personally, I was hoping would add MAPI support for its Mail.app, Addressbook.app and iCal.app for Tiger. But this is really Microsoft's Business Unit responsibility. I think Mac OSX customers should demand MAPI support for Entourage if they are going to be paying all that good money. Its Microsoft's very own properietary protocol, yet they don't support it on the Mac side. I've long concluded that the DoJ is asleep at the wheel. Microsoft provides the bare minimal support to show the DoJ folks that they are complying with US anti trust laws. Yet, I feel Microsoft has purposely not developed the latest versions MSN Messenger, Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer further. Yet, the latest Quicktimes and iTunes is found on the Windows side. I hope that the FTC will require Groove Networks to support Mac OSX too.
Read Ray Ozzie interview here
I hope I'm not blasting my NDA saying this, but we've been using seed builds for a while and the one thing that I think many people will be pleasantly surprised with is the sense of responsiveness/speed. I'm using a spanking new G4 laptop and using Tiger on it makes it feel like I have an ever faster machine (which is what I said about 10.3!). Everything is more responsive; screen redraws, directory listings, quicktime videos, etc. It's on-par with my AMD64 box with XP in terms of GUI resposiveness now!
-_-
I even SAID that Apple doesn't necessarily deserve credit:
BeOS had their database functionality first, but they died. Xerox had their WiMP interface first, but they never released (licensed only to Apple of course!)
Networking wasn't new, but it was experimental and Apple made it both easy and integrated.
CGA counts as color, but Apple introduced 24 bit color to a consumer level device.
3d acceleration was done first by SGI, in $10k devices, then by VooDoo Graphics in $600 video cards, but no 'common' or 'commodity' OS has implemented until Apple did in 2001.
Perhaps you're bitter, but you have to also understand Apple HAS done things, just like Microsoft has, and SGI, and Linux, and all the other companies out there.
The biggest thing people seem to have issue with is Apple's iPod.
The iPod did three things that no other mp3 player did before:
Density. 5gb in your pocket. Predecessors include Creative, with 20gb in a Mac mini sized device and the Rio with 64mb in a lighter sized device. Apple's was 5gb in a cigarette pack sized device.
Usability. Apple's device could be used by one hand. Creative, with 13 buttons (maybe it was 11) could not. The use of iTunes and a database meant, also, you could access thousands of songs with only a thumb and a forefinger. Finally the adoption of Firewire, over USB1, meant you could fill the thing up in 5 minutes, instead of 5 hours.
Style. Apple cared enough to make it look good. People don't like wearing ugly clothes, driving ugly cars, or wearing ugly watches, so why would they want an 'ugly' mp3 player?
GPL Deconstructed
What typical nonsense from someone who is:
1. Not a Mac OS X user (clearly)
2. Believes that version numbers still accurately reflect changes
3. Relies on other non-Mac OS X users to review Mac OS X.
4. Requires a dramatic visual change (perhaps change the color to bright red?) to "realize" the value of a new product.
YES -- "one of the main" 200 features is an RSS reader. And it happens to be very nicely integrated into the browser for an experience that definitely adds value. Of course there are 199 other features too.
True, a lot of features in this release are under the hood. What that means is that developers will be creating some very cool apps as a result of the new release (that they couldn't easily create in the past). But even so, there are major benefits in this ".release" to the end user and while not all 200 features are on the level of Spotlight or Dashboard or Automator or QuickTime 7, they do add up.
In a horizontal product (such as an OS), not every feature is meant for every user. When a word processor adds support for Table of Contents, it won't matter so someone that just writes letters. But it will matter to someone who has had to create TOC manually or through some third-party tool in the past. Same thing for features in Tiger.
And what the hell do you care -- you're clearly not a Mac user, so you won't be buying it anyway. You might as well complain about cup-holder that they left out of the new Ferrari.
You don't have to BELIEVE me at all.
Reality stares you in the face every time you boot a computer and use a feature that Apple adopted that later became adopted by the rest of the industry.
GPL Deconstructed
Remap modifiers such as control and caps lock for compatibility with Windows and UNIX keyboard conventions.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Apple has 5% market share at best, linux maybe 3% (full time users no dual boot action going on) and MS Windows 90%.With all the money MS makes off its OS monopoly it should kick apples ass and did for years now apple is winning and it is understandable that they get coverage because they are the leader in OS innovation .If anything gets to much coverage its Linux with KDE and GNOME it has forked its just a bunch of random crap put together by 400 different companies it will make not it in the desktop. Merge KDE and GNOME and maybe Linux could be much better.Lindows is just about a white flag same with wine open source community can't make good killer desktop Apps unless they are first built by someone else first so they're using the Window API why not just use Windows with 100% Window API compatabilty.
Panther could do this too; after all, it uses ipfw. But Tiger just adds it to the graphical interface for the firewall.
English is easier said than done.
Networking, introduced in 1990 with AppleTalk and AppleShare in System 7 -> Windows for Workgroups and Windows 3.11 in 1992
Child please. AppleTalk was available on the first 128K Mac that Apple sold in 1984. There was no valid use for it until Apple released the LaserWriter I in 1985, but it was there (and it did work). A number of us got some cables and gathered at a house in early 1985 for a game of Bus'd Out (Apple's in-house port of Maze Wars). I was using a Mac 512k at the time, so I know it worked then. In fact, AppleTalk was a follow on port of an earlier Apple// product called SchoolBus.
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
I actually expect this release to be a milestone in GUI operating systems. Not only is inter-programm communication fully developed, it also gets a easy to use point-and-click interface to access these functions (Automator).
What would really rock is if someday Apple had the guts to actually drop the desktop metaphor and introduce some non-overlaping full screen realestate using workspace and application management. Something like blender has - only more accessable of course.
How long have knowledgable users of Windows, Linux and Mac OS dreamed of easy cross-program automation via visual graphical pipes. Once again it's OS X that's years ahead of anything else.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why is that useful, anyway? Does anyone actually need to do that? Or is it just another annoyance that people will accidentally click on while trying to do something else? (Or maybe I just have bad mouse skills? Which is why I do all my file management from the command line on Linux?)
Sorry, you're wrong.
10.3 -> 10.3.9 have run on all machines that support 10.3.
You're probably thinking of 10.2.7 (G5) vs 10.2.7.
10.2.7 (G5) shipped on the first PowerMac G5s while 10.2.7 shipped on the first PowerBooks that had USB2 ports. There was no 10.2.7 updater available for 10.2.6: 10.2.7 was only available on machines it came pre-installed on.
10.2.8 came in two flavours too, 10.2.8 (G5) and 10.2.8.
- proton
That's GNU/Linuxtard, sir.
More like a chicken coop. Leave the door unlocked and the fox will have chicken for supper.
Problem is the MS chicken coop is missing slats, the door is falling off and the replacement is misisng features and stuck in engeering limbo.
XP had a firewall from day one... Problem was it was NOT turned on and was pittifull. The revision is fare.
That makes it hardly useful at all. A lot of apps will break as all traffic from lo interface only gets the first packet through. Additionally, responding packets get dropped from outgoing connections. I *think* you wanted at the beginning:
iptables -I INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
-1 Flamebait?
More like honest criticism, and constructive at that.
And the GIMP Printer Drivers really don't have much to do with GIMP... it's kind of a new printer driver format.
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Then 'justsomebody' tried to correct the examples.
Xerox Alto 1972
They didn't get it 'right'--at least not right enough to bring to market. The Mac made the GUI useable.
ARPANET 1969
The GP was referring to desktops and LANS, not workstations and big iron. Etc. with the rest of your response. Maybe you're being obtuse on purpose?
Damn those pesky terrorists
I don't dislike your point exactly... Mac bashers have been loud forever (I was one years ago, based on having to use it at school, then they got better, then they got better, then...), but...
You know, I really just hate your example. I don't exactly know why. Maybe because it assumes that there are areas of knowledge forbidden to everyone depending on how they were born? I mean, I'm not rich, but I think that I can model that behavior in my head and come to valid conclusions about it. It has been helpful when predicting where the behavior of rich people deviates from middle class ones, and how. And isn't that really what empathy is about?
With massive storage being so prevalent these days, I get tired of having to do filing on my computer. Plus, with more collaborative software, you find that different people have different filing methods (numeric, phased, alphabetic, dewey-decimal etc.). Why should I have to care about where my files are? I just want to know what they relate to. Goodbye file manager/finder/explorer. I'll have Spotlight search, and smart folders (stored, self-updating search results, effectively) that show me the info in the way that I like to see it, without compromising anyone else's filing structure.
This also completes Apple's interface metaphor for data search/store - as used in iPhoto and iTunes. And consistency & simplicity of UI metaphor are what make Apple systems easy to use, and Windows relatively more complex to the layman.
We all live in a state of ambitious poverty. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis
This is by far the biggest feature. Not having to write custom API's for using altivec is going to make this OS great, not only for performance of generic science apps, but for general application performance for apps that would require to much work to write custom loops for in Altivec.
An anonymous reader writes "If this hasn't already been posted,
Actually, if it has already been posted, it actually increases the chances of it being accepted by slashdot.
Slashdot - News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. By the way, it's news for nerds & stuff that matters. And did I tell you it's news for nerds & stuff that matters.
I agree with most of what you said however, I think you are minimizing how great OS X 10.3 is by comparing it to Windows 2000, I understand that you are trying to show a comparison of how much an upgrade 10.3 to 10.4 is, but really, how many "new features" for end users have really been added in windows in the last few versions. Mac OS X has gave new OS enhancements in every update on the core level, developer level AND the user level. I had not noticed the versioning difference in Win 2K and Win XP before, that is interesting, if true then I can't understand why windows users are calling Tiger a minor update, or point release... hmm hypocrites I guess.
(1) Filevault encrypts swap file, and
(2) Not using Filevault leaves your swap file and the rest of your home directory open to data theft
Am I missing something? It seems to me that this is a pointless upgrade.
Funniest shit I've read all year. *claps*
You mean that the "news" site that uses a shiny nice logo for Apple stories but a ugly, photoshoped Borgified Bill Gates for MS stories is biased?
How about the near daily Google updates? Linux has almost become old news.
Direct away from face when opening.
