Slashdot Mirror
Comparing Tiger and Vista Beta 1
UltimaGuy writes "This article is an excellent comparison between the features of Apple Tiger and Windows Vista Beta 1. The point it raises - 'Windows Vista Beta 1 is a much-needed demonstration that Microsoft can still churn out valuable Windows releases, after years of doubt. For Mac OS X users, however, Windows Vista Beta 1 engenders a sense of déjà vu."
...except for the Vista games-playing ability.
I'm going to hold off until GoogleOS comes out.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Not only will you get the news a day earlier on http://www.osnews.com/ but you'll also get a lot more interesting stuff that doesn't make it to /.
Well I admit it's a fairly well balanced article, it is glaringly pro-microsoft. I wonder if some company in Washington paid the author to write positive fews of the up and coming software.
The fact that you can even compare a beta version of Windows Vista to a final release of Apple's operating systems speaks volumes about their qualities. Microsoft truly trumps the hacker shop that is Apple.
Is Vista going to be a pure 64-bit OS?
The owls are not what they seem
The problem isn't whether or not Apple's operating system beats Windows at features A, B, and C. The problem is that Macintosh has never been accepted on corporate desktops, and that's where Microsoft's next version of Windows will be unstoppable. Outside of certain very specific industries, MacOS has never had a presence in the office setting.
The home computer market is the same story. MacOS has its fans and that gives it something like 10% of the home market, but Windows (in any incarnation) has always been more popular. It's never been simply about "OS xyz has feature abc while the competition doesn't". It's always been about getting the operating systems preinstalled on hardware. Now MacOS will be delivered on x86, and that ought to be interesting. But if customers can only buy MacOS from one vendor, that means that they won't have very much choice in hardware selection.
In the grand scheme of things, though, Apple is the largest single hardware vendor, and that's where they excel. Their software is excellent, but it's always been the hardware that keeps them financially viable.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
What do I care how many users are out there with some kind of desktop search. A million, a hundred million or just two. I don't care. I don't care if you use it or how you use it.
The only thing that matters with regard to desktop search is if I can use it and if it finds my stuff.
To summarize: It's a feature comparison, not performance.
A B A C A B B
Like this is the first time MS has "borrowed" from Apple.
Anyone remember the claims against Windows 3.1?
I found no graph! No simplified rating system! Just text! Am I supposed to RTFA in order to complain about it? Is this really slashdot?
id like to read the article but its already slashdotted (congrats)
The article loaded fine for me (11:10 Eastern), but just in case here is a Coral Cache mirror link.
The president has been kidnapped by ninjas!
Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?
It would appear that after looking at Tiger, Paul's faith in Microsoft has been shaken and these-days he is more critical of what they do and how they implement things.
Hopefully Slashdot will post part 2 as it does make interesting reading.
On a side note: Apple is now offering a Mac Mini testdrive via its online store, allowing prospective customers to purchase a mini and then return it for a full refund within thirty days if they don't like it.
Good news is that they're not charging a restocking fee. Bad news is that you'll have to pay for the shipping if you send it back, the offer only applies to stock minis (not custom jobs) and it's not available outside of the USA.
Can't get everything I suppose. However still might be worth a look, especially since it gives people the opportunity of a risk free (in terms of your credit card) chance to try a completely different operating system.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I've been hearing this for years: "My Mac was able to do [blank] years before Windows did it, and it still does it better than windows for a mere $1,000 more than your silly little white box."
Mac does do it better, IMHO, just not cheaper.
Putting the whole MS-copied-this-from-Apple! cries, isn't this like comparing apples and oranges? (pun not intended) Maybe when Mactels come out, we can do a better analysis.
...an excellent comparison between the features of Apple Tiger and Windows Vista Beta 1...
Yes, I think it's perfectly fair to make a comparison of features, since if Vista is truly Beta, then new features shouldn't be added.
Explain why you disagree?
Why are we comparing a Beta 1 to a shipping product? We all know Microsoft still has stuff to shelve before they ship.
"They never would have been announced during 2004 had Microsoft not first revealed that it was making the feature a standard feature of the next Windows."
Riiight. Because we all know that Spotlight was bolted onto Tiger in response to Longhorn. Don't these things take months (maybe years) to create and fine-tune?
"In short, though there are some bizarre inconsistencies in the Tiger UI, it is far more elegant looking than Aero in Windows Vista Beta 1."
What inconsistencies? He doesn't list them in the previous paragraphs, he simply concludes "Hey, Tiger's a little messed up, but it's still better!"
"Tiger does however have a hard-to-find "Spotlight Comments" section the Get Info box for any document in which you can add keywords or phrases as desired."
It's not that hidden, it's right at the top of the Get Info window; and it's not just for documents, it's for *any* file or folder.
I give up.
I look foward to dual-booting both OS's off the same intel/amd system for the Best of Both Worlds.
If the gaming on OSX ever gets up to par with the windows systems, then it would be my OS of choice. It's no where near as fast as the Windows system is for this. And that's assuming the game you want to play is even ported to OSX.
Though the drawback to this is of course siding with Steve Jobs. *cries*
Because it's a known fact that Beta 2 is when a vast amount of features will be put out for Windows Vista. Thats why.
Really? I thought XP was fairly useful, if only an incremental upgrade to 2k.
Meanwhile, Vista is panning out to be nothing but XP with alpha transparency and a lot more DRM. As a network admin, I see no reason at all to upgrade. As a gamer, I see no reason at all to upgrade; Avalon/WGF are being ported to XP. As a user, there's incentive not to upgrade, because it costs more, it's more of a hassle, and it doesn't allow me to do anything I can't do on XP, already.
Yes, it's a feature comparison, as sibling said.
That is, the beta is advantaged:)
The comparison is between things some people already enjoy and things some others might enjoy in the future.
If they ever finish the beta.
gtkaml.org
then just what is it that we're beta-testing in beta1, if not the actual product? If new features are going to be added, shouldn't this instead be alpha-stage? And can you provide evidence that this "known fact" is true, or is it just a random retort pulled from no-where?
Well, completely offtopic, but i kept staring at this red ad for about two minutes without knowing why, until i came to realize that there's a syntax error in the code. damn clever.
Yeah, but this is a pro-Microsoft site doing the comparison, so I'm sure they'll figure out a way to balance it out.
This space intentionally left blank.
"For Mac OS X users, however, Windows Vista Beta 1 engenders a sense of déjà vu."
Yeah, us WinXP users are getting some of that déjà... ooooh look, shiny!
Spotlight is really slow on my G4 Powerbook (1GB RAM), it can take 8 seconds to find what I am looking for. I don't see why it should take so long if everything is pre-indexed.
Dashboard isn't terribly useful either, its a nice gimmick, but I find myself using it very infrequently. The selection of Widgets is symptomatic of this, I mean, who really needs a countdown timer to the next episode of Battlestar Galactica just one keypress away at any moment?
Both Spotlight and Dashboard have gained reputations for slowing overall machine performance too.
I have yet to find a use for Automator, and from what I can see from the rather uninspiring selection of Automator Actions people have created, neither has anyone else. Its a nice idea, but in practice not a very useful one.
But the only comparissons I could find were between Tiger and Vista. Where were the comparissons of Vista functionality to promises made at PDC 03?
is it fair to compare Tiger to a Beta?? 'ha! our completed OS OWNS your beta OS. unf unf in your face'
Well, I'd say it is not really fair. What needs to be said is "our current OS is still better even then your new OS that won't even be out for another year or two. " By the time Vista is released Apple's current offering will probably be another few years ahead of it and While Windows users are drooling over the "new" features, OS X users will be running a system comparable to what MS will release a few years after that.
After reading about Vista, and then about what features are actually going to be into it I was pretty annoyed to discover most of the core features are either weak copies of OS X features or ways to lock-in the user even more. They are adding in DRM galore, trying to kill openGL and move everyone to their proprietary DirectX, trying to kill PDF and move everyone to their proprietary alternative, etc., etc. Too bad most purchasers are so uninformed. I wonder if they will be able to buy the EU to avoid getting beaten for all this continued monopoly abuse and move to closed, proprietary formats that contradict EU purchasing policies and further illegally extend MS's monopoly.
The Dice ad? It is a two part ad... there is both an opening and closing brace, if you see both parts of the ad.
Paul missed the fact that Tiger supports 256 x 256 icons as an extension to the existing icon data format.
Icon Services in Tiger has been extended to support icons that are 256 x 256 pixel in size. To support these larger icons, a new icon type selector has been added for you to use in calls to SetIconFamilyData and GetIconFamilyData. The selector is kIconServices256PixelDataARGB and is defined in IconStorage.h.
With SetIconFamilyData, a non-premultiplied 256x256 ARGB bitmap should be provided as input and IconServices will compress it before storing it in the ICNS container.
With GetIconFamilyData an uncompressed raw 256x256 ARGB bitmap is returned. The only difference is that the returned image contains the alpha channel where for the previously supported icon sizes there are 2 separate selectors: one for the mask and one for the data.
(reference , look at the bottom)
I cant really see the value here. New clothes and some fixes. Its really just XP with a new interface. I cant see any new tech that would get people to jump out of joy. Desktop search is based on flawed thinking. If you dont take the time to remember and care about where you put your files do you really think you will take the time to index them? Its also avaliable today on XP from various companies so its not like its a new shiny feature.
I feal like this article is just a dun of the mill hype fest to get some excitement going for a new Microsoft OS. The problem is its just Windows XP Second Edition.
HTTP/1.1 400
Am I the only one who thinks Vista looks damn ugly... like the designers spent the afternoon in Fisher Price for inspiration?
From TFA: I think it's important to compare Windows Vista Beta 1 to both Mac OS X Tiger and the promises that Microsoft made at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2003
or Leopard to Vista.
Comparing Tiger to a beta OS is hardly fair. And even so, Tiger comes out on top.
(well, actually skeptical minds)
Just what does Windows Vista do, Out Of the Box??