There is a difrence between a difering view point and misinformed/misinformation. . ,the subsystem is heavily updated, ,Fine grain locking has been added which is wonderfull news if you have duel procesors (or more on an x-serve), The dashboard is rather cool and another well integrated feature ala exposè ,native support for a new generation of file formats , PDF rendering updated to vs1.5(remember pdf is part of the core ),Core image and vidio are excelent improvment ... etc etc etc those are a few of my faviourits(include apple including KSH by default ) .
I agree it perhaps is not trolling , but it was most certainly false information
Honestly Tiger is not just an minor update , Some serious OS functionality has been changed, the kernel has been optimised for g5s , most of the core utilites have recived major function overhalls
The command line is now far far more functional from a sysadmins point of view , the networking interfaces have recived a large ammount of added functionality and improvements , Developer tools are in vs 2 , 64-bit VM support
personaly these are far greater changes than those from windows 95 to 98SE or ME , and definantly far greater than that of windows 2000 to xp , and i would say that its a greater upgrade than for example suse 9.1 to 9.2 or more comparable to the diference between debian sarge and debian Sid
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
XP Pro was able to do that upon release.
I just switched to Mac, but let's not be making stuff up about PCs to make 'em seem better - they already win in many other ways.
you can obtain suse pro free of charge. just do a ftp install [from suse or a local ftp server that you have downloaded the tree to]. or download the iso of the dvd and burn it to disc.
hard to beat free...
sum.zero
that'll come in the Cougar release, once OS X "matures".
I second this fully. Not to mention all the other niceities RDP/ICA includes, such as file access, sound, printer access, resolution/color depth changing, etc. Plus, RDP is one standard - it's not fragmented like VNC (you have so many different variations of VNC out there, like UltraVNC, TightVNC, RealVNC, etc., each with their own versions.) With RDP, your only concern is the version of the client and the version of the server.
Aw, you can't fault them for that. A lot more of the people here actually USE Windows ;)
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Exactly.
Complaining that these are "just point updates" is silly. You can't compare versioning schemes between software.
Compare:
A typical open source Linux package, version 0.4
A typical commercial Windows package, version 1.1
The OSS 0.4 is generally more stable and mature.
Apple is using "point releases" because they're in trouble-- the Mac OS X brand name depends on the version being 10.x.
Had Apple not relied on the OS X brand name, this would be "Mac OS 14.0 Tiger."
Microsoft avoids the whole decimal versioning system by not displaying it in marketing materials. People would be less likely to buy Windows XP if they saw that it was NT 5.1, a "point release" update to NT 5.0 (Windows 2000).
I am more than a little surprised that Apple decided to pack gcc 4.0 into the package. I'm not entirely convinced that gcc 4 is ready for prime time, and I am not sure if any other *nix distros are shipping with it this early.
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
So when are we getting the same functionality with Google? You type a bit - "oh, 5 Million hits and the top 3 are not what am looking for" - so you type a bit more until you reach your goal. Sounds fantastic, currently I'm refining my queries a lot and it takes a lot of time...
Does anybody knows if there is something similar planned by the big G?
Spotlight = Copernic/Google Toolbar/MSN Toolbar
No, it really isn't. I'm unsurprised by your ignorance about this. I guess we've just done a lousy job of explaining it.
Spotlight is a full-fledged system service, not just a user interface. Application developers can very easily add Spotlight to their own applications. For example, look at Mail. The additions to Mail to support Spotlight searching were trivial. In fact, the total code size of an early Spotlight build of Mail was significantly smaller, because we off-loaded all of the indexing and searching to the Spotlight service, removing it from Mail.
Comparing Mail to a third-party bolt-on search product is, well, dumb.
Safari RSS = Why the name change?
There has been no name change. The name of the browser is Safari. The version is 2.0. "Safari RSS" is just a marketing name for Safari's RSS support.
Dashboard = Avedesk/Samaurise
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
"AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation
No, it's not. But we got 17,438 requests for that feature from users. It doesn't have to be big to be important to our customers.
it's quite easy to obtain as many free fonts as you please
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
"Improved RAID Support" is what we call a "fix" not a new feature
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
We already had striping support, which is sometimes erroneous called "RAID 0." We already had mirroring support. Now we've added concatenation. See? New feature.
I have absolutely no problem with people who want to be critical. Critical is where we live. But is it really too much to ask that the people who levy criticisms have the tiniest idea what they're talking about first? It would save so much time.
Does anyone else notice this phenomenon of the system req's slowly advancing?
With 10.0-10.2, any Beige G3 or Wallstreet PowerBook G3 was fully supported. For Panther, they required built-in USB, thus knocking Beige G3 and Wallstreet systems out of the mix. Now for Tiger, it requires built-in FireWire. The only systems that come to mind without FW but without USB are early iMacs, some clamshell iBooks, and Lombard PowerBooks. That's a fair number of people that are starting to get left behind of the upgrade cycle.
I am not trolling.
Most people use the speed changes to argue in favor of Apple and against M$. But, you would see the exact same progression if M$ was adding more features (which slowed things down a bit), while Apple was correcting coding / design mistakes from an earlier OS. Versus the implied world where new M$ code is bloat-tastic, and Apple is bravely discovering new ways to speed things up.
I think the solution is a mix of the two, and I'm not convinced that all aspects of XP are slower than earlier versions (I'm convinced that some of the filesystem stuff is faster). OS X was built on a mature OS but was itself not mature on release: that they would find ways to increase the speed of their Apple-specific code was sort of inevitable.
Anyway, this isn't a valid reason to bash M$ or even praise Apple (because it implies that they were doing things the slow way before).
Praising Apple for having better GUIs and features is very valid, of course.
Doesn't matter much to me, really: I like Free Software, so I'm running Fedora, and I'm not swimming in money to the point where I can just go grab a new machine anywho. But those new G5s really do look badass...
Is it possible that these speed increases are due to superior compilation? I recall that the PPC implementation of compilers was in a bad state as of a couple years ago, and this would be a very real area where they could realize speed increases without having "made mistakes" in the past.
Course, I could be wrong...
Imagine being able to order printer supplies from the one thing that really knows what printyer you have - the computer. People do have trouble figuring out which of many ink carts they need to buy, soemtimes even if they have the model memorized.
While you and I probably will not use it, I would not discount it as a nice feature to have. And we don't know yet if the OS will push things or not - you're able to order prints in iPhoto but it's hardly in your face about it. It just lets you do it if you want to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The moment Microsoft talks about integrating new features or software into the OS, everyone complains. When Apple does it, it's the greatest thing ever, regardless of how well/poorly either side does things.
2D acceleration != 3D acceleration. Apple's using 3D acceleration for their 2D UI, which *is* new.
And in other news, 2 does not equal 3. If they're using 3D acceleration for their 2D UI, it must have some need for benefitting from 3D acceleration. Personally, I'm not visually impressed by fancy looking widgets. I'm fine with the same boring Windows Classic I've been using for the past nine years. It needed no 3D acceleration 9 years ago and needs no 3D acceleration today. Whatever Microsoft comes up with in the next version of Windows will probably be turned off on my system.
Actually, mirroring didn't work; it would almost immediately drop one of the disks for no apparent reason. I wonder whether that's fixed?
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
When the Blue & White G3s came out in 1999, people were shocked that it lacked a 3.5" floppy disk drive. They provided a workaround, though: use a USB floppy drive.
Apple did it again when they released Macs that can no longer boot into OS 9. The workaround: use Classic.
And again with Panther, which requires a G3 with built-in USB, forcing many legacy Mac users to use XPostFacto as a workaround.
Then came iLife '04, which refuses to install certain iLife applications if you don't have a G4 processor. Third-party processor upgrade cards were the workaround.
Considering that all of Apple's current lineup of computers have optical drives that support DVD-ROMs, perhaps Apple is also, in its own way, gently nudging it's market to move away from data CD-ROMs to DVD-ROMs.
Especially when you consider the installation scheme for the retail version of Panther -- 3 CDs must be swapped if you want to install everything and iLife '04 & Classic aren't even included.
The retail version of Tiger may likely need only the one DVD (since iLife '05 isn't included) for the OS + XCode2.
While the "Apple Store visit for CDs" may be an inconvenient workaround, at least there is one. It beats buying a Mac-bootable Combo- or SuperDrive and installing it.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Okay, I'm on a disinformation-squashing crusade today.
Google indexes content. This is important. Hugely, massively important. But we've had content indexing for a long time now. It only takes us so far.
What's more important than content indexing is metadata indexing.
Metadata literally means "data about data." It's information about your files that isn't actually stored in your files. For example, let's say you take a photograph and store it in your Pictures folder. Spotlight can automatically extract some metadata from the picture all by itself. It can tell that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it's in Nikon RAW format and that you took it on December 24, 2003. The computer knows this stuff already.
Other metadata was inserted automatically when the picture taken. For example, the camera inserted metadata identifying it as being taken with a Nikon D1 using a 1/250 exposure and a 2.8 f-stop.
Spotlight indexes all that stuff.
But there's a third type of metadata. In addition to intrinsic metadata and automatically inserted metadata, there's descriptive metadata. Your computer knows that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it was taken with a Nikon D1, but it can't know that it's a picture of your niece Katie. That's where iPhoto comes in. You use iPhoto to write a descriptive caption -- "Lawrence's daughter Katie on Christmas Eve" -- and that caption gets stored in the photo as metadata. Spotlight indexes it.
So if you come along later and search for "Christmas pictures," Spotlight will find that photo. Because it knows it's a picture, and because you described it as being related to Christmas.
Now, that's today. (Well, in two weeks.) What's next? We're going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here's one we've been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.
Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.
More: Using a very simple user interface, you can define locations. Sitting at your desk, you tell your laptop to refer to that location as "work." Any file created within a 100-yard radius of that location will be returned in a search for "work." On your couch you define a location called "home." Sitting at the coffee shop you define a location called "Starbucks." And so on.
Now your computer knows not only when you modified that file, it knows where you were when you did it. That's all metadata you can use for searching.
This is pretty advanced stuff. It's going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks. But it's on the drawing board.
Spotlight opens up a whole new way of storing information. It's not a new idea; we've been trying to make it work for ten years now. But the actual working implementation of it is simply revolutionary. It's a quantum leap beyond anything that anybody has to offer right now.
Haha, well, even better. I was barely 7 at the time.
GPL Deconstructed
Thanks for the clarification! That is some good info and it is definitely better than the calculator in Windows that people keep comparing this to.