I mean, as it comes, without having to PURCHASE additional software such as MS Office, Word, etc..
As distributed, what can you do with it?
Word processing?
Financial stuff?
Photo & image manipulation (Paint prog?)
Spreadsheets?
Desktop publishing?
Multimedia editing / DVD authoring & burning?
Webpage authoring / editing?
I'm curious. Can Vista do any of these things as it comes or do you have to dish out more cash separately for each desired application, on top of the price to purchase the OS??
Quite arguably. Say I'm looking for "Programming in C", which may or may not actually be named that on my disc (although I know it'll have program-something in its name).
Tiger:
Pro... Final cut pro shows up...gr
Vista:
You have two options:
Pro + enter
too many results, try again
Program + enter
program files.... look down the list.. there it is!
or
Programming + enter
hmmm... I don't see it... try
Program + enter
oh! the name was mispelled in the filename and was actually "programing" of course
And at this point I've made how many searches to equal the instant feedback of Tiger? Instant feedback is the whole point of having desktop search! Otherwise it's only a slight improvement over what they've had for ages.
How does Thurrot get off comparing Microsoft's unreleased OS to Apple's released update - which has been in user's hands for while now? He should be comparing Vista beta to the next release of OS X, not Tiger.
And this crap about the feature only being valid when exposed to a wide audience? So the OS don't work if Microsoft doesn't sell 200 million copies? WTF?
Google Talk comes out with Beta 1 and gets nothing but praise enough though it has 1/10th the functionality of other IM offerings.. but hey, it's *******OPEN******* (sort of). MS comes out with Beta 1 of Vista and IE7 and gets nothing but bitch slaps for more than anything, because it's MS. Forget cool features like anti-phishing in IE7. Lets step back here and look at Tiger Beta 1... it crashed only a daily basis and had very limited new functionality. It was nothing like the final release. Yet here we're comparing Tiger release to Vista Beta 1.... Anyways, like Apple, I'm sure MS has quite a few tricks up their sleaves which we haven't seen in Vista B1.
The folder browsing view where folders appear in a new pane on the right every time a new folder is selected, one after another. What's that called? Can I reproduce the same effect in linux?
Too, I'd like to remind you that Windows Vista is only in Beta 1. Lots of things are going to change, and many, many features will be added by Beta 2 and beyond. This stands in sharp contrast to Apple's approach with Tiger. If you go back and look at the WWDC 2004 keynote video, you'll see Steve Jobs demo virtually every single major new feature in Tiger. A year later, when the product actually shipped, little had changed and nothing major was added. This isn't how Microsoft works. Beta 1 is a minor subset of the overall functionality we're going to see in the final Windows Vista product.
So what he's saying here is that Apple figured out what features they wanted, then took years to refine them.
Vs. Microsoft, which has a beta out now but will cram a lot of stuff in over the next several months and let users test it in early releases.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What a shock, upgrading a cheap POS computer is more difficult than an expensive one. Windows is not an inherently difficult platform for which to install hardware, especially not a CD burner. It would have taken me about 10 minutes-- pop off front bezel plate, screw on drive rails, hook up ATA cable and slide in. Done.
that Tiger already has all the neat functions. And Vista is still only a beta.
Unfortunate Comparison
I'm sort of amazed that every mention of Vista or Mac OS in the press focuses entirely on GUI widgets and desktop search (the feature of the month, apparently)- and in comparing these two things between Windows and Mac OS X.
Frankly, I am a fan of both of these OSes (and others), but comparing the two in this way is silly, because their target audiences and development focuses are wildly different.
Sure Vista is going to include some updated UI elements, and this will inevitably generate comparisons with Mac OS, but I believe that for the Windows folks updating the UI is a tiny frilly prize at the end of a much more substantial journey. (I think) Most of the work going into Vista is not related to wow-ing an individual user with the splashy out of box experience (though there will be some of this). Instead, most of the work going on is targeted at corporate IT installations of tens of thousands of machines and the associated management costs. Things like new deployment options, services hardening, re-engineering to provide functionality while reducing attack surface, expanding on multiple layers of management frameworks, expanding on policy enforcement, network access protection, using AES for more and more crypto functions, etc, etc, etc... In some cases Vista will represent a radical advance in the plumbing of the Windows platform.
I guess it is understandable that a reviewer wouldn't be interested in these more important things, focusing entirely on UI widgets, but it is unfortunate that a project as substantial as Vista, one which will likely affect all of us, is only represented in the press with the thought "Now includes desktop search! Sort of like Mac OS!"
What I don't understand is how putting a CD burner in is such a big deal. Hook up two cables (maybe enslave the evil drive). Install your burning software of choice or use windows' (bleh) software. And it works. I've been doing it for years, and never took more than a half hour. Unless I neglected to enslave said drive. Oh well, I guess some computers just plain suck sometime.
Use a little common sense once in a while. --Book of Mooch Ch. 5 verse 14
Steaming heap of hot buttered groat clusters...My MYYYyyyyyyy...
Um... is there a "-1, Vaguely Unsettling" mod?
No? Well, just asking.
The people who need 64 bit are already using 64-bit. They're doing it because they have to, because they're getting an advantage from the larger words and address spaces to counter the performance hit of throwing up to twice as much data around to do anything.
Alpha and AMD64 are not counterexamples. Alpha got its performance boost from a better overall architecture. AMD64 boxes are not getting a performance win from the 64-bitness of the code, but more from the larger register file. You don't need "pure 64-bit" to get this.
Please tell me which CD_Burner you had problems installing in a Windows box so I know to avoid it. I'm usually looking at power down, throw drive in, plg in cables, turn computer on, and burn. Ten minutes, *IF* that under any Windows platform.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think it's in the article. Mention is made about the next stage of beta being the stage at which new features are added in.
un burrito me trampeó.
Ok,
I'm neither impressed by this Vista or Tiger thing.
MS takes how many years to produce a windowing system that has animated icons?
Or N number of years to come up with a manner of searching your files that quite frankly doesn't sound any better to me than what already exists.
I mean quite honestly, how many grandmothers are going to build what is essentially an SQL where clause to find their great-grandbabies photos.
If those grannys are like my mother they will be lucky to remember where the friggin power switch is from day-to-day.
The author states:
> For Windows enthusiasts, Windows Vista Beta 1 is a much-needed demonstration that Microsoft can still churn out valuable Windows releases
I guess he is right assuming your expectations are incredibly low.
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
Rosyna: "The author is a 'known' MS Shill."
:-)
rwven: "I'm not saying you're wrong, about this, but if you have some evidence i'd sure like to see it..."
I don't know if Paul Thurrott is a paid shill, but he's definitely the ultimate Microsoft fanatic. Read his past stuff. He's always raving about how new and radical and excellent and wonderful Microsoft's stuff is, even if it hasn't been released yet, was horribly buggy, came three years after everyone else did the same thing, etc., etc. Basically, he acts like a propaganda outlet for Microsoft.
He might do all that for free. Some people are just fanboys. Hell, look at Slashdot. "Suddenly, a bunch of Linux nerds cried out in horror, and were silenced."
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Nothing about Exposé? This single feature is pretty darn useful. Does Vista feature a similar solution to windows clutter?
If I wanted a video game system, I'd buy one. My computer is for getting work done on.
Yes, I think it is fair.
Look at it this way, when Vista 1.0 is released OSX 10.6 or 7 will be released and certainly will have various enhancements. So by saying that each will be consistently improving by adding features etc., Vista Beta 1 is Microsoft's best answer to Tiger, just as Vista 1.0 will be Microsoft's best answer to 10.6 or 7
I brought a Mac Mini for my old mum, and was so impressed with it I am currently changing my desktop to OSX. And I've been a windows user for about ten years.
The software you get with a Mac Mini is worth the price alone - I love that everything works together so nicely. As a desktop environment it's much nicer that Windows XP.
seriously, the parent should be modded troll.... anybody who takes 3 hours to install a cdrw has bigger problems to take care of.
but... anybody who buys an 'eMachines' is also slightly off
From TFA:
We like the search being instantaneous. That's why we have slocate. We don't want to wait 2 minutes to get our search results we want them NOW. That's why spotlight (or slocate) is better. Is it really that big a deal that search results pop up instantaneously? Also, from looking at the pictures in TFA, it looks like Spotlight also has metadata and such.
Stacks are fine and all, but most (smart) people just organise them in the first place with directories and such.
As for the icon previews, KDE has had this for a while (maybe GNOME too?) Nothing new here.
I challenge the author of this review to please review parts of either OS that make a difference to anyone.
...
Who chooses an OS based on the look of the finder? Both meet minimum user needs, so who CARES.
How about a review of something that MAKES A DIFFERENCE like the security implementation, features like "Desktop Widgets" or Scripting tools like "Automator"
Since I don't have access to Vista I don't know if there are equivalents to these or not and unfortunately, the reviewer didn't think to tell me anythong other than he like's the stacking feature of Vista's file folder view - BFD!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Vista doesnt seem like an upgrade of anything, 95 was straight fire when it came out. 2000 changed a few things but not much. I'm done with M$. Linux Rocks!
The insinuation that Spotlight was a panicky reaction to MS's announcement of search features in "Vista" is about as "balanced" as the average Fox News on-air editorial "newscast."
This one is somewhere between a genuine paid shill and astroturf.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Vista, to the end user, will probably look a lot like Windows XP with a bit of a UI refresh, but there's a whole lot going on under the scenes that only developers will appreciate.
.NET Framework (which will finally come with the OS so you can depend on it being there, assuming you're targetting Vista) replaces just about everything else.
Win32 has been how you write Windows software since Windows 95 (and that was based on Win16) - from the very first version of Windows to today, you're creating HWNDs and sending messages to them, and calling CreateFile when you want a file and so on.
But now Vista is delivering on a whole lot of strategies at the same time.
Avalon / Xaml replaces how you create user interfaces.
Indigo replaces how you do communications.
WinFS (which will probably get rolled into Vista at some point, now that it's gone from vaporware to betaware) replaces a lot of how you manage your data.