Someone mod the parent up!
Thanks for the correction. (And where in the Hell did that missing year go?)
You mean you can buy a Mac without Mac OS now? How much cheaper is it?
Movie player? Or actual API and its usage?
API, as hinted at by Wikipedia - "provided basic underpinnings that are still in use today".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is something cool: Use your Bluetooth headset as an input and output device, enabling hands-free audio conferences in iChat AV and more.
Where Macs Belong in the Living Room
Godamn, I pay $3000 for a laptop, and I can't suspend it to disk?
This really irks me, even though I'm a fanboix.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
While it is true that computer sales figures have to add up to 100%, market shares do not have to add up to 100%.
If each member of the computing public owns a pc that dual boots windows and linux, and a macintosh (heck, let's have it dual boot OSX and linux), then microsoft, apple, and linux each have 100% market share.
Why is that? Because an application developed for a particular platform (windows, linux, apple) could be purchased and used by any of the people in the computing market place, hence, 100% market share.
ALMOST all use. Middle-click-paste is pretty convenient. Dare I say, Aqua would be 100% more useful if it included this feature everywhere.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You're obviously making your point from a developer's point of view: mine is as an end-user, who doesn't have the tiniest idea about developer technologies. I'm sure everything you said about Spotlight is true, as you seem to know your stuff, however to the end user, who wants a search function, it's Copernic.
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
Again, it's clear from my ignorance that I'm not a developer. I do know however as an end user that Widgets are Widgets. If I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that Dashboard is different to AveDesk/Samaurise/The rest because it pulls it's information off the Internet. Avedesk/Samaurise/The rest, to the best of my knowlege, also do this, hence the Weather Widget, (which can be skinned to be exact clones of the Tiger widget, and has been available since the first shots of Dashboard were released) POP/IMAP mail checker, etc.
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
The Longhorn Readability Fonts are free: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina and Corbel. They look pretty professional to me.
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
My apologies, it wasn't clear which features had been added in the explanation on the Apple site, so I incorrectly assumed that Apple's uber-modern "World's Most Advanced Operating System" already fully supported RAID that was fully laid down in 1988, and that they were merely fixing a bug or two.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Too bad I did not find any references to a Java 1.5 upgrade.
Does anyone know if this is to be expected in the near future?
There is for instance good SmartCard Token Support in Java 1.5 (PKCS#11) amongst other important language and framework features...
--------
* Sigh *
With Macs, it's simply a matter of privacy. And tiger does this out of the box, no need to buy any additional software as you point out.
It's not like there aren't security holes in OSX (Apple has released plenty of patches). And considering how lax the typical OSX user is at applying those patches, I would say a firewall for OSX is a good thing for most users.
Hey Saha, my "day-job" employer just started using the Snerdware apps a while ago. They work really good. There are still a few limitations, such as AddressX only importing a small subset of Exchange contact data (doesn't pull in the mailing address, etc.), but all the good stuff is in there and we run a database with all the contact info if anyone ever needs it. The only odd problem seems to be that GroupCal comes "unhooked" sometimes. It could just be my install, or perhaps it loses the connection when iCal is updated, but otherwise it works great. You do have to subscribe to each pub calendar that you want, which can be a pain if you need to re-install. Otherwise, Snerdware has saved our OSX users from the scourge of Exchange.
--- Shoo-be-doo-be-do-wop-say-what-yeah!
My wife and I use the same Mac, so we want to share pictures folder and iTunes folder in a somewhat secure manner. As ridiculous as it sounds, Mac OS X Panther won't allow you to do it. You can put whatever you want into Shared folder, but once you create some files the other user will NOT get write permission on them. There's no way around this short of setting a very lax umask that permits RW access to anyone.
In Windows I'd just put the correct ACL on the folder and by default all new subfolders and files would "inherit" the permission.
I've already ordered my copy, but please oh stranger, if you have a prerelease builds confirm they've fixed this.
I love when my university gives away OS upgrades for Apple and Microsoft for free (at least they used to give Microsoft upgrades for free... at least Office Pro is still $24 for Mac & Windows).
[insert lame joke here]
ditto is a command on OS X and some BSD systems that's used to copy files. On OS X it has the flag -rsrc that ensures it copies the resource forks of various documents and applications. Currently on 10.3, 'cp' will ignore the resource forks, breaking some applications that use them.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
My bible for this argument is basicly here: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
People are lazy, People are stupid and the system is not scalable to larger enterprises without problems.
People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only. I don't claim to know why this is, but my best guess is it's probably because it is not a visual file and there's no way of previewing it without watching. (As opposed to seeing a thumbnail of a document/movie/picture.) If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless because as with anything which is unreliable, it will fall into disuse and there will be less incentive to add metadata to files, so less people use the feature due to decreased reliability and the sitation continues to snowball.
People not knowing everything about their content is also a problem. Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans. If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions. Not only is the first problem amplified the larger the system is (more people being lazy, also less confidence that everyone will do their bit in adding metadata) but an inherent problem is that in a webwide Meta data system, people have hidden agendas, and they lie. The largest web-scale meta data implemantation we have at the moment is META tags in web page markup. I don't think I need to explain why these are often ridiculed - people lie. META tags are often abused by sites to get more hits: adding Britney Spears, XXX, pr0n etc will boost a page's rank. (This is often misguided, as more hits may occur, they they will not be relevant and leave the site straight away, however this is besides the point - they still input incorrect metadata into the system.) The problem has got to the stage where Google really doesn't pay all that much attention to META tags in comparison to the page's actual content and a monitoring of it's popularity with visitors searching for a certain subject.
This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together so this metadata is really useless on a larger scale in the same way that METAtags are now almost redundant in HTML, or or the RIAA has been able to spoof meta data on P2P networks to fool fileswappers.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Ok,
In 1986 Novell released Advanced NetWare version 2.0. With version 2.0 and all subsequent packages a NetBIOS interface has been included; Novell implemented NetBIOS encapsulated in IPX/SPX. Later Microsoft reverse- engineered the technology to provide encapsulation of NetBIOS in IPX/SPX that is compatible with the Novell implementation.
IBM Tokenring was in 1985 and NetBIOS dates to 1983
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
XP is substantialy slower. I used 2k for the longest time, and then for whatever reason (I think a reinstall) I put XP on it, and my computer is slow as shit. Fucking Athlon XP 3200 and I can barely stand to use the damn thing. And this is after I've turned off all the themeing stuff.
OS X WAS slow as shit, but it hasn't been for quite some time. By contrast, if Tiger provides the same speed increases that we've been seing for some time now, that is an improvement, because as it stands, OSX has been up to normal speeds since panther first came out.
Dashboard did not alredy exist from third parties. Don't give me the crap about konfabulator. I used it. It was shit. Slow, resource hog and nothing really useful from it, and the damn stuff took up space on my desktop. Dashboard is everything I wished Konfabulator could have been. Remember, bundling is not in and of itself evil. It's when you can't remove the bundled apps that you get into evil.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Yearly? Panther (the last version of OS X) arrived in 2003. This is 2005. 10.0 was $129. 10.1 was FREE with major new functionality. 10.2 and 10.3 were $129. Lets see here... $387. Now in that time the Microsoft side has gone through Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Thats $400 in upgrades. Windows is still higher. And considering this is probably the last upgrade on the Mac side before Longhorn, it will eventually be $600 to keep your PC current at least, compared to $387 on the Mac assuming you used Mac OS X since day 1 and didn't have a computer that came with it.
My OSX box has no idea what kind of printer I have, only that it prints PCL. Just sayin'.
Of course Microsoft didn't charge for SP2--it was a bug fix! They sold you a broken OS and they're doing the right thing and trying to fix it--and they made you wait 3 years. Who would charge for that? Oh, wait--Microsoft would. I seem to remember paying a lot for Windows 98 because it fixed Windows 95. And for only $200 too!
Well Apple sold you 10.0, atleast they didn't charge for 10.1, but if you wanted a usuable OS you had to pay again for 10.2. So it's not like Apple is any different. Especially if you want to go back a bit an look at all the broken crap Apple released back in the 90's.
I have to say that the thing I'm really looking forward to w/Tiger, is the Automater app!
I was a big fan/user of Automate , and AutoHotKey for the Windows platform, and was really looking forward to working with AppleScript on the OSX-side of things.
However AppleScript's code/syntax is really difficult for me to get into. It's attempt at being an "easy to read/use" code is SO different than anything I've used before, that it makes i hard for people who've scripted for other languages, be it Perl, Windows-Scripting, or *nix , or whatever, to easily pick it up.
It's a powerful language... I just wish the syntax was a little more... "computer-like", rather than the mix of normal speech, and computer terms that it is.
However Automater promises to make a lot of the simpler things easy, similar to the aforementioned Automate app, for Windows. I may still have to write some code for some of the more difficult operations, but Automater promises to make the simple things a lot easier, I think.
Currently Metadata is common in Music only.
Not true. Every photo taken with a digital camera has EXIF metadata, and every photo distributed by a wire service has IPTC metadata.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
The old "if it's not perfect, it's useless" lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions.
Actually Spotlight scales spectacularly well across the enterprise because clients have read access to server metadata databases. However, this is just an incidental benefit. Spotlight isn't designed to do what you're criticizing it for not doing.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that you obviously have a fundamental lack of understanding about the problem you're trying to discuss. This is nothing to be ashamed of. But you should first try to wrap your head around the problem before telling everybody what's wrong with the solutions.
Besides, your objections are trumped by the most obvious rebuttal of all: Spotlight works. Spectacularly.
... get four Mac using friends, squeeze a hundred bucks each out of them, pool your money together and get an ADC account. I did this with some friends of mine and we consider it money well spent.
500$/year gets you Server and Client builds, update builds, and advance info/data of just about everything. The downside is that you can't talk about it until it's on store shelves or in Software Update.... but the upside is that it's cheaper as a group effort than buying a single copy of the OS yourself. There's also the 1337 factor of knowing the new toy inside-and-out months or weeks before everyone else starts OMFGing about it.
Until now, MacOS X's PPTP implementation has been largely useless because it routes ALL network traffic through the VPN connection instead of letting your ordinary Internet traffic use the connection you already have. Thus, if you tunnel into your office, your ordinary Web browsing goes through the office and then BACK out to the Internet while the VPN is established. Is this fixed in "Tiger?" Nothing on Apple's Web site says.