The rest of the
It probably won't be for another 5 years or so, when developers can start thinking about depending on this stuff, that things will really change, but for Windows developers, it is a pretty big change.
The Mac of course has made these kinds of "forget everything you know and start over with this new technology" changes many times. It's the courage to do this that has kept the Mac alive, and I think shows that Microsoft is on the right track.
The really annoying thing is that both companies are radically changing how you develop software for their platforms, and they're completely different.
As a developer, will I ever get to use Avalon in a real app? I'd guess not. Making a portability abstraction for Avalon and Xaml is a lot different than wrapping a button or a listbox with a generic API. Every platform has buttons and listboxes; no other platform has a Xaml equivalent yet (XUL is a bit of Xaml but they're not really directly comparable).
Availability.
Tiger released? Yes
Vista released? No
and we only get to see the beta version? gimme a break!!!!
You have to remember that MS has redifined "beta". Beta used to mean feature-complete, time to squash bugs, work on performance. Now it means late-alpha that you want to get out there to prove you actually have something -even if it bears no resemblence to what will actually ship (if it ever ships).
IMO, since the days of the Win9, MS has used public betas as a way to ship their product without actually having to take any responsibility for it.
...infinity + 1 icon sizes! Take that you Mac shill!
Well I admit it's a fairly well balanced article, it is glaringly pro-microsoft.
.asp suffix...
What gave it away? The fact the site is named "Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows"?
I actually had my questions about the unbiasedness of the site while I waited for the page to load and noticed the
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Here's a hint: when you write an article comparing operating systems, don't compare useless shit like FILE SEARCHING.
It's boring and provides no insight to the OS itself. Really now, how often do you use windows file search to locate something?
Why do people act like this is an essential thing to have? I know the old windows file searching is slow, but if you're releasing a new OS, focus on something more useful and relevant, like system stability, or these mysterious "new features" that Microsoft is claiming to have made.
So far the only new "feature" is the skin, which really doesn't look all that great... oh, and the improved file searching (big whoop).
What I want to know is: what's so good about Vista? Why does Microsoft claim that Vista is the next big thing on par with going from 3.1 to 95?
Oh, DRM so media companies can insure that others don't pirate their stuff? That affects me HOW, exactly?
So far I've heard a lot of talk, but nothing to back it up with.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Microsoft copies the idea and bungles it in its own uniquely retarded way.
...Microsoft can still churn out vulnerable Windows releases...
Yep, that seems to be the trend.
Did anyone else mis-read the article summary at first glance, like I did?
I've become so used to seeing that lately anyway...
Isnt it ridiculous to compare Vista BETA 1 with Tiger.
XP was horrible at beta 1.
Promoting this kind of article is pathetic.
From the article:
>In Tiger, there is no easy or obvious way to edit meta data
>for the documents and other data files you create.
I guess, this would be relatively easy to add in OS X. There are
command line utililties like "mdls" to list metadata but I'm also
not aware of tools to add or modify metadata. A little bit more
transparency would be nice here (also for example how to backup
metadata).
Remark beside: I wonder, how metadata will work in Vista when mounting
other file systems. This is a sore spot in Tiger:
NFS mounted linux or solaris drives seem not yet to be searchable with spotlight
(at least I did not manage to do so yet).
Wonderful anecdotes telling us how inept you are at installing hardware on a Windows box (installing a burner ain't that hard)...sounds like you should stick to the closed architecture of Apple to keep coming up with these cliched fanboi anecdotes.
Unix systems have had the locate tool for decades now(+ filters) and if you're going to argue about having graphical searchtool with meta search, BeOS had that ability over a decade ago(well before apple that is)
Apple has had support for extended meta data for years. It's not stored in any SQL database, but you can create arbitrary attribute value pairs for any file. Right now, you can do this from the command line.
I think that Apple has chosen, wisely, NOT to do anything with this. They have a really great R&D lab there, there must be a reason that they've never exposed this functionality for an end user. I bet it's just too complex for a user. Who wants to tag the files we create? So you only get the benefit if YOU ACTIVELY do it. What if you just dont understand it?
I understand the power of having fully user editable meta data, but there are just some times when you dont want an end user messing with things like that.
I think that's why apple lets you tag files with a label. It's just simpler, and users can understand it.
He's saying its important to compare Vista and OS X, and Vista and the promises Microsoft made. As in, is Vista living up to what Microsoft said it would do? The statement doesn't mean he's comparing "vista+promises" to OSX
But is that really a bad thing?
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
after all, it's offering to manage my digital rights. If it wasn't for Microsoft and the powers that be, i might do something naughty! It'll be good when it's all integrated: "Windows has detected a CDR in your computer. Do you want windows to send a Cease and Desist?"
Tiger runs on a 266 MHz G3 iMac with 128 Mb RAM (the bare minimum though, not very recommendable). What about Vista?
I thought the whole point of calling something BETA was that this is what you'll release once the major bugs are fixed. In this case, they're treating it like a "feature beta," which from a security standpoint is a nightmare. What ever happened to "test what you fly and fly what you test"?
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Too, I'd like to remind you that Windows Vista is only in Beta 1. Lots of things are going to change, and many, many features will be added by Beta 2 and beyond. This stands in sharp contrast to Apple's approach with Tiger. If you go back and look at the WWDC 2004 keynote video, you'll see Steve Jobs demo virtually every single major new feature in Tiger. A year later, when the product actually shipped, little had changed and nothing major was added. This isn't how Microsoft works. Beta 1 is a minor subset of the overall functionality we're going to see in the final Windows Vista product. That would seem to go inline with Microsoft's philosophy to date: Let's cram every last useless thing we have, do no real testing for stability and testing, and we can just fix it later with a patch. Yeah, I can see how that's better than actually showing the consumer what they're going to get, then making those features as stable as you possibly can in your operating system environment. As it's been said, time and time again, Microsoft has basically conditioned consumers, including those in the IT field, to expect the worst from their machines. These incremental improvements appease those wanting a bit more, but do little to warrant the hype being spewed about by the easily-satisfied among us.
Windows: nothing included, one time cost.
Mac: some included, pay for every upgrade.
Ubuntu: everything included, no need to pay.
Now, what were those choices again?
Regarding search using metadata, I find it difficult to imagine that any significant amount of Windows users will begin to tag their files with metadata at all let alone accurately. People in my office place do not even take the time to name their files (allowing Word to name the file some combination of words and punction that it find representative of the document contents) - I assume I am not alone in finding this tendency amongst one's co-workers. If people cannot be bothered to name their files, I do not see what would motivate them to accurately tag their files with metadata.
From TFA:
Vista Beta 1 also offers other nice organization touches, like Stacks (Figure), which visually group documents by specific criteria (such as by author or size) and Lists, which let users create collections of otherwise unrelated documents and data files manually. Even in this early Beta 1 release, Windows Vista far outstrips the data file visualization and organizational features in Mac OS X Tiger.
Oh wait. Isn't that the exactly same thing as smart folders?
Smart Folders
Take the results of a Spotlight search and save it as a Smart Folder that automatically updates as you add or remove documents from your Mac.
Does that include booting the machine? I just ran Spotlight on my iBook (G3, 500 MHz) and found something within 5 seconds. Please note again that this is with my very old laptop, which has 640MB of RAM.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
from the article : 'Features like instant desktop search are great for any operating system, but they only truly "matter" when the mainstream market is using them' Why? it should be personal between you and your desktop!
Mac toys and accessories blog
It's a decent article but the site is obviously someone's love child for Microsoft. Sorry, but the site has an obvious biased playing up much of Windows positives but I don't see much claiming problems with the software.
As others have saide most of Windows Vista has been ripped from other software, (most noticably the interface from OSX's beauty) but claims that OSX is more advanced because it's had more revisions. He doesn't seem to realize that they've had this since XP, they deserve to be ahead of the game with Microsoft dragging it's feet here and deciding to rewrite most of the code in 2002.
And of course he skips meantioning those "features" that you'll have to accept for the stuff he does meantion (namely the big one? DRM, true he can't test it but it'll be enforced, not exactly my idea of a fair trade off)
This article is an excellent comparison between the features of Apple Tiger and Windows Vista Beta 1
Since when are a Beta 1 and a Final releases comparable?
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within." - Albert Einstein
How is this insight? Lack of sight is more accurate. I am not Microsoft Fanboi, but let's not re-write history with our emotion. Vista had many of OSX's features planned and communicated before OSX had them. Search is the big one of course. Stardock has prior art on Windows animations so OSX ripped that off too! Microsoft is following suit as well though.
Looks like the author of the article couldn't supress his inner shill.
His biggest complaint about OS X is not that it doesn't have smart folders, but that it is purportedly hard to find how to use them?
Based on this he concludes:
"Even in this early Beta 1 release, Windows Vista far outstrips the data file visualization and organizational features in Mac OS X Tiger. It will be interesting to see what Apple comes up with for Leopard, the next OS X release."
Yeah, I can't wait until Leopard when apple implements special folders that collect files based on certain criteria... oh wait. The author is just being lazy, here.
His other points such as adding meta data plugins are also way off base, as you can do the same thing in os x.
His other examples about how vista has more user editable meta data all assume that those features will be successful, which is just speculation at this point.
I personally will not edit many files to add meta data such as ratings. I would rather have spotlight intelligently search that file automatically in order to get a good search result.
I have never used Apple's meta data field in the get info window -- I don't expect it would be different for vista.
Your comment and the other replies to it are all correct, but there is one distinction to think about.
Now whether this is Microsoft's intentions I'm not sure, but the core OS likely won't have any more functionality added between now and Vista's release. The "meat" that people are waiting for in Beta 2 and subsequent releases are all applets and applications, not directly integrated components of the OS.
I could be wrong, but like you said, it doesn't make much sense that MS would call this a Beta with every intention to add critical pieces of the OS at a later date. While somewhat unrelated, it's also worth mentioning that Microsoft released Beta 1 of WinFS two days ago on the 29th to everyone's surprise, which doesn't work with the Vista beta, but installs as an add-on "component" in XP.
A B A C A B B
All Dashboard processes are suspended when you hide it. You can confirm this with a simple "top" command in Terminal. So I'm not sure how they slow overall machine performance.
I'm generally an Apple fanboy, but I echo your sentiment on Spotlight, though. I also don't get how it's not instantaneous with everything pre-indexed. Lastly, if I just want to find something by filename, the Panther way of doing it (Finder search) was actually faster... but this alternate search facility was mysteriously made unavailable in Tiger.
It has been said over and over again here on Slashdot -- Beta 1 has the basic core OS in place for developers to get familiar with the *platform*, not the general OS features or UI. It certainly is unfair to compare OSX to Beta 1 because Beta 1 literally has none of its new features built in (other than core OS). The builds leading up to Beta 2 are a *significantly* different beast than Beta 1.
As a dev I was primarily exposed to my component area, and up until a month ago I was impressed with our work, but was was worried if other teams were up to par because Beta 1 was pretty vanilla (ignoring some awesome core OS work). I can say with certainty now that Vista Beta 2 and RTM will be a significant OS release (similar to a win98 -> win2k move, more than win2k->winXP).
In reality, who cares?
I don't. Both OS's have their strong points and are suited to different users.
I like them both, along with *nix. And uselss bickering an dfinger pointing wont change my mind. I'll continue to use whichever product will do what I need it to do at that time.
Considering the promises Microsoft's made about Vista have changed as much as our reasons for going to war in Iraq, I take anything about Vista with a grain of salt. What happened to WinFS? Or Monad? While those are both "beneath the hood" features, a real shell and a better file system than NTFS would have been nice. M$ has axed both of those.
I just switched from Windows to Mac. My Mac Mini easily outperforms my Athlon XP 2800 in most tasks, and I can't seem to stop myself from playing with my computer. It's not just that it's cool looking and all that, but everything makes sense. I was a Macintosh user up until 1997--then switched to Windows. From '97 till now, the Mac OS has made impressive strides. In that same time, innovation has almost ceased in Microsoft's offering. I've played with the Vista beta (but not on the same machine as Mac OS). Vista is much better than previous offerings, but too little too late.
The guy is an M$ user, supporter and in all other ways, an M$ borg. He gives many excuses for why Apple is better than Microsoft. He says (first) that Apple copied many Microsoft technologies revealed at the 2003 developers conference. Then he also gives excuses as to why Apple's UI is better. I got sick of reading the article. He claimed that M$ was like a poor picked on little kid at the playground. I doubt that. A company with that size and power has the capability to do whatever the fuck they want. I don't buy that bullshit. Apple was smart and decided to build on top of Darwin Unix. But M$ would never be so bold (no pun intended). Just hot air from a hopelessly plugged-in M$ user.
If they ever finish the beta.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc?
I thought MS designed all the capabilities and released the 'specs' but Apple beat them to the implementation. There was the big burnMS ad compain last summer when Tiger came out. Just because Apple implemented it first doesn't mean MS copied them.
Anyone have some better evidence on the chronology of this?
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
The article is forgetting one big big thing: when Vista ships (late 2006), it will be Leopard (10.5) vs. Vista, not Tiger (10.4) vs. Vista. In other words, when Vista ships, Apple will have rev 2 of spotlight done, major revs to the Finder, and the list goes on.
It's just like MS to innovate to yesterday's bar. Wouldn't it be something if they pushed the bar instead...
G-Force music visualization
He stated that the Apple's incremental search is not as good of a design choice as Microsoft's choice to enter the string completely before the search. As an Emacs user, I must strongly disagree. The example he gave is when something starts with something common like ``the''. It's a waste of time to do that in the first place so you shouldn't be doing that anyway. And if you feel, for whatever reason, that you absolutely need to do that, the incremental search does not slow anything down. Furthermore, with an incremental search, you can stop typing as soon as you find what you want. Also, you will find out earlier when you've typed something that is wrong.
Actually, judging by the size and scope of the OS X.4.n updates I'd say they were comparing two beta OSes.
$500 mini PC (again I ask...why?)...it's not out yet...next month I guess. There is also a strong possibility that this will be the x86 Mac Mini base.
$500 Laptops...Apples start at $999 but there are several x86 laptops at or around $500. I like Apple plenty (I used to work for them), but the zealotry has got to stop.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
PDF is an open, published standard with multiple open and closed source implementations of both readers and writers. PDF sucks on Windows right now mostly because most people view PDFs with the slow and bloated Acrobat reader plug-in running with IE and neither IE nor Windows in general has good end-to-end multitasking. When most people think of PDFs they think of clicking on a link and then waiting a few minutes while their computer is unusable for the thing to load. Viewing PDFs on Linux or OS X on the other hand is fast and if your internet connection is too slow, your machine is still usable while you wait for it to download. PDF as format is just fine.
Now contrast this with what MS will likely be offering. You will have no choice of client, probably no choice of OS, it may or may not be readable on current software in a decade, and it will probably be as half-assed as all their other take over programs. It will be just good enough for most users to not bother buying or downloading an alternative. It will suck for real publishing where PDF will continue to dominate, but it will still take over on the low-end because it will be bundled with the OS and hence with pretty much every PC you buy. Basically it will be very similar to the existing Word format with better layout controls and vector graphics. It will abound in office settings since most users and managers won't realize that they are losing choice and forward compatibility. It will suck for everyone who has to deal with it that is not running Windows.
I guess if you think moving from an open standard to a closed one owned by Microsoft is a good thing, well we'll just have to agree that you're being paid a lot of money by them.
Inetesting when you compare it to the blackouts in the northeast, esp. in New York awhile back... I guess some parts of this country are just a bit more savage than others.
Nope, I was serious. I don't know why I got modded Funny. I think Google certainly has the talent and the opportunity to turn the industry on it's head with a totally from-the-ground-up OS.
/., you should definately get crackin' on GoS. I'm going to stick with WfW 3.11 until I see it.
http://os.google.com (not active yet, but some day it will be, trust you me)
Some cool features GoS will have:
- chipset emulation built in the kernel (run windows/linux/solaris software "natively")
- search capability integrated in the file system
- distributed processing support (yes, a beowulf cluster) -- have 3 GoS boxes on your home network, have two of them as slaves for offloading work
The list could go on for quite a bit. Despite the probability of me getting modded down by the Linux zealots, current O/S technology is *at least* ten years old (and probably closer to 30). There's been considerable advancement in hardware (pipelining, multi-core, GPUs), but other than p2p technology, what kind of **new** software have we seen since the first web browsers came out in, what, '94?
Ok, I'll get off my soap box, but if anyone from Google reads
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Most people have lost any love for Microsoft. They just have more of an accecptance that it is there and they need to use it. They won't upgrade until they really have to, or until they get a new computer. I think most people are waiting for the day that Microsoft releases an OS that does all the things that they promiced us for Windows 95. The reason for the growth of Linux and OS X is because when people switch to these new platforms they find that the new OS's come with so much useful stuff by default, Most Linux distributions come with most anything that a person could use. OS X interface is just so well designed and intuitive to use with a lot less annoying things then Windows, they they feel that they have seen the light on computer use, thus much of the religious furver that comes with it.
We have been promiced so much before and all the betas before made us think the next version will be different and better. But in reality it is not much of am improvement.
If Windows 98 was like Windows XP, then we might feel a little more excitement about the OS. But right now windows is a combination of too little to late.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It certainly is unfair to compare OSX to Beta 1 because Beta 1 literally has none of its new features built in...
What are the most advanced and best operating systems you can get from each vendor? Well you can get the OS X 10.4.2 or OS X for intel release or you can get WinXP Pro or the Windows Vista beta 1. I'd say comparing these to one another is certainly fair.
But we all know who wins a Windows vs. OS X comparison based upon the current releases so a lot of people are looking at what MS will be releasing and comparing it to what they can from Apple. When the Vista beta 2 and Vista Gold releases are available for comparison I'm sure they'll be compared as well. It's not like Windows is the only OS that releases software where most of the advancement is aimed at the architecture and what developers can do with it. OS X 10.4 added tons of meta data functionality, built in graphics and database functionality, etc. It does not matter. All users care about is what they can do with the OS and right now that is Vista beta 1 for some WinXP for others. Windows has fallen behind and is trying to catch up. Deal with it.
OS X 10.4 is officially supported even on a Rage 128. I've seen sites claiming they can run 10.4 on Rage Pro's, although I don't think Apple supports that.
I finally just gave up my B&W rev.1. It had 10.3 on it at the time and ran great. It would run 10.4 just fine as well. It's about 6 years old...
They:pron. Used to refer to the ones previously mentioned or implied.
Ever:adv. In any way; at all
Finish:v. tr. To bring to an end; terminate
The:def. art. Used before singular or plural nouns and noun phrases that denote particular, specified persons or things
Beta:n. An incomplete, work-in-process software release
Put it all together now and say it with me:
Does that make more sense? If there's anymore confusion, I would begin by taking the comment you replied to less seriously.
I'll do the same for your post and hope you're laughing as much as I am at the rediculous amount of time I spent replying to it.
A B A C A B B
10 minutes? You n00b. I can do it in 2min.
Why, you haven't heard of Duke Nukem?
(sorry, I forgot to close the </joke> tag, and your browser doesn't show it correctly.. for this reason only!:o)
gtkaml.org
I can't believe that I got tricked into reading another lame Paul Thurrott article. He's got a real knack for picking interesting subjects, writing weak articles, then getting them widely promoted via Slashdot, etc. It's gotten to the point where when I see his name I wish that I could reach into my web browser and take back the nickle that the banner ad view made him.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I use Dashboard for 4 important (to me) uses:
1. Instant Calculator. I don't want to add the Calculator to my dock. I can simply hit F12.
2. I hate auto-spell checkers. So I usually have them off. Thus, when I want to check the spelling of a word, I love popping open the Dictionary widget. Quick. Easy. And faster than opening up Word or enabling spell check.