Besides, your objections are trumped by the most obvious rebuttal of all: Spotlight works. Spectacularly. If you're willing to type out descriptions on all your files, the point being. When Jobs demonstrated Spotlight he had a load of images from Corbis which had all been nicely tagged and described by the good people that work there. People who don't have the luxury of being revered as gods inside Cupertino would have to actually type these lengthy descriptions themselves.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Did you get a free upgrade for the last Microsoft "point release" (Windows 5.0 to 5.1 or in marketing speak 2K to XP). You didn't?
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
iptables-save to save a ruleset.
:P
iptables-load(*) to load a ruleset.
* not sure about the name, though. i dropped linux on my ibook in favor of os x a couple of months ago.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
I particularly like the fact that he somehow automatically knows that the Longhorn search feature will be more "further-reaching" than Spotlight. Being as we haven't even seen MS' version demoed, we can't know. The fields that Thurrot covered in his review concern generally the GUI. And, apart from Spotlight, there is little revolution in this area from Panther to Tiger, merely refinements. Most of the people that will upgrade won't notice a big difference in their habits.
Yeah, I noticed that. He completely left out things such as Automator (which I will most likely use extensively), and instead focused on the general GUI, Spotlight, and Dashboard. Out of all the new things in Tiger, Dashboard is the one I am least interested in. The general speed increases and speed boost in Safari are things I want to know about, not if this program looks different or not.
Mac OS 10.4 = Win 5.6
Steve is very against themes. I'm suprized the Appearance Manager even made it in. (Apple never released the themes, but they did leak out eventually).
Why? How hard is it to debug when nothing is where it should be?
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Sure... .NET Framework
DirectX 9
the addition of IPv6
a rewrite of the firewall
major security infrastructure improvements
a radically improved update mechanism
Set Program Access and Defaults
Windows Media Player 10 (contrast this with the awful WMP 8 included with XP RTM)
the addition of things like handwriting to Messenger
the security center
a simpler wireless UI
etc. etc.
In an ideal, no, it shouldn't. However we don't live in an ideal world. Getting 10.0 out there and a free update in 10.1 six months later got the transition to OS X 'ball' rolling. It bought Apple the time to continue to refine, innovate, and test out things in OS X.
;-)
While 10.2 and 10.3 have been great steps forward 10.1 wasn't that terrible. It was an iBook and 10.1 that convinced me to switch away from WindowsXP full time. Well, maybe WinXP is bad enough to make 10.1 look good.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
Did I mention that this post is spell checked via the system-wide spell check feature?
May the gods bless this feature until the end of times. I didn't even know about it for the longest time, but now I can't live without it. I knew about it in iChat AV, AppleWorks, TextEdit, etc., but not Safari. Now I have been using it, and I can't live without it. Now my comments are t3h c0rr3ct $p3ll1ng!!!!!one!!!1111!!!!!eleventyone!
I've been on Slashdot since '99, and I noticed initially there was quite a bit of resistence to most things Apple. The groupthink about Apple seemed to be, "Yeah, they make shiny widgets that graphic artists like, but they're toys unsuitable for people who know anything about computers."
The release of early builds of OS X started the ball rolling in the right direction. Apple's foray into Open Source with Darwin at first was greated with enormous skepticism, but after a while people started to realize that Apple wasn't just pulling a publicity stunt. The evolution of Apple hardware got more people interested in Apple, and the titanium PowerBooks in particular made quite a few Slashdotters to realize that OS X on a PowerBook was essentially a very capable UNIX machine with a great form factor and nifty features.
Subsequent events (the launch of the iPod, the foray into online music, the G5 boxes, and the continuing improvements to OS X) have changed a lot of minds. I seriously doubt that Slashdot has become infested with Apple fanboys who drool at the opportunity to mod up comments that make Apple look good. My take on it is that Apple has changed for the better, and they're coming out with hardware and software that many Slashdotters like.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"You're obviously making your point from a developer's point of view: mine is as an end-user, who doesn't have the tiniest idea about developer technologies."
I do believe that's a big part of the point: Tiger is more for developers then end users. CoreImage, CoreAudio, gcc 4.0, XCode 2, and all of the new scripting and searching hooks are going to be underutilized for a while. But then developers are going to start releasing software that uses these new features, much more significant in the long term.
Give it a couple of years. When you can search everything, and I do mean everything, from a single interface, the point of Spotlight may become apparent. When you can automate anything, anything, from a simple click and build GUI, the reasoning behind Automator may become apparent.
"If I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that Dashboard is different to AveDesk/Samaurise/The rest because it pulls it's information off the Internet."
No. They're webviews because they're written with extended JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. They're extremely easy to develop and design, as a result. (And in this, I recognize they're strangely similar to Konfabulator widgets. However, Konfabulator does extremely odd things with its threads and child processes, so said widgets are the most amazing resource hogs.)
Everything new in Tiger is not meant for you, oh doubtful naysayer. But when developers start releasing ever more useful applications, which would require full multiples of time to develop on another platform, please, reconsider your postings.
Maybe Apple should have focused on preemptive multitasking and memory management in the 90s instead of producing the crap that they did. MacOS was the worst OS on the market from the mid 90s until OSX
Vote for Pedro
There are two points where Thurrot isn't particularly convincing. One is his endless comparision between Mac OS X and what Microsoft offers, that ranges from "It's some kind of imitation of Windows" to "They're the first to implement it but MS had certainly already thought about this feature before and their version will be better".
The most incredible was his claim that XP-SP2 is arguably a more major upgrade than Tiger. I'm not intimately familiar with XP, but as far as I know SP2 was mostly security features. I'm sure that makes a huge improvement in usability, bringing back your Win box from the brink of death, but Tiger offers actual features that apply to actually using the computer.
It's funny how many Mac haters there are out there. If you like Windows so much, why would you give Mac zealots the time of day? Instead these guys get so incensed that people like Macs even though they are barely on the marketshare radar. There's some kind of Mac-envy going on. Not sure if they're jealous of the computer itself, or just the satisfaction that Mac users enjoy, but it certainly is telling.
anyone else notice that almost all things mentioned in this list are not usability additions... but things to secure a Windows box?
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
In the same time, covering Jaguar, Panther, and now Tiger, MacOSX offers these NEW features: Inkwell, Rendezvous (now Bon Jour), Apple-tab application switching, Expose, iChat, iChatAV, look-ahead searching, Spotlight, a functioning fax replacement, iSync, Automator, Dashboard, Printer setup in System prefs, several versions of Quicktime including H.264, fast user switching, VoiceOver (this thing actually makes computers usable for the blind, and for them, has to be the single greatest thing to happen to computers), Safari, and, of course, etc. etc. Security was excellent to begin with, and only got better since, usually with free upgrades.
Here's my take on the price: it should have been $129 for upgrades from 10.1 and below, $99 for 10.2 Jaguar users, and $69 for Panther users. Bear in mind, that the Family Pack is a great deal, and that there are no heinous license verifications with this upgrade. I ordered Tiger through Amazon, and paid less than $100. That's only $30 more than I thought I should pay, but nobody forced me to do it. I could, of course, have paid $499 for it, and got a great little computer thrown in, as well as a $99 iLife suite, but I think I'll upgrade my hardware when Ocelot comes out, which will still be before Longhorn is finished.
Did anyone notice (Bottom right of the page, listed under "Unix" -- no of course you didn't, no one reads articles anymore) that you can now remap modifier keys like control and caps lock! There have been 3rd party applications that permit this, with some caveats.
This is huge for me. I'm going to get Tiger anyway for Spotlight alone - seems like I've been waiting for that feature my entire computing life - but putting the control key where it belongs is icing on the cake.
Who are these Apple engineers that seem to be paying attention to what users want, and how come none of them are working for Novell/Mandrisa/Red Hat? I mean come on, folks, I'd love to keep using Linux on my home box, but I have yet to find the Linux distro that provides such phenomenal usability. One of my complaints about OS X used to be the non-modifiable modifier keys. And now that's been taken care of.
Go Apple!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
DirectX 9
Open GL updates are free on OS X and come with each real point update (10.x.y).
the addition of IPv6
Welcome to the 21st Century.
a rewrite of the firewall
Mac OS X firewall has been working fine since 10.0, long before SP2's rewrite came out.
major security infrastructure improvements
So they fixed things that have been problems for years? Joy. And security fixes as a major feature of a service pack is not a good thing. Apple releases security fixes through Software Update that are security updates alone, not service packs (although the true service packs have the older fixes in them as well).
a radically improved update mechanism
Software Update has worked fine for a while now on OS X, since before XP SP2 came out, as well.
Set Program Access and Defaults
And, yet, some programs still require the use of being logged in as an administrator account, which has no default settings to prevent unwanted programs from being installed while running that account.
Windows Media Player 10 (contrast this with the awful WMP 8 included with XP RTM)
Yay. Quicktime gets updated through Software Update if you want it to, or you can download it from the Quicktime part of Apple's site.
the addition of things like handwriting to Messenger
Been in OS X for a while. Has Windows yet gotten a reliable voice activation/dictation software yet? OS X has.
the security center
Something else to highlight the security flaws in Windows, and something not really needed on OS X.
a simpler wireless UI
As in WiFi? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA! WiFi on Windows is such a pain in the ass to set up, it isn't even funny. In OS X (cue overused but true saying) IT JUST WORKS. In fact, I literally just connect to any unsecured network in the immediate area if I choose to.
Sorry, but it looks like these new features are still behind stuff OS X had in some cases since 10.0.
Absolutely it does. Pictures taken with a given camera on the same day are naturally grouped together, making it trivially easy to batch-annotate them in iPhoto. Hell, iPhoto can even discriminate between pictures taken indoors and those taken outdoors by the white balance preset.
Automatic metadata certainly does make annotation easier. Very much so.
Why do all you naysayers sound like you haven't got the foggiest idea how this stuff actually works?
Then you're probably not in the target market for this feature, are you?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You sound like you've never seen iPhoto before.
Mac OS XI ditches the previous Unix underpinnings and goes back to OS 9 technologies; the long awaited Copland.
I've got an early beta here.
Shit I've broken my NDA with Apple....