3. I regularly work with a distributor in another time zone. I keep my world clock set to their time zone. For me, it's faster to press F12 than to make the appropriate GMT +/- adjustment in my head.
4. Doppler radar. I am a weather nut and a sysadmin. When severe weather is in my area, I enjoy having instant access to the local doppler radar at the press of a button. Sure beats opening up a browser/tab and hitting a bookmark.
Since using Tiger, when I'm using a machine running Panther or Windows, I'm often taken aback when I naturally press F12 and nothing happens.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
8 seconds? You're complaining about having to wait a whole 8 seconds?
...and we didn't have these "laptops" you speak of. If we wanted to use our computer outdoors, we had two choices: a personal generator or a really long extension cord...
You youngsters have it easy these days! In my day we all had to use Windows Find. After 25 minutes of "Not responding...", we were lucky to get away without a reboot.
:-) asdfasdfasdfasdf
OK, so the argument here is that one of Vista's big advantages over Tiger is that it ships with pre-made Virtual Folders. I can think of lots of reasons why Apple didn't do that.
Apple's fervently pursuing switchers, users who are new to the Mac. Try explaining the difference between folders and smart folders to someone who's not, as people often say, "good with computers." Tell them something like, "well, OK, you see, the file's there, but it's not really there. It's actually in a real folder somewhere else." You're likely to get a glazed expression from that one, and possibly an existential argument about "is anything really where it is?"
The moral: smart folders are an advanced feature. People who want them will know how to find them. People who don't understand them won't have to worry about them.
Again, from TFA:
Spotlight relies on Spotlight Importers, little bundles of code that know how to read files and return metadata about them. More often than not, the importers are written by the original application designer, who should know better than anyone what bits of data are most important in a document. Apple's implicit position is that metadata should be either derived from the document on its own, or that metadata should be provided in some manner by the creating application (which the importer can then retrieve).
Again, should people have to care what "metadata" is? There are lots of ways the programs themselves can gather all the metadata you'd care about. Standard info, such as the file's author and what-not, can easily be provided automatically by the program. That's the way it should be, because programs can automatically add relevant metadata that improves searches without the user ever having to do a thing. Plus, there's a matter of confidence. If Vista's got a great big box for me to enter metadata, should I take that to mean that there's a good chance Vista doesn't really know how to index my files? If that's the case, then forget about it. I'm not going to add metadata to every document I've ever written just so I can find it.
The moral of the story is this: having a wide arsenal of tools is great. But many users don't know how to use them, don't need them, and don't much care to learn. Vista seems to favor forcing users to learn how to use these new features. A forcing function is a good idea sometimes, but forcing users to use features that just complicate their experience is foolishness. The crux of Thurott's complaints against Tiger is that it's not complicated enough. There aren't enough exposed features. I've learned that in UI design, the more buttons you give someone to push, the better the chance is that they'll pick the wrong one, and the better the chance they'll blame you for it. And they'll be right.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
How relevant are all those new functions.
I mean the desktop computer in it's classical meaning has preety much died. Fewer and fewer people do things like text-processing with dedicated applications like Word.
The future is the web. On the web you have true applications, not just programms. Need a route planed? Go to a website. Wanna use e-mail? Use a webmail-site.
The next step to it would be "private Wikis". Essentially wikis with usage-restrictions. You'd then have that Wiki running on a server you trust, (which might be running on your local machine) and can then edit your documents easily on the web. No need to carry your computer with you, just access your server from anywhere in the world. Wanna publish a document? Just make it world readable and publish the URL, any changes will be automatically avaliable to others, and you even know how often it was accessed and such.
What is the big deal about desktop searching, anyway? Are people REALLY having so much trouble finding files on their own computer? Don't most people just save files to wherever Word wants to put them (My Documents)? Don't people know how to organize their own files so that they can find them without complex search tools? The only time I ever use search tools is to find OS and application files. And how many users do THAT?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
So basically, Microsoft are trying to undo years of software development stage terminology. Sorry, but I don't care what they call it. Much of the rest of the software development world calls this kind of release an Alpha.
Hope you don't mind my butting in b100dian, but I closed the joke tag for you:
YES ITS A FAATURE COMPARISON AS SIBLNG SADE TAHT1111!!11 OMG WTF LOL IS DA BTA IS TEH COMPARISON IS BTWEN THNGS SOME PAOPLA ALRAADY ENJOY AND THNGS SOM3 OTHERS MIGHT ENJOY IN DA FUTUR3 IF11!11!!! OMG WTF LOL THEY AVER FINISH TEH BTA1!!11!1! LOL
Translated by means of Moi using the AOL Translator
PS - Is b100dian an Armenian nick?
A B A C A B B
Reuse scripting code without having to type anything or define and mess with classes:
AUTOMATOR description for Geeks:
Automator= What would happen if I did a Java Bean type thing for application scripting? You'd get a GUI for working with code fragments/functions:
AppleScript= scripting of application public 'objects'
Automator Actions= plug-ins that are code fragments/functions that conform a little so Automator can use them.
Result- highly reusable scripting code--- why applescript multiple programs, when you can do tiny scripts per program and reuse them in automator--- no copy/paste of code and trouble maintaining changes.
If you have done applescript and the pain of getting the english like commands the right way it wants... when you figure out how to get the application to do what you want, it would be nice to reuse that---but most the time its not worth it you copy/paste maybe put it in a function. But this way its worth it, because reuse will be easy.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I didn't think it was a joke either. Google's goal isn't really to take down Yahoo! (although Yahoo! is definitely caught squarely in their sites). No, their real target is MS.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
Windows 3.1 -- "Start Me Up ... it makes a grown man cry" was the advertising slogan.
Windows Vista -- "Look Out!" seems the obvious choice.
Now see, the problem with slashdot is that it is generally dominated by trolls that are given high karma boosters. The truth is, I am about as associated with microsoft as Ghandi is associated with Hitler.
PDF as a format is fine, but as of yet I haven't seen any good PDF viewer. GSView is nice and fast, but it is crash proned, its search features really don't work that well, and it has bad rendering. Adobe Bloatware's Acrobloat Reader *works* the best, but man is it bloated and slow.
I don't really care if the format is opened or closed so long as it doesn't piss me off every time I view it.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
If comparing the Vista Beta to Tiger is unfair because it hasn't been released yet, obviously the proper comparison is Windows XP SP2 vs. Tiger, in which case Windows loses by an even wider margin. Does that make you feel better?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Would you care to justify your claim Paul? What inconsistencies are you refering to? No mention of what they are, just a typical empty swipe at the opposition. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
"They never would have been announced during 2004 had Microsoft not first revealed that it was making the feature a standard feature of the next Windows."
This is patently false; Apple hired Dominic Giampaolo, developer of BeFS (which was specifically developed to have the sort of 'fast search' that is finally showing up in mainstream operating systems), in February of 2002. The intent was clear, back in 2002, that it was Apple's intent to bring the innovations of BeFS to OS X, a year before Microsoft announced the feature.
Phrasing the chain of events as "When Microsoft announced [it] in October 2003, the race began." is ridiculous. Apple effectively announced the plan 18 months prior, and even then it was clear that it was too late to make it into 10.2, the 10.3 release was unlikely, and that therefore... it would show up in 10.4. Just like it did.
More damning, though, is that Microsoft has announced this feature a number of times, every time they've announced that a future OS (starting with NT 5, IIRC) would feature a database-driven filesystem. Why didn't anyone else jump on getting the feature first then, rather than this time? I'll tell you why: it's a hard feature that took a lot of time to work on, and every one had been working on it the whole time.
The real problem here, though, is that I bet Paul Thurrott doesn't know any of this. All he knows is, Spotlight Search was announced when 10.4 was announced, which was after Microsoft announced it. And without looking at it any closer, he decided he knew the whole story and that he could speak authoritatively on the subject. I can't be bothered to read the rest of the article if it has the same empty authoritative voice.
--Matthew
For Mac OS X users, however, Windows Vista Beta 1 engenders a sense of déjà vu.
For me, meanwhile, remembering how many times this has happened before, this article engenders a sense of meta-déjà-vu...
And next head line, "OS X has more features than DOS".
Cost Availability:
New System running Windows: $250 from Dell, hell, let's go extra conservative at $400 monitor included.
New System running Tiger: Mac Mini at $499 (2.5 inch slow hard drive, one stick of RAM, no monitor), or eMac at $799 (can't change monitor).
Availability encompasses many things.
I'm really curious to know if Apple, being the bastion of HCI and good design, is implementing anything of the sort. I'd be a little disappointed if they weren't.
Er... guess I should add that I don't expect Apple to use the exact same techniques and designs that ol' M$ is using (for example, having set folders for documents vs. movies vs. etc. ... while this is all well and good, will the system allow me to make my own or change the existing ones? What if, sometime down the line, there's a mixed format file? Where would it go? There are other issues involved as well...). However, I /do/ agree with the idea that DataVis and InfoVis are important and should be added to an OS.
What worries me is that we haven't heard anything from Cupertino about such things... and meanwhile, Microsoft has actually come up with a good idea on its own, for once. Here's hoping they actually build it properly. It would be interesting to see them set the bar for Apple for a change. (You know, that whole "Let us compete in good works" stuff.)
Ne Cede Malis.
Or did you just read about it somewhere?
I just tried it and let me tell you that you are wrong.
Running Vista on my system here it works just like the Tiger instance of your example.
Application scripting taken to the next level:
Applications become 'objects', scripted application features become GUI 'methods'.
Easily write your own GUI 'methods' for applications by writing actions= scripts.
Before this, you had to script everything yourself. Now you can reuse scripting code without typing.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You may have found something in 5 seconds, my point is that typically it takes longer, and even 5 seconds is ridiculous. If Google can search the entire internet in a few milliseconds, then why can't Spotlight search one hard disk in less than 5 seconds? I suspect you will find that the ratio of Google's processing power relative to the amount of stuff they index is much more of a challenge than that posed by a single modern computer searching a single modern hard disk.
"Windows has fallen behind and is trying to catch up. Deal with it."
Really? What exactly am I missing? I've NEVER sat at my XP machine and said, "Damn, if only I was using OSX right now!"
Frankly, OSX (any version) would be a HUGE downgrade for me since you can't play most games on it. All the other shit I need a computer for like browsing, email, DAP sync, word processing works just fine under XP.
So, I say again, what does OSX have that I actually need? Cute UI bullshit isn't a need.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
The "problem" I have is that on a dual 23" LCD monitor, my desktop is 3840x1200. If my active application is on the screen without the menubar, I have to move the mouse aaaaaaaaalllllllll the way over to the menubar, then aaaaaaaallllllllll the way back again. If I miss the bottom of the menu bar, and click the finder background by mistake, I have to repeat this. I'm moving the mouse rapidly, a long long way, and I'm not too accurate when I get there... It's my pet hate.
Now, looking at my Safari browser I have a bunch of personal-preferences that are just below the toolbar. I don't find it a problem to move the mouse 6 inches up and click. I'm not going very fast because I don't have the same distance to travel - my accuracy is much higher. Personally I find this a *lot* easier.
I don't think it would be too hard for Apple to change the configurable-toolbar to create a copy of the application menu in-place at the top of the application window. That would work best for me, but unfortunately they don't do that.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
The poster is insightful by simply pointing out that for an individual user, a desktop search feature is useful it if finds things he's looking for. The "critical mass" aspect of the ability to search for and index, say, Word documents is the mass of Word documents, not the number of people using the search technology.
Microsoft's real threat is google.
This gets said a lot, but I'm not convinced it's true, and the fact that Microsoft is paranoid about it doesn't change my skepticism -- Microsoft is paranoid about everyone. Google does not have a desktop platform, they have an advertising service.
As John Gruber put it recently, "What makes something a platform is that you can't take it away without the stuff that's built on it falling down." You can port programs from Windows, but you can't just move them onto another platform. They need Windows. What has Google produced that meets that litmus test? Changing your web site from using Google Search or Google Maps to Yahoo's equivalents is changing a few lines of code somewhere; Google Mail and Google Talk rely on the fact that moving to/from them is trivial; Google's few actual software products are for Windows.
Google makes virtually all of their money from advertising, either by driving you to their web site or by getting their ads in front of you on other web sites. They're really good at what they do, they've got a bunch of best-in-class web applications, but for the foreseeable future, they're competing with Yahoo! and other portal/search providers. They may be competing with Microsoft's MSN and Hotmail divisions, but not on the desktop.
Nope, I was serious. I don't know why I got modded Funny. I think Google certainly has the talent and the opportunity to turn the industry on it's head with a totally from-the-ground-up OS.
http://os.google.com/ (not active yet, but some day it will be, trust you me)
Maybe Google doesn't need an OS? Shifting a large number of applications to the web browser (by a plug in or whatever) would be a big enough kick in the balls to MS.
Some cool features GoS will have:
- chipset emulation built in the kernel (run windows/linux/solaris software "natively")
Chipset emulation alone wouldn't cut it. To run a foreign binary you need to either emulate the entire machine and run the OS inside it, or emulate the functionality of the kernel and various other bits and pieces.
- search capability integrated in the file system
- distributed processing support (yes, a beowulf cluster) -- have 3 GoS boxes on your home network, have two of them as slaves for offloading work
Yes, if they were to create an OS, you could be pretty certain that those features would be there.
However, I don't think they'd go to the trouble of a new OS. Unless it was heavily based on an Open Source OS, it's a hell of a lot of work, even for the engineers at Google. Making day-to-day tasks more platform-independent would probably do an awful lot more damage to MS.
PDF as a format is fine, but as of yet I haven't seen any good PDF viewer. GSView is nice and fast, but it is crash proned, its search features really don't work that well, and it has bad rendering. Adobe Bloatware's Acrobloat Reader *works* the best, but man is it bloated and slow.
I don't really care if the format is opened or closed so long as it doesn't piss me off every time I view it.
Have you tried Apple Preview? That thing is excellent, and seemingly instant. xpdf, gpdf, and particularly kpdf all work much better than Acrobat Reader does in my experience.
And it matters greatly if the format is open or closed, because if it's closed, MS has all the control over it, and they could easily prevent the format from being written in without buying specific software from them, and they can lock out users of other operating systems from properly viewing it.
The problem is, the waters have been muddied.
In my web browser, I click a hyperlink once to open it. In my file system browser, I double-click. Unless the two have been pseudo-merged, in which case, maybe I only click once.
In applications, dialog boxes clearly indicate where I can do things by using standardised widgets like buttons and check boxes. Unless they are pretend web pages, and you have to click the underlined (or not) blue text that isn't really a label, but works like a button.
Toolbars have icons in them, which you can click once to do what they do. Except, obviously, when those icons really indicate the current option from a menu of icons, such option being changed if you click the not-quite-arrow triangle thing slightly too far away from the button along the toolbar to be visually connected to it.
I agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of the grandparent post: things that work subtly differently in two different places are bad UI design. One of the things that made early Windows versions such a great success was the consistency of interfaces it brought to a world full of uniquely styled MS-DOS applications. Apple always had this going for them as well, and they were better at it. The fact that Microsoft and their slightly-too-trendy followers now try to distinguish their own applications by breaking their own usability guidelines is not a point in their favour!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Really I didnt read all TFA.
I stopped when he told me that every desktop search is free except Apples. Sure it has a min requirement of 10.4, but so do all the other features of the OS. So saying it is not free is like saying Internet Explorer is not free because you have to have Windows for it. It's a value added feature, not something you have to pay for, therefor it is free.
Honestly how can you compare an unreleased OS that mostlikey will be changed 500 times before its released, to an already released OS that came out 6 months ago. That is not fair. Maybe he should have ponied up to Apple for a beta of their next OS like he did Billyboy.
He also says that Apple impliments features after M$ legitimises them, and took advantage of the closer release period for Tiger. Well that maybe, but if they can integrate it into an OS release before the people who announced it, good for them. What I took from his comment was that M$ takes a long ass time to do something, where someone else can do it in a fraction of the time and make it to market, and M$ actually had a jumpstart on it, since they hadn't announced it yet. I don't think it was his intention to lead me to believe that. He wanted us to think that Apple essentially store M$'s idea and rushed it to market. But really, who is to say that Apple wasn't already working on these, and they act before they speak, unlike M$ and all these features they are gonna have, that don.t show up untill 2 releases down the line.
ways to lock-in the user even more. They are adding in DRM galore, trying to kill openGL and move everyone to their proprietary DirectX, trying to kill PDF and move everyone to their proprietary alternative, etc., etc.
Wow, they really are ripping Apple "features."
(that was funny and you know it)
"...that Microsoft can still churn out valuable Windows releases..."
"Still" implies that they ever did churn out valuable Windows releases.
Well, it seems that the Windows vernacular is sneaking into the article, as is to be expected from the likes of Paul. Transparency and translucency are not the same thing at all.
Windows is calling their ability to see windows behind other windows translucency, which is what it is, you can't really make out the detail of the window in back very clearly, it's a lot like looking through smoked/cloudy glass.
Apple has a feature called transparency. Where you can clearly see the windows behind the windows in the front. This was demonstrated a few interations ago in OS X when Jobs demoed it by showing that you could clearly see a Quicktime movie when it was running behind another window. Apple's implementation is an adjustable level of transparency so that you can make the windows more or less opaque.
I want to know if the Vista windows can be made to be more transparent than any of the crappy looking examples we have been shown so far.
I don't think it would be too hard for Apple to change the configurable-toolbar to create a copy of the application menu in-place at the top of the application window. That would work best for me, but unfortunately they don't do that.
Yeah, that would be ideal. Let the user decide if they want the old-style single menu, or for it to attach to the application windows.
I can see one problem with this. My understanding is that the Mac UI is based around the idea of only being able to run one instance of an application, and any files you have open in it get their own window. So I may have five spreadsheets open in five windows, but they're all children of the single spreadsheet application process. Furthermore, if I close all five windows, the spreadsheet is still running because I didn't explicitly exit it from the File menu.
So if each window gets the menu bar, does File -> Close kill the entire process and therefore the other four spreadsheet files? If not, how do I exit the application entirely, unless the OS assumes that the process should end when there are no more open windows?
Something like Photoshop that has a bunch of independent windows would be a hassle too, and the Windows kludge of putting it all inside an MDI window is kind of ugly.
I'm surprised to read about people having accuracy trouble with menus. I run at 1600x1200 too, and I drink tons of coffee as well as taking prescription stimulants for my ADHD, and it's never been a problem.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The truth is, I am about as associated with microsoft
Jeez, learn to take a joke already.
GSView is nice and fast, but it is crash proned[sic]
Really? I know the half-assed Windows port used to crash occasionally, but I've never had the Linux or BSD versions crash on me. I guess that shoots down the myth about Windows having more, better, applications.
As for open vs. closed. I agree with you when talking about applications (although open is a big plus for custom or business use). When it comes to file formats, however, I strongly disagree. You see I want to be able to read my financial records, books, and other documents 10 years from now and I want the option of allowing anyone else to do the same. I also like the option of using whatever program/OS I like and have available to do it. Right now you don't like any of the PDF viewers you've tried but at least you have a choice and can try more than one. When MS pushes PDF out of the home/office space you will be stuck using just the one they provide. Also, like the situation with IE, once they have the market, they will not have to compete to maintain it so you can say goodbye to any improvements from then on.
I publish a lot of documents for both select audiences and the general public as well as archiving my own papers. I expect to be highly annoyed when I have to deal with a lot of half-assed publication in formats that only some people can read and even fewer write because not all platforms are supported. I also imagine I'll be very annoyed as everyone continues to use what will become an outdated and inferior format, simply because it is shipped with Windows by default.