Similarly,
Mac OS X 10.1 = Darwin 5
Mac OS X 10.2 = Darwin 6
Mac OS X 10.3 = Darwin 7
Mac OS X 10.4 = Darwin 8
Currently, Mac OS X 10.3.9 gives Darwin 7.9 when you do 'uname -a'.
This thread is very helpful.
We should officially start considering those who way "charging money for a point release" trolls by now.
If you're willing to type out descriptions on all your files, the point being. When Jobs demonstrated Spotlight he had a load of images from Corbis which had all been nicely tagged and described by the good people that work there. People who don't have the luxury of being revered as gods inside Cupertino would have to actually type these lengthy descriptions themselves.
You've managed to effectively argue for the point you wished to oppose. You initially claimed only music files have meta-data, and then you go on to mention Corbis images - which are carefully tagged with extensive meta-data.
The meta-data from Corbis is put to good use by a lot of people who buy their images (publishers for example). Currently only people running a program like iView can search on that data. With spotlight anyone can - I know that this will make my life easier personally, and I'm more likely to purchase images with said data pre-entered (note that they do this now, on all images, not just for Steve Jobs as you imply).
Where there is financial value for adding meta-data (and in many cases in business there definitely is) it *will* be added, and extensively used. Programs like Word already add author specific data to files, I imagine once it is a system-wide service this sort of facility will be pervasive, as it will allow sophisticated searches and sorting of documents which previously had to be done by hand. Initially inside organisations and between trusted partners, but it will happen. Perhaps it will never spread to the internet, but if we're talking about Spotlight that is irrelevent.
Meta-data on the internet is a joke because of trust issues. You have extrapolated from that narrow case to all others. Please don't do that.
What is your point, exactly?
My point exactly.
"Our company recently migrated to Linux workstations after years of Windows. Can't say that I see much of a difference between Linux and Windows GUIs nor I miss Windows GIU at all."
Even if you are keen advocate of other platforms, isn't it just barely possible that the reason for the Slashdot appreciation for Apple's products represents not an elitism, but an educated choice by an especially educated and specialised community for tools they consider to be the best? Isn't it also possible that the (perhaps true) Slashdot-Apple bias represents the very strongest seal of approval?
I am not a geek, but a supervisor of geeks. I buy what they recommend. I skim Slashdot now and again to see how you - the expert computer community thinks. More and more, they (you) recommend Apple, for more and more applications and situations. Why would I pay their salaries if I didn't pay attention to their expertise? If a car engineer told me that yes, Mercedes DOES build their cars tremendously well, woudn't I listen?
Isn't it about time you replaced the "X" icon from how it looked in 10.0 and 10.1 to a more current version? I scan the articles and see the blue X, and I wonder why people are submitting articles about a four year old OS!!!
Sweet. My ransom notes are gonna kick ass.
I, for one, enjoy /. even more nowadays because we recently got an iBook to test out. So now I have something else to read while /. announces the next critical Windows Update patch.
"*new since Windows 3.1!"
And then three years later:
"We finally copied some of Longhorns features into Linux!"
"Derp de derp."
I wonder about this. Surely the reason people are lazy about doing such things is because up to now there hasn't been a *reason* to do so?
I own a Mac with iPhoto etc, and yes I'm that kind of lazy person. I've never described a photo without a reason to do so - i.e. publishing a web gallery. But isn't that the point? People are usually lazy for a reason, as in there's no percievable need for them to expend that energy.
I intend to buy Tiger. Now, because I *know* that in the future I'll be able to have access to such a powerful search function, and that its performance is directly related to how well I describe my photos (and other files), I'll have a reason to do so and keep up with it. And I'm very confident that I will do so.
Hey.
/.ers! You really like me.
/. would already have a similar post up by the time they read my submission.
I'm the A.C. who submitted the link to the features page. Normally, these submissions go into my browser and I forget about them long after the links are ingored by the moderators. So, it is surprising that the mods felt like posting it.
Some follow-ups:
1) I thought that the verbage would be changed; instead it was posted verbatim. Yikes. Me didn't want to come across as some sort of shill for Apple or as a bafoon. I accomplished the latter w/o trying. thanks,
2) I submitted it yesterday. My luck tends to be that of a johnny-come-lately and it just seemed like
3)Stealth Mode, like some mentioned, is totally about privacy. It may seem trivial to most of you but c'mon, peeps, giving non-technical savvy users that option is welcome. And, the firewall feature is built into Darwin. Any obvious privacy additions to the security features are welcome.
4) Most of the features are tweaks, simply product enhancements. There's nothing wrong with that. When the Find application in OS 8 became Sherlock with OS 8.5 it changed the way users searched for files on their desktop. It even allowed for searching the internet from within the Sherlock app. Windows search thing still launched the browser--explorer-- and defaulted to MS' search page. BS, that is.
At base, Spotlight is the better search that seemed to stall between OS 8.5 and OS X. With Metadata not existing, so to speak, in pre-Tiger OS X, the options for search were limited. That is a major reason I don't use X daily. I likes me metadata because I can arrange things the way I want to and not as the OS wants me to. And, the OS "knows" when I move things without popping up warnings or interfering with what I'm doing.
In OS 9 I can search based on the data in the resource fork. That's helped me out especially when I've had to fix corrupted files.
And, of course meta-data makes the OS "smarter."
The goal of comupting advances is still about making the interaction invisible and easier for anyone to use, right?
Arranging files you create in ways that are best conducive to the way you work is just desired. Metadata, especially since I cut my teeth on System 7-OS 9, makes things better.
Finally, beyond metadata, the things I dig most about Tiger and while I'll likely upgrade:
Automator, Core Image/video, Quicktime enhancements. All of those are good for me and my ilk who do multimedia and who don't program. The bulk of the enhancements to the OS assist people like me who aren't code junkies but who want to take fuller advantage of the OS, of Quicktime (which really has so more functionality than Apple seems to promote , like, interactivity and the 3D panoramas of QTVR) and increases our workflow.
An AC has already made part of this post, but I will finish it off.
Any time that an application can get inside the firewall and install itself without the explicit permission of the user then that is it, all bets are off. While not all applications installed like this provide a root shell equivalent, it is possible for many of them to turn on and off services at will.
If your firewall is on your end user system, then it essentially ceases to exist once your system is compromised, as it can easily be switched off or have rules changed to allow malicious traffic, while still appearing complete.
However, if your firewall is on a separate system, it is more likely to maintain its integrity if your system is compromised.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
"AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation
No, it's not. But we got 17,438 requests for that feature from users. It doesn't have to be big to be important to our customers.
Make that 17,439. Where do you request this?
What, for 5 years?
I don't disagree with you, the Apple of the time was pretty poorly run.
In 10 years, will we be remembering the current era as a time when "Microsoft should have focused on security and usability instead of producing the crap that they did. Windows XP was the worst OS on the market from the early 00s until [insert future OS successor]"
GPL Deconstructed
You do realize that there's no need to submit the feature request because the feature has already been added, right?
For actual feature requests, use https://bugreport.apple.com/
As of a few months ago...
http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
I fail to see how the stealth mode on the firewall will annoy legitimate users of the network, unless you define legitimate users to be something which I don't.
Even based on the page you linked to, there is no information which would lead to other users on a network being annnoyed based on your system applying stealth mode. It could be inferred that problems with DHCP lease allocation could cause the same IP to be allocated to two users, but the ISP should have sufficient technical expertise to not get into such a situation (otherwise they shouldn't be an ISP). The only possible way that stealth mode would impact other users ability to use a network would be if the network gateway, or the ISP, applied stealth mode.
The worst it could do to an end user is drop them off the network if they did not respond to ICMP pings, or heartbeats used by the ISP.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
Oops. Try this instead
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
My bible for this argument is basicly here: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
I quite like the "Metacrap" paper, and I use it a lot as a reality check for those diving too deeply into the metadata / XML web services / SOA utopia.
Unfortunately I disagree with your interpretation of its arguments, as noted below.
People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only.
Which came to be because some people are anal enough to sit down and add descriptions to their music collection , and people created ways of sharing those with others easily.
The point is to make it easy to add descriptions and combine it with implicit / observational metadata. iPhoto , for example, knows when you took your photos, which is a very good start for lazy people organizing data -- Spotlight can answer queries like "pictures taken on December 13 2004". People that are organization freaks can get better searches by putting some more words associated with it.
Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans
Or that which is implicitly associated with something by necessity - "observational" stuff. Creation dates, authors, links, etc. That stuff is usually very reliable, as noted in the last section of that paper...
This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together....
Whoa. This argument seems to be an example of the "division fallacy". Since explicit metadata solutions don't work well on Internet scales means they won't work on smaller scales (like enterprises).
It's interesting you used communism as an argument against metadata in the beginning of your post, because economic systems are really a form of information system, in a sense. Communism is an attempt to explicitly associate metadata (prices) with goods. A market-based system, on the other hand, uses implicit metadata (supply/demand price adjustments) to govern. Yet we do recognize that explicit control is used within a company because it's more efficient than the market when applied to a small enough group (aka. 'transaction costs' argument).
Relating to the topic at hand -- quality data is important, and seriously lacking in most organizations (and individual user desktops!). Metadata partially fixes a major part of the quality issue: relevance. Explicit metadata, like most explicit forms of agreement, works well in an environment with a consistent culture and centralized policy -- or in the case of a single user, someone anal enough to tag their pictures. But it requries an investment.
On the other hand, implicit metadata is "free" because it's already there, it's just a matter of capturing, indexing, and making it accessible. Google did that with hyperlinks. Spotlight is doing that with photos, music, and emails. So whether people stay lazy or not, Spotlight still significantly improves the user experience in getting access to relevant information....
-Stu
No, they literally mean what Linux has been doing for a while now - individual subsystems of the Darwin kernel now are locked individually, rather than via a Global Kernel Lock.
Did I ever deny attribution or credit to PARC? I only suggested we owe credit to Apple.
GPL Deconstructed
Flamebait? Ah, I get it: When Microsoft copies somebody else, sharpen the ol pitchforks. But when Linux distros FINALLY get features that Windows had for years, it's sacred.
Honestly guys, if you can't take a little poke here and there, maybe you should consider not dishing it out.
"Derp de derp."
Simply save it to a shell script called view_grandchild_photos and give it desktop link. Voila - she'll be running in stealth mode in no time! ;)
You've got a strange idea of "normal". My 1Ghz iBook runs OS X with similar performance to the ca. 450Mhz P3 I use at home for my Win2k3 DC.