Your complaints about viewing PDFs are very valid. It demonstrates the need for competition in the space and a good alternative to PDF, or at least alternative viewers. MS expanding their monopoly into the space, however, will make the situation much, much worse in the long term.
This isn't even comparing apples to oranges. This is more like comparing this year's unripened oranges to last years apple juice.
This is precisely why I still use Windows 95 for my games and NT 4.0 for almost everything else (and occasionally WfW 3.11 for the really old stuff.) These OSes do everything I need them to do currently. If I ever upgrade Windows, it might be to Windows 98lite / 2Klite, but I have absolutely no use for XP (and despise its numerous quirks with a passion.) More likely, though, I will migrate to Linux (as I am gradually.)
"The visualization and organization features in Vista Beta 1 extend even further, however. In Tiger, you can configure Finder windows to display icons in various ways, which is cute, but then Windows has offered similar features for years (and to be fair, Tiger also offers some unique shell-oriented features, like spring-loaded folders, which have no analog in the Windows world). Vista Beta 1 adds new Live Icons, in which file and folder icons dynamically change to display the underlying data (Figure). So a folder in Vista Beta 1 visually resembles a file folder that's padded with the actual files you'll see in the folder. And a document icon in Vista Beta 1 visually resembles the underlying document. That is, a Word document icon will visually resemble the first page of the Word document it represents. A graphics file visually represents the underlying graphic. And so on."
This is the one section of the review I had big issues with. First of all, graphics files in tigre are shown as a thumbnail of the graphic itself, so that part of the paragraph is bunk.
Secondly, while having the document icon represent the actual document is cool and funky and visual, in practice (at least my own using this feature in nautilus), it just doesn't work that well for a large set of cases. Thumbnails of PDFs of flowcharts for example, and thumbnails of word docs don't. Unless the icon is big enough that you can read the text (waste of space) or the document is more than just text (ie: lots of graphics, different headers, etc), all you see is a bunch of document icons that look the same. For myself (others may have different opinions) my documents are pretty much the same, a page of text with no graphics or headers (or the headers are all the same (company letterhead)).
I can see how this feature could be even worse. Imagine a folder of icons, mixed thumbnails of word docs, text files, and other types of documents. All mini views that you can't tell by looking at them immediately what they are even as far as the type of doc, never mind the contents of it. Compare this to a folder of icons clearly visible as word, pdf, text, etc.
My $0.02
This whole comparison and news thing is a known trick of Thurrott to get web traffic by spreading subtle FUD and carfully chosen "news". Did anybody expect a fair comparison from a known Windows shill running a site called "Winsupersite" and writing for WinITpro?
*Na* - Move on. Nothing to see and discuss here..
Yes it does, because you are comparing complete products. Although I would like to see the explicit criteria you use to come to your determination, given that apart from some usability problems when running as a non-administrator in XP SP2, the platforms are fairly evenly matched on all counts (and those things missing in XP can be easily solved by free add-ons, like desktop search, firefox, etc...).
No, I see absolutely no point of increasing the resolution beyond 800*600 even on a 19" monitor. I'd almost use 768*576, but I can't get a decent refresh rate with that.
Frankly, OSX (any version) would be a HUGE downgrade for me since you can't play most games on it.
That's not really true you know, right? Sure there are some games you can't play, but most games are ported and a number of good games never get ported from the the mac to Windows. If you just want to play games you might as well buy a console.
All the other shit I need a computer for like browsing, email, DAP sync, word processing works just fine under XP... So, I say again, what does OSX have that I actually need?
How about spell checking, grammar checking, language translation, dictionary/thesaurus/google lookup of all text everywhere? How about just using the same spell checking dictionary in both your mail and word processor if you so desire? How about the ability to make a PDF from every application without having to buy additional software? How about being able to view PDFs without your machine grinding to a halt while they load? How about being able to leave your computer running 24/7 for a month with a dozen applications open without worrying about your machine slowing down or a game running slowly because other programs are open? How about having the option of viewing all of your open windows simultaneously and instantly with a single mouse button press and being able to select from among them? How about being able, without additional software and without writing a line of code to automatically script hundreds of different computer operations from renaming files to downloading images from a web site, scaling them to size, inserting them in a PDF, and e-mailing them to a given address. How about being able to find and launch any program, file, website, etc. with a quick 5 keystrokes that are ordered in such a way that you don't need to memorized them (cmd-space-1st letter of name - 2nd letter - enter)? How about just being able to browse the web and open any e-mail message without having to worry that it might contain a virus or internet worm?
Now I use Windows for certain tasks, OS X for many tasks, and Linux for certain tasks, but as far as general purpose computing goes OS X is so much faster, and more functional than Windows XP that there really is no comparison.
Moving forward, I would expect nearly all NEW hardware to support both systems. This is really what I was getting at, I guess I wasn't specific enough.
Still, I do believe that it's not nearly as hard moving from x86 32-bit windows drivers to x86 64-bit windows drivers as it would be to go from x86 to something completely different like Itanium. Walk in the park type difference, probably.
So, as long as *new* hardware, with new drivers, are written for Vista, we'll almost surely get both 32 and 64 bit drivers.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I mean, c'mon. To shrug off Apple's spotlight as essentially meaningless because a "mass market" isn't using it is just overly defensive tripe coming from someone who doesn't want to admit that his beloved MS has been one-upped. Spotlight has massively changed how I use my computer and has increased my efficiency in surprising and unexpected way. That has nothing to do with mass market use. I don't understand that statement and Thurrott offers no explanation.
Also, the idea that Windows betas are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of features and you can always expect more when MS has spent the last couple of years scaling back expectations on Longhorn/Vista is just plain ludicrous. This guy is an apologist to the core presenting himself as a non-biased observer. I don't buy his spin.
Mr. Thurrott, you can explain away the stuff that makes you uncomfortable by couching them in imagined advantages that MS has, but the simple fact is Apple is already shipping these things and MS is still talking about it. Microsoft has mounted a great marketing campaign supplemented by glimpses of a beta. Meanwhile, I'm actually using spotlight.
That's like telling a guy lost in the desert that he shouldn't stop at the little pool of water but should pass by and continue crawling to that big pool he can almost see miles away... just keep going... a little further... hope it's not a mirage.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
I'm neither an Apple or MS fanboy but it seems what's lacking is an honest analysis of the features in all these new OSs that will actually positively impact the average user... I find it hard to believe that users upgrading from XP to Vista will be as impressed as those who went from 9x/Millennium to XP and saw most things (including the Internet) "Just work".
Is it worth spending over $100 so that you can be virus free for a few weeks? Linux is free and it will save most users from the largest computer annoyances...
Get your torrents...
This guy --Paul Thurrott, is pretty awesome, yeah? :-)
He claims that the race for development was on after Microsoft announced integrated desktop search functionality in Longhorn in October 2003. Then he goes on to say about these products "They would never have been announced in 2004 had Microsoft not first revealed that it was making the feature a standard feature of the next Windows."
And then he goes on to say "If you go back and look at the WWDC 2004 keynote video, you'll see Steve Jobs demo virtually every single major new feature in Tiger, A year later, when the product actually shipped, little had changed and nothing major was added."
What an interesting claim!
Let's say for the sake of argument that he is right. OK?
What he actually says is that in the time from October 2003 till May 2004 - basically 6 months, and I guess Apple did not get the sourcecode from Microsoft; Apple did not only figure out the more or less complete UI of Spotlight, but also implemented a kernel level, system wide search engine almost to perfection. 6 months!
What did Microsoft do in these 6 months? - and I guess they must have had some code and prototypes for this great idea since they'd decided to make it an integral part of their OS? Dunno!
Mr Paul Thurrott writer, the only thing we have seen from Microsoft, and it is soon 18 months since WWDC 2004, is a half baked beta. According to yourself Apple did the job almost to perfection in 6 months. Go figure!
Nah, the way Microsoft does system development kinda resembles this:
Optional point: Slip in a patent filing, just before Apple gets around to do it. Or better on Apple announcement day.
Wicked tongues said some time ago that the reason why WinFS was pulled from Vista, was because Microsoft did not have anyone they could copy the implementation from. Now that they are about to figure out the combination of HFS+ and Spotlight, it is safe to put it back on the table again. But not in Vista, in case they have not quite figured out the logic by ship in November 2006.
The future is in beta
Fools.
Vista is riddled with bugs and FUD about what will/not be delivered with it. It's a long way from finished. Some sycophants will get it with their new HP or Dell and be pioneers for us, ready to take the arrows in their back (and front). Yes, Vista has some eye candy. But review after review has shown that its security model is incomplete, and still lags behind most *nix, including MacOS.
Apple gives it away with their machines. They don't have to; I'll bet that newer x86/686 machines from Apple will also boot Vista. It proves that the base OS is a ticket for selling other brands and timelines of accessories and plans. The base OS becomes increasingly irrelevant except as a security problem or enabler of a brand(s) of software and games that people want to use.
*nix (xBSD, Linux, etc) will stay at a lower entrance cost, at the cost of having civilians hurt themselves when they see a bash prompt. Microsoft will continue to build on eye candy with a nearly 20 year old, flawed architectural design. Bah.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I've got a PowerBook too. 1.5Ghz, 1GB ram, nothing running and spotlight searches STILL lock the search box after typing stuff in. How many letters you get in depends on how fast you type. It gets better the more you use spotlight, but saying that the problem doesn't exist is disingenuous. G5 class machines are a different story...
Yes the moving text is counter-productive. Say your see the document in the list and move your mouse to it. By the time the cursor arrives at the location, other results have pushed your document down or up, making it more difficult to get to.
I like Apple just as much as anybody else, but there's no need to hide real problems. Microsoft pretty much digs its own hole.
Considering how many times the .DOC file format has changed, can you still open up .doc files you made in Word 1.0 with Word 2k3? The answer is YES, so the closed format and not being able to view it in 10 years is mute. You don't think MS will support their own formats 10 years from now?