OS X starts to approach "snappy" on G5-class machines and high-end dual G4s. But it's still far, far less responsive than Windows.
Sony have a hard time seeing the present of portable music, let alone the future. That's why they are barely a blip in that market.
If you're going to talk about usability, how does DRM affect the user? I ripped about 200 CDs yesterday for my fiance's new iPod. No DRM. Of course, here in Australia I can't buy from the iTMS, but even if I could, Apple's DRM is the least restrictive.
We don't have the choice between DRM or no DRM with online music. The music industry will never allow that, and after years of online piracy, I have to say that seems fair - people have shown time and again that they'd rather get something for nothing. The industry's been bitten and are responding with DRM to protect their copyrighted music. That's not to say that I believe that their tactics of suing file-sharers are anything but dubious, but they have the right to protect their stuff in the face of rampant piracy.
So given that we are going to have DRM on legally retailed music, what sort of DRM would you like? Apple's model trusts the user more than most.
I'm digressing a bit though.
Moving music *from* a portable device is a bit of an odd thing. I've got the music on my computer already, so why would I want to send it back to my computer? Unless you're talking about backups (better handled by an external HD anyway) or piracy, I can't think of a reason to do this.
As for battery replacements - the thing lasts for about two years! It's a bummer that we can't easily change the batteries ourselves, but that's not a deal-breaker and it's not a usability issue (unless you want to change the batteries every week).
The iPod is where it is for a reason - it's the best mp3 player on the market. It's not just the ads (which many people I know haven't even seen) or marketing, but the device is actually a really good one. After seeing my fiancee take to hers (and she's not a Mac user or Apple fan) I have to say that it's almost trivial to learn how to use it.
So stealth mode is supposed to go down like this, right?:
....
Windows H4xx04: OMG wut wuz dat?
Windows H4xx04-2: ya i got hit to
OS X H4x04: OMG PWNED1111
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
The distinction about Mail2 and HTML is this: You can now compose email as html -- meaning you can type in messages using tags like table, img, a, code, etc. Mail1 would let you copy and paste in rich text, and turn it into html when it sent it to someone else, but you couldn't compose the mail as html. To clarify a little more, if you pasted a bunch of html into a new message it would just send that code with all the tags escaped and such... like on Slashdot the difference between "HTML Formatted" and "Extrans" and "Plain Old Text". I can think it's really only that useful to people who want to make glossy pretty html emails like ADC sends you. Of course the new Safari's "mail this web page" feature could easily be used to get this functionality. Eh. Sorry for rambling.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Sometimes I love Apple, sometimes I hate them. Sometimes they do great software, sometimes they screw their users as bad as any commercial software company.
This time, they done good. First: it looks like the iSight now can route audio through the system like any other mic; before, it was an expensive webcam with a crippled microphone. This should, for example, mean that Garageband can use it for recording audio input, which is convenient (and currently impossible). Second, the Audio Unit Lab is going to be interesting. It allows users to create Audio Units - which in Garageband means software instruments and which generally might give the Mac a built-in, midi-accessible sampler. It's hard to believe on the one hand - I doubt it would have features to encroach on, say Ableton Live - but on the other hand, with some pre-loaded audio, a cheapo Casio keyboard with midi ports, an isight, and Garageband, you'd practically be a moble radio station - podcasting anyone?
And the Audio Unit Lab is on http://www.apple.com/pro/musicaudio/tiger.html and NOT on the 200 list!
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Dashboard is nothing like Active Desktop. Active Desktop lets you use a page from a server or a local file. Dashboard is a space for individual widgets, not full web pages, and the extended JavaScript allows hooks into OS X's API.
I'm not familiar with setting up Active Desktop to, say, run cron jobs or searches, poll information about the current network connection and system status. Without resorting to ActiveX or other such architecture, I do not believe Active Desktop can interact with other applications, such as iTunes or iCal. Dashboard Widgets can, and with relative ease.
Besides, you can only run one Active Desktop page at a time, not the many componentized widgets of Dashboard.
"Many products used comparable technologies. How is this innovative for Apple again?"
I ask you, who claimed this was innovative? Not I. Go argue with those that did. And those other products with comparable technologies are not part of the system. They are add ons. It's comparable to saying "Microsoft is stealing the idea of a firewall by adding it to their system." The idea of the firewall is a good one, and thus integrating it into Windows is an excellent feature.
Konfabulator has not perfected the widget. In fact, Konfabulator is rather laughable in its approach. It's a nice application, sure, but it sucks up 25MB of real memory and significant CPU cycles for each open widget. Yes, I want to lose a quarter of my system resources for a dozen widgets. Konfabulator, for all its nice JavaScript extensions, is also still fairly limited in its API hooks.
"Shall we talk about the Xerox lawsuit they won against Apple for the GUI? Funny, no one seems to mention it anymore either..."
You just did, and I thank you for it. But then again, everyone else is being sued or has been sued, as well. Apple is neither the exception nor the example.
Now, again, nowhere did I say Apple was the innovator. So, I ask you, again, why are you flaming me?
"Spotlight, the wonderful new search feature? (You say it is special because it is a Service)... Bull... MSN Desktop Search is just as freaking functional and it is an experimental beta for God's sake. It has API sets for application developers just like Spotlight (so it accessible just like your service) and also tracks and references MetaData that NTFS supports natively, as it has since 1993 as well."
Yes, MSN Desktop Search is available, but is not immediately a part of the system. Again, this is one of the points.
As far as the MSN Desktop Search API hooks, I find the documentation on them exceedingly difficult to locate. If you could point me the link (or the path in MSDN), I would appreciate it.
Again, MSN Desktop is optional. Thus, developers need to consider whether taking the time to add functionality is worth the consumer response. Since Spotlight is something that may be assumed, I warrant it will receive extensive support from Mac developers.
"How about the direct Burn to CD feature - wow.. Adaptec's DirectCD was doing this back in 1998 as well, it was an instant burn process, NO staging as well."
And Windows XP can do this?
The point, I reiterate, is that the functionality is built into the system; no third party software needed. There are technical concerns with instant segmented burning, and staging is an interface choice that allows users to add, move, rename, modify, and delete before finalizing the disc.
"There are more 'fixes' than features, and bundled concepts they have ripped off MANY other companies."
Where did you get this idea? I'm staring at the list on Apple's site, and though I'm questioning why Font Book Scriptability is listed twice, the points seem to be new features. Perhaps you could elaborate.
What companies? Besides, at the risk of redundancy, why are you telling me? I never claimed
I think I'll drop the funeral bill for the parent's joke in your mailbox. Pay up.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
iTunes DRM: What iTunes DRM? None of the files I've encoded ever got DRMed, and all the files I've purchased through the iTMS played on all iPods.
Hoops: Um, it's a firewire device. Drag music on, drag music off.
You mean how to grab music out of the iPod library? They didn't make these hoops to be obtuse or difficult, extracting out of the library is 'difficult' because it makes it 'easy' for the iPod. Your music is sorted into 100 folders in the manner of a hash table, guaranteeing an average minimum and maximum seek time when you access any song. The songs themselves have no real human usable names because all the information (names, tags, artists, etc) are stored in a database file, guaranteeing nigh instantaneous song access because the database file is always loaded in memory.
Battery replacement: $99 through Apple (easy, if slow) or $29 diy (a little more complicated, but fast). You mean the fact that they don't use 'standard' alkaline batteries? They use special batteries to achieve their form factor and weight. They sacrificed long term maintainability for long term and immediate usability, and it seems to have worked because the average consumer has accepted it.
Audio quality: You mean there isn't enough bass? Granted, some players have more, but most are on par. Apple gets points for actually being slightly louder, all around, than most other players.
Jukebox: You mean you can select a playlist, an album, an artist, or a song with one hand? Because the usage you described, "play, next, back, and volume" sounds like the iPod shuffle. You also said, "It didn't reward laziness like the iPod does," and I think you're confused because you attribute to laziness what is actually good design. Your Jukebox makes it harder for you to use in two ways: You have to pay attention to how you put your music on the device, and you have to pay attention on how to use the device.
Don't you think that's silly? The point of the device is to listen to music, not to teach you how to organize your music or how to use the device.
iTunes solve those two issues quite simply: It organizes your music for you in automatic artist/album folders, if you want to browse the folders, and it maintains a database of all the information on your music so you access the music by any aspect, not merely filename or folder:
Artist
Playcount
Type
Album
Composer
Genre
Comment
etc
iTunes also does other things to improve your experience; you insert the CD, and it automatically rips (if you let it). You plug in your iPod, and it is automatically synched (if you let it).
All you have to worry about are three things:
Inserting CDs into the computer (or buying them or dragging them into iTunes)
Plugging in your iPod (since it not only synchs, but charges, through it's connection to the computer)
Deciding what you want to listen to on your iPod
Anything else is a pointless exercise. Creative is lucky that Apple hasn't actually pushing as hard in the market as it could have. Apple decided to take a nice healthy profit, instead of slashing margins to totally own the market. As it is, Apple is pretty close to owning the market in the flash AND hard drive markets, and there is still things they can do to further marginalize Creative.
GPL Deconstructed
Ahem... Xerox is still around. I know 'coz I'm sitting here typing from a Xerox owned resource in a Xerox office.
BTW PARC (and our other research centres) is still inventing new stuff for geeks to drool over when it finally hits the market, we just have to get better at developing and marketing stuff ourselves rather than just licensing or abandoning them.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
I guess you could blame this one on Google, who pretty much had the first desktop search out there. In fact, they'll even sell you a search appliance for your intranet.
You can probably lay the blame squarely at the feet of Dominic Giampaolo, file system guru and developer for the now defunct Be Inc, currently working in the File System and Spotlight groups at Apple. Giampaolo's work was hugely influential to a similar feature to spotlight in BeOS, which relied heavily on advanced features in Giampaolo's BFS filesystem.
In fact, Apple users probably have him to thank for the marked improvements in HFS since his hiring, including journalling and auto defragmentation.
More: Using a very simple user interface, you can define locations. Sitting at your desk, you tell your laptop to refer to that location as "work." Any file created within a 100-yard radius of that location will be returned in a search for "work." On your couch you define a location called "home." Sitting at the coffee shop you define a location called "Starbucks." And so on.
Is that 100-yard radius predefined or specifiable by the end-user? Because that feature would be very cool.
Your Windows PC is my other computer.
Haha, fair enough.
Do I have it right? Just because I read it on the internet doesn't make it automatically true. Did Apple license stuff from Xerox?
GPL Deconstructed
XP's files and settings transfer wizard, since 2001.
Actually, that's completely different - and briefcase (mentioned below) is differetn as well. iSync synchronises contacts, calendars, bookmarks and various other things. You primarily use it to synchronise your Mac with a PDA, movile phone, online .Mac account etc, but via .Mac you can use it to synchronise all those things between two Macs. The other beauty is that it's a one button sync with all the devices mentioned - so as long as they are all plugged in when you click the button to start the process, then everything gets the same up to date version - and it checks all the sources to make sure that it has the most recent version. It's a very, very useful feature.
Creative, with 13 buttons (maybe it was 11) could not. If you are refering to the Nomad Jukebox, it's 11 buttons a scroll wheel and a hold switch. There was an IR port on the front that i've never seen used. As someone who used to be a Creative labs lover, starting with the first nomad, I have to say that they are good at hardware(used to be better) but their software is painful to use at best. I loved my original nomad, I'd still use it if it worked with XP. It's tiny, has a FM radio, and a screen. In fact, I'm going to pull it out again(was looking for a small radio, am idiot) I dont know what the point of this was, but Apple makes elegant things that work, everyone else makes things that almost work.
We're talking about highly advanced stuff here. It exists only in labs. So it's way too early to talk about specifics.
I don't want to blow anything out of proportion, but think of Spotlight as being kind of like the first bitmapped graphics. What we're doing with it right now is cool. But what's really important is what it enables us to do in the future.
GPS-based locational metadata is just one example. Automatic speech-to-text transcription for audio recordings is another. (You wouldn't believe what vector processing can do for speech-to-text. I saw a demo where a high-quality, noiseless audio recording of an unaccented speaker was transcribed at 20x real-time on a single 2.0 GHz G5.)
Example: You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose.
Think about more detailed logging. Right now your computer logs only the most rudimentary events, stuff that is of no interest to human beings. What if it could log everything? Right now you can say "Show me that file I worked on yesterday at two o'clock." But what if you could turn that around and say, "When and for how long did I work on this file?" That's vitally important to anybody who does billable work. Imagine if, through metadata and logging, your computer could automatically produce your time sheet for you?
Another type of automatically generated metadata we're experimenting with is relational metadata. Let's say you've got a picture of your dog on your computer. You e-mail it to your sister Jan. Your computer notes this as metadata on the photo so later you can ask your computer to show you what pictures you've sent to Jan.
Address Book is one area where relational metadata is pretty important. In Address Book, you put Jan and your brother Harry into a group called "Family." Both Jan and Harry, in their contact records, get metadata describing them as being members of the "Family" group. So later you can ask your computer to show you what pictures you've e-mailed to members of your family. Or received from members of your family. Or what pictures you've e-mailed to SOME members of your family but not ALL.
Let's say you take that picture of your dog and drop it in a Pages document, then export the document as a PDF and mail it to your sister Jan. The computer records, as metadata, the fact that that picture of your dog is related to Jan. It knows that put associated the picture with that Pages document, that the Pages document was associated with the PDF file, and that the PDF file was associated with an e-mail to Jan.
Now combine it with a gestural interface. Take two files, any two files. Say it's a PDF representing an invoice and a Photoshop file representing a poster you designed. You drag the invoice over the Photoshop file and a marking menu appears, giving you the option of establishing a relationship between the two files. If you want you can annotate the relationship. If you don't, you don't have to. The computer will simply note that a relationship exists.
Now extend that idea. Instead of it being two files, it can be two ANYTHING. Drag a contact from Address Book to a Pages document; up pops a marking menu asking you if you want to establish a relationship. Or an song from iTunes to a picture of your girlfriend. Or your daughter's birth certificate to her birthday in iCal.
The possibilities that Spotlight opens up are pretty inspiring. It's not just a desktop search tool. Yes, it makes that possible, but bleah. That's 20th-century thinking. That's you working in the way the computer wants. What's more important about Spotlight is the fact that it's an enabling technology that lets the computer work in the way you want.
There's some pretty exciting stuff coming in the next few years.
Networking, introduced in 1990 with AppleTalk and AppleShare in System 7
More like System 3 if not System 2 (and hardware support from the first Mac). The ANU Math department's Macs were running AppleTalk over their existing phone lines in 1985. System 7 added personal file sharing.
Color support, which allowed for Photoshop and other image programs, in 1988 with System 6
I was pretty sure this was wrong, so I checked.
1. Original MacOS supported 16 colors (but no hardware support).
2. Mac II shipped in 1987. Internal color representation was 48-bit (we're only just seeing mainstream support for this). Two graphics cards were initially offered, one supporting 16 colors from a 32-bit palette and another supporting 256. A 24-bit card soon became available.
3. It ran on System 4.1.
Mac II specs
however, novell explicitly allows you to do this. try it. if you like it, then support...
sum.zero
suse is garbage!
give me a break. suse is a perfectly good, albeit idiosyncratic, distro. i have had few problems installing it on a very wide assortment of hardware. that said, it's just a distro and not a religion.
your single bad experience, for whatever reason it occurred, is hardly the basis for leaping to the conclusions you do. especially considering suse is a $$ commercial distro...
sum.zero
Don't recall all the history perfectly, but most of it was licensed for stupidly little money given how important some of these things became: e.g. GUIs, ethernet, etc...
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
If you look around I think you'll be surprised at the amount of metadata that exists in all sorts of files. I can have Word automagically add my name, company, manager, e-mail, and all sorts of other little tidbits to a document in a meta data section. I just have to add this data once and from then on Word, Excel, and Powerpoint will do the tedious work for me. This metadata can be searched and indexed by Spotlight.
So for instance, I'm working on a project with a few other people in my department and we're sharing files and sending e-mails all over the place. I can bring up Spotlight and type "John Smith" and it will find me e-mails send to and from John, his Address Book contact, calendar events with John associated or mentioned, and importantly Word and Excel documents he has sent to me. All of this data was parsed from information that was already lying around various locations on my computer. Word and Excel were already adding John's name to files that he authored.
Your premise is that metadata sucks because no one bothers adding it to files. It isn't the end users that will be or need to be doing the work, the onus for that is on the developers. Since Spotlight will now be a major feature in the OS, developers will begin going out of their way to not only use Spotlight in their own applications but make sure their file formats are extremely Spotlight friendly. It's only going to get more prevalent from this point on because it is going to become a lot more useful to the person on the street.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
One of the new features that Apple did not mention, is that all built-in text fields, including the editing areas of TextEdit and (presumably) Mail, allow discontinuous selection now. That is, you can select a word here, a word there, a rectangular chunk somewhere else. You can then copy, cut, paste, etc.
Maybe it is just me, but I like being able to do that!
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Don't worry, you can always use VirtualPC to get those lovely little programs run on your mac.
Imagine when your coffee maker is running out of coffee, it tries to sell you more coffee - except that the coffee is half a pound less and twice as expensive as a bag down at your local grocery store.
.Mac.
It might be a *feature* if we were getting a great deal on printer supplies because it's being supplied by Apple, but we're not we're getting marketed to. I don't approve of that.
Furthermore - I don't approve of Apple using my fsking operating system as a platform to sell me crap like
See, my experience is just the opposite. My 1 Ghz TiBook runs faster than my Athlon 3200 box at home.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I'm not familiar with setting up Active Desktop to, say, run cron jobs or searches, poll information about the current network connection and system status. Without resorting to ActiveX or other such architecture, I do not believe Active Desktop can interact with other applications, such as iTunes or iCal. Dashboard Widgets can, and with relative ease.
Besides, you can only run one Active Desktop page at a time, not the many componentized widgets of Dashboard.
Ok let's stop you right there... You truly don't anything about the Active Desktop feature of Windows. Applets can fully interact with the OS, Run applications on the Applet Pages, and you can run as many applets on your desktop as you want.
I have had a calendar page and Weather map I have used on my desktop for almost 6 years. Trust me you can run 100s of Active Desktop pages at a time if you wish.
Again, MSN Desktop is optional. Thus, developers need to consider whether taking the time to add functionality is worth the consumer response
True for the extent of its availability today, but you are forgetting that NTFS and metadata has been a part of the WindowsNT File system for years, and developers do use it.
Spotlight is a nice technology, but it is nothing new... Just like Sherlock was nothing new, even though Apple made a lot of people thing it was.
As for the 'Spotlight' search features that will for show all your Word Documents on your system no matter where they are located and 'save' this folder view is also not a new concept.
Windows was able to save Search Folders since Windows 95, unfortunately many people never used them because Microsoft didn't tell all the Windows fanatics that they had invented the wheel with this simple feature.
If you will also notice the 'search' folder concept in a more 'evolved' version was first introduced in Microsoft Outlook, which was in development for a more than a couple of years before Apple started on Spotlight. So again, who is photocopying whose technology?
And Windows XP can do this?
The point, I reiterate, is that the functionality is built into the system; no third party software needed
Actually Microsoft considered licensing this form of CD burning, as they licensed the engine from Adaptec anyway, and Microsoft licensed the Roxio engine as a courtesy, as Microsoft actually had in house code for CD burning
Microsoft however was under the microscope of product bundling, and by providing this full functionality into WindowsXP was considered by managers to be a red flag to the DOJ and everyone out to lynch Microsoft for bundling more products into the OS.
When Apple does product bundling and screws the companies that made a competing product everyone thinks Apple is wonderful, and yet when Microsoft even goes to the extent to license the components they want to integrate (even though they could develop the software themselves) they are flamed as bundling too many features into the OS.
It is really sad, as Windows users would like their OS to be as full featured as possible, but with the 'government protecting us from ourselves', Microsoft will no longer be able to just add innovation without approval from the US govt and EU.
Apple's small market share is the only reason they are able to get away with this.
I shall give you "a freaking break", when you stop ranting and begin discussing.
I actually apologize, as my comments were not intended to be directed at you solely, and more of a directed post in regard to many of the statements and reactions of many of the zealots that have no idea what they are talking about.
You know your Mac OSX facts far better than most people; however, I still attest that your understanding of the features that have been available or are available in other OSes for many years are old hat, even though they are cool and new for Mac users.
Just look at OSX - Windows NT, or Unix users could have made
I certainly understand what meta-data is and I use it all the time. When I first read your post I was quite inspired by the possibilities. A lot of my mobile computing is location based. The Mac locations help, but don't go far enough.
However, I'm reminded how hard it is to get rid of meta-data. People tend to just copy documents and then edit them. That's fine if everyone's word processor is very smart, but the reality is they're not.
I've got many documents on my network that all have the same title in the meta-data. Most people don't ever update document meta-data. Eventually that will change (I hope). Another example is how people start "new" threads in email by simply repying and changing the subject never realizing the "References" aren't erased.
My other concern is privacy. Imagine some whistleblower writes a document exposing the government for some terrible offense only to be arrested at the location they wrote the document.
I have no doubt there are lots of smart people thinking about these things. I'm hopeful that as Apple takes meta-data to the next level they'll do it in a consumer friendly way.
Doug Alcorn
How is adding the ability to order something from a program "being marketed to"? It can be, if the program is saying "hey - you're low on ink - order here!!!".
But what I am saying is that while iPhoto lets you order prints, it's never pushy about it - you have to activate that portion of the software, it never asks you if you want to. That is the difference between being marketed to and simply adding convienince to the product. And because iPhoto could have worked that way but they chose not to, the whole printer-ink thing will probably be about the same in not really making you use it (or go around it).
It all depends on how they implment the feature, but they have been responsible in the past so it's not to unreasonable to predict the same going forward.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Those are some really cool ideas, especially the "drag one thing over another to associate and annotate". I can't wait!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I don't even remember anything about .Mac in setting up Mail. I could be wrong, when does that occur?
I'll try setting up a new user and see what Mail does.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Almost every Mac user I know (especially the less technical ones) apply the Software Updates to OS X quite regularly (ie. when they pop-up).
However, I actually know far more people skeptical and very hesitant to apply their Windows updates because of fear of it ruining their system. Heck, entire corporations banned SP2 until the last minute. Now MS is actually saying that SP2 needs to be applied. I just had a big meeting on the upgrade to SP2.
So, while I admit their are Mac users that do not apply updates (stupid them), I see it to be far more common (percetage wise) with the Windows users to not apply patches. In each case, the user is at fault... but I wouldn't go using that metric as a comparison of "typical" users, if I were you.
Yeah, and the best thing is it will be bundled with Duke Nukem Forever.
Go hug some trees.
Would very much like to know how. I've got a Thinkpad X40 with a CD-RW/DVD drive running Windows XP SP1 in it and when I put the CD in I get no options to burn, dragging files onto it don't work, things like that.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Wasn't making it up, I can't get it to act like I thought it woudl on my machine. I can't right click on an ISO and say 'burn to disk' and I can't create an image and burn it by dragging files to my CD-R/RW drive running said XP SP1.
Nice to see I get moderated as a Troll when I really have an issue with being unable to burn CDs at work without software from another vendor running the 'released' operating system. I'm not on SP2 because my company won't let me be not sure if that changed it.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Puzzling, though not unheard of - I've seen a few machines here and there where XP just doesn't recognize the drive as a writer.
... though really, I can't think of anyone who doesn't use this functionality.
You could look at this site under "8. problems".
official MS article describing the capability
Aagh! ADC! This is probably the third time I've looked through the registration form just to see the "I also confirm that I am 18 years or older." disclaimer at the bottom. My parents use Windows, so I don't really think I can convince them to sign up. Why do they have that requirement? COPPA only requires you to be 13...
What I was going to request is that away messages shouldn't require a third-party hack to set an auto-response. And iCAR doesn't even set the "Auto-response from" flag, presumably because it isn't able to, as an extension to iChat.
We don't accept input from minors because minors are not legally able to enter into binding agreements.
And auto-response is not on the list of features we're planning to add to iChat. iChat is a presence program. It's not supposed to be running if you're not sitting in front of the computer.
An easy half step is using 'keywords' in iPhoto. When you show the keyword box a set of descriptors (like the cull search in Garageband) will be listed on the left. I set keywords for things like "cats" or "landscapes" or "family" and first and last names and whatnot. Then, for example, when you do an import you select all the thumbnails that show landscapes and put a mark in the keyword box for landscapes. Anyhow, if you know about all this then you can see how cool building up keywords can be. You can build smart-albums for things like keywords "sky, landscape" or "family, vacation, beach, David, Rolfe" etc. Anyway -- the point I'm going for, is all this metadata can be entered in less than a minute with no typing once you have a set of expressive keywords defined. I like captions and comments as much as the next guy, but that is a lot of typing :-D
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Have you considered getting your PC fixed ?
Duh, we're talking about iPhoto. Of course, iPhoto is out and it is trivial to add rich explicit metadata with a couple clicks using the keywords panel.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Just to add to this, to show how it's possible now, even without a GPS unit, your computer can already differentiate where it is by which networks it's on. Your computer could use your subnet, or 802.11 SSSID, or info from the DHCP server to tell where you are, work, home, or Starbucks.
Hasn't this been around forever?...most recently the f7 key on my TiBook
Automatic Projector Mirroring
Automatically mirror your presentations on both your Mac and an external projector.
Classic runs my old Mac Infocom games, with no problems.
(Though I prefer running them with a modern zip environment. The old programs insist on a 512x342 window, which is tiny on my 1600x1024 screen.)
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
That setting isn't part of the PPP negotiation and therefore cannot be dictated by the server. It's set on the client. Windows has a simple box in the client configuration that says "Use default gateway on remote network" that one can check or uncheck. MacOS X does not. It always does wrong thing (it routes EVERYTHING through the VPN tunnel). So, your boss gets to see everything you browse, all of your webmail, etc.
why? It isn't reproducing.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I am not a geek, but a supervisor of geeks. I buy what they recommend. I skim Slashdot now and again to see how you - the expert computer community thinks. More and more, they (you) recommend Apple
You post just lost all creadability with that statement. Sorry.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
* Channel 9 Wiki
* MSDN
CheersNo, but I used to work for Microsoft.
This is the one that's on my top 3 list:
Access Control Lists (ACL)
Go beyond the limitations of traditional UNIX file permissions and enjoy greater flexibility over assigning access permissions to files, folders and network services.
My wife and I share the same computer at home, and thank God for "Fast User switching" - especially because she's a Japanese native and I'm from the US. One click and a password entry and she's got her own desktop with menus in Kanji.
But the downside of sharing the same computer is trying to share the same files. Apple puts a "Shared" folder under the home directory root. Does this mean my wife and I can easily work on the same file? No. Permissions are a bitch - I fiddle and fiddle, but things always get reset and eventually gave up. I'm hoping ACLs are going to add a lot for collaboration on the same server.
Ragetech
Files taken back off of the iPod still have the full ID3 information they had when being put on.
My iBook has a 60GB drive (55 'real' GBs) and 23GB of that is music.
I know what you mean, but then if your iPod is stolen you have to go back to a digital copy or re-rip your collection again.
A new iPod is AUS$500, but spending 20-40 hours re-ripping my entire CD collection seems even more expensive to me.
I have the iBook as my primary music source, then my external hard drive as my backup, and finally my fiancee's iPod as a last resort backup. I don't understand using an iPod as the only digital copy you have.
The 10.3.9 licensing problem has been fixed now... check the snerd site. I updated both apps today and everything is happy again. These guys are really on it.
--- Shoo-be-doo-be-do-wop-say-what-yeah!
I just posted an article on my blog titled, "What's Apple still got in the cage?" I took the information you gave us here and extended it out into other some other possible uses. I'd love to hear whether anything I've put suggested is actually in the future of Spotlight.
There's some pretty exciting stuff coming in the next few years.
Unfortunately, you won't be at Apple when it comes.
Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage.
Which is why you don't have to for the system to work. Yes, the more metadata that's available, the better, but it doesn't suddenly break down (as you seem to be saying) if you're inconsistent. If you organize at all, it works better. If you don't, it still works better than it used to.
Also, invoking "Metacrap" is basically meaningless, as the entire piece is about the use of metadata on the Internet, which is a vastly different scenario than on the desktop. I don't see how any of the seven points really applies.
On the internet, the producer of the metadata and the consumer are not the same, and have very different desires. On the desktop, you are the consumer of your own metadata. You have much more incentive to do it well, and much less incentive to do it poorly (lie). If you add keywords like "v1agra pr0n britney spears" to your documents , it's nobody's problem but your own.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
This might be true if the system *only* used metadata, but it doesn't. Plain text files don't have any kind of user-added metadata at all, but you can still find them by content, or filename, or create/modify dates, etc.
If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.
This is a horrible example for some point I cannot fathom. Why on earth would you *need* to describe something that you can't read? Why would you even care if the file is effectively meaningless to you? Why would you need to describe a source file at all, when all of the useful information would be part of the content index?
Maybe you should learn more about a subject before likening it to Communism.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Why not? Information is supposed to be free, isn't it?
Seeing as you're an Apple employee I'd like to repeat a request I have regarding Voice - to - text. That is... don't forget us deaf folks. :-) Stick in a sorta generic voice recognition that we could use on the fly to get at least a phonetic translation of someone's speech and deaf people all over will flock to Apple's. (Just like the blind are gonna do with Tiger) Something where you could turn it on and off and get a little floating / scrolling transcript. Heck, make it work for movies that aren't captioned or subtitled and I'll be able to rent stuff that came out before the mid 80's! I wouldn't have had to sell my original Twilight Zone collection just because those cheap-skates couldn't be bothered to add subtitles to old TV shows.
:-) Hmmm... maybe this is already doable in Tiger or even Panther. HMMMMM...
:-D
Oh and... if you're doing the iTunes Movie Store thing... you must add subtitles to all the movies cuz... if not I'm gonna have to sue you guys under the ADA to keep us from being completely ignored as digital movie downloads become big.
Of course make it multi-lingual and sprinkle in the real-time Dashboard translation and we've got a tricorder.
P.S. Love ya for the multi-video chat... hope it can handle 4 way sign language with a decent fps. I gotta figure out how to get the govt to hand out iMacs to deaf now.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I'm looking forward to my copy of Tiger, but I'm disappointed that Mail and iCal haven't integrated features like event and project tracking, like Entourage. Oh well, I'll wait until the next upgrade.