Ah, but over the next couple of years, your next machine can be an Intel-based Mac. It'll come with OS X, but you'll be able to run Windows on it if you need to.
I've got two custom-built Wintel workstations in my office, next to my Macs, and I hope to replace them with Mactels, so I can use all my machines as Mac OR Win.
My video compression blog
As of Q4, '04, Apple market share in the US was 3.3%. It has the fifth largest market share among pc vendors in the United States.
o wing+PC+market/2100-1042_3-5540712.html
http://news.com.com/Dell+expands+lead+in+still-gr
"less memory and processor time"
The idea of splitting up into separate "programs" (processes) is that each is isolated by hardware from others. So an error (bug) will disturb one but not others.
The OS itself (and, I believe that MAC OS X core does this as well) shares code pages anyway. The incremental cost of a new "program" is then the data used, and the scheduling (which is typically insignificant).
The ONLY thing is that it becomes difficult to share material (documents) BETWEEN the processes (because of the isolation).
In a system that shares the single application instance, I imagine that you spend a lot more time saving important material.
But really, the resource sharing is done by the kernel anyway, so that isn't a valid argument. (and, as an aside, it is possible to determine if an application is running and being serviced by an X server, and the open instance can be vectored to the running instance. It is also possible to find a machine on the local net that is already running your application, and vector the execution to that machine, which is something I used to do to reduce application start-up times, and something that the original commenter may have done as well).
I agree that MAC OS X GUI isn't too shabby. The transparent terminals are a feature to die for. The other features? Pretty much ho-hum, in my opinion.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
As I said in reply to someone else, the number was an exaggeration. However, I see a lot of people make the assumption that because a lot of companies did not upgrade from win2k to XP, they won't upgrade to vista.
Simply, it has more to doing with the corporate hardware aging cycle than to a repudiation of xp. If you go back to the year 2000, a lot of companies just upgraded hardware and software because of the Y2K fears. XP came out a year later so it is not unreasonable to assume xp came out too early in the aging cycle to motivate companies to upgrade.
My company didn't upgrade to win2k. We went from nt and win 98 to 2003 on the server side and xp with new desktop hardware leapfrogging win2k. Count on a lot of companies leapfrogging xp to vista as longhorn has been hyped for a couple of years now.
Whatever happens though, they won't be upgrading to OSX products.
I don't post on slashdot. But I can't help myself today.
/.
STOP greenlighting Thurott's articles. The claims, comparisons, and conclusions he makes in this article make me furious that such a piece of trash was linked on
Too, I'd like to remind you that Windows Vista is only in Beta 1. Lots of things are going to change, and many, many features will be added by Beta 2 and beyond. This stands in sharp contrast to Apple's approach with Tiger. If you go back and look at the WWDC 2004 keynote video, you'll see Steve Jobs demo virtually every single major new feature in Tiger. A year later, when the product actually shipped, little had changed and nothing major was added. This isn't how Microsoft works. Beta 1 is a minor subset of the overall functionality we're going to see in the final Windows Vista product.
Umm.. To me, it's a good thing that a year before release, features were demonstrated. That shows to me, that Apple took their time to completely make sure EVERYTHING works and didn't add in things closesr to release time and back themselves into a corner saying "oh well, we'll just release a patch and fix it later..." (not that apple hasn't had to patch software from time to time, and not to say that Tiger was perfect exactly out of the box).
The fact that Microsoft is only at beta 1 at this point after this much time, is fine, but if there are missing pieces from it, how can it really considered to be a good beta candidate?
Unlike with Spotlight, Vista Beta 1's searches are not instantaneous, but this is by design and is arguably a better choice. In Spotlight, as you start typing a search, the search results begin appearing (Figure), which can be both annoying and counterproductive when the first few letters of your search include common letters or words (like "the"). In Vista Beta 1, you need to hit Enter to launch the search (or click the Search button).
I don't agree with this line of thought at all. Having used Tiger since the day it was released, and having had spotlight remind me where I put what, having the results pop up as I start typing makes things easier and saves ME time sorting through what could possibly be thousands of results. The more you type, the more the search gets narrowed down, or you can change the search "on the fly" using backspace. In the "Vista" method, if something about your search is wrong, you have to do it all over again, possibly running 2 or more searches to find what you're looking for.
Don't get me wrong: Search is important. But it's only part of the story. The system we are delivering won't force you to search for your data."
Well, if you "lost" your data, and you can't find it by type or any other 'normal' form of searching, then exactly how is Windows supposed to know what yo're looking for or what context the data is stored in? i.e. "Will it read my mind?" This sounds sneakily to me of saying "Windows will come with folders called 'my documents' which will store your documents, 'my pictures' which will store your photos, and 'my music' to store your music. If you can't find it in the search, click an icon and these folders will come up for you to look through." Absolutely revolutionary. When it comes to things like this, hav ing a "smart folder" isn't really a good solution, in my opinion. A better solution, would be to change how people use computers, through maybe teaching them basic practices of making a default download folder for their web browser, etc, which was hinted at with "my documents" in windows, but why people should use it never really caught on. I keep a seperate folder for all my downloads, or send them right to my desktop in plain sight, to be sorted out later by hand. And as long as I've used any computer I'm pretty confident in saying that I've never "lost" anything from my desktop. At least not anything hidden away from me. I however am not your average everyday user either.
(Tiger does however have a hard-to-find "Spotlight Comments" section the Get Info box for any document in which you can add keywords or phrases as desired.)
Highlighting a file and pressing apple+i is not hard or hard to find.
This is possible because you can easily add and edit m
-Users don't run as Administrator by default in a domain
Yet the admin/user model is still broken in XP
-Fast switching isn't useful in most domains
Says who? It'd be nice to FUS to an admin account without repeating, "Do you need to save this?" ten times to a user.
*You can do system images for fairly disparate hardware already, but not completely different.
And all the fun that comes along with changing the SID and testing to make sure your hardware changes don't break the image? I'll take any improvement we can get here.
-There are already public recovery disks
Which are hacks that violate the EULA
-You can already get real shells
You will hear no complaints from me if MS wants to improve the default shell.
*I'm sure a more advanced task scheduler is useful _somewhere_
Uuuh yeah. The current scheduler is pretty weak. Improvements welcome... again.
Some of these are very welcome improvements to Windows. I think you downplay them too much.
These stories are just pathetic. I guess this is pep speech for the Windows fateful. Don't worry. We'll have those features soon and they will be better. Keep the faith. (DORKS!!!) I have been a Mac user back in the pre-OSX days. The whole Apple experience is great not just the OS. Beyond the very capable OS, you have high quality, well designed hardware back up by great tech support. The genius bar is one the best ideas to come of Apple lately. You have problem with the computer. Just set up an appointment and walk in. You have live human right there so you show them the problem even if you can't quite describe it. Dwell on OS features if like but Microsoft/OEM will never offer that experience.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
But in the end aren't both companies just doing now what Linux and the other like operating systems have been doing for years. Yes some of the UIs available for Linux and the like are not the greatest, but so many other things that are finally starting to creep into Mac and Windows (journaled FS) have been around for ages. And seriously, how many slashdot people really care how pretty it looks, isn't the how pretty it looks what made some many girls think the iMac was sexy or something?
In the end what I want is some degree of power in my OS and well, control. Something M$ has continually said we will never get all of it that we want. Every couple years I can rotate back to Linux because my games will run on there since my higher powered hardware can make up for the wine performance drop. With my new system coming early next year, I will be back to Linux and wine until a new game comes along that just won't get enough juice or won't run at all in wine.
Btw, I am tired of the start bar. I mean yeah graphically the UI is a bit of a rip, but its not like they stole the snazzy little app bar or anything. Not that I would mind...on a side note I would probably get Mac OS X for x86 if they would make it usable on all hardware, oh well...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I have both, as you do, apparently. We stopped counting after the first Vista 100 blue screens. Security is abysmal. Several APIs are plainly broken. The 64bit drivers for Vista are even more rare than the XP-64 version.
If you want to see MacOS run on Intel, go to theinquirer.net and look. Ok, it's a dev release... but it proves the point. Eye candy is cute. Underneath Vista is the same rotten core that built XP and 2003. It's a Revlon job, not a rewrite. Plastic surgery, not new youth is what Vista is all about. Microsoft, IMHO, is running, and hasn't invented much in the ten years since Win95/Win32.
Put your glasses on and look underneath the UI, ugly (again IMHO), a dry-rip of MacOS, and uninventive. The best part of Vista is that it has actual attention paid to workgroup needs. Fancy that.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Exactly! You can only do one thing at a time in windows! I cant stand it - why on earth am i expected to stop surfing the web to burn a DVD?
This is why I run Linux; its pretty good at multitasking on the same hardware. And if it misbehaves i fiddle with the "niceness" of all the applications, and I, the user, actually get to use the computer instead of just throwing up my arms in disgust.
Considering how many times the .DOC file format has changed, can you still open up .doc files you made in Word 1.0 with Word 2k3? The answer is YES, so the closed format and not being able to view it in 10 years is mute. You don't think MS will support their own formats 10 years from now?
First, just because they "support" one format going forward does not mean they "support" all of them. There are plenty of deprecated Microsoft file formats that are no longer readable. Second, have you ever opened a really old .doc file with a new version of Word? The fonts and layout are invariable messed up and and mathematical equations are gibberish in Word documents just two versions old. I have a number of four year old .doc files bequeathed to me at work and only about half of them display correctly. I have three that will not even open in Word, but will in OpenOffice. So to answer your question, no I don't think I'll be able to properly view MS's PDF replacement files after 10 years. And no I don't think MS removing all competition from yet another set of applications and then leaving them to stagnate along with much of the rest of computing is a good idea.
However, I think a better and more consistent solution would be to provide an option to just mirror the menu bar at the top of each screen. Those secondary screens always look naked without it. I could see this possibly confusing some people, so it would be disabled by default, and it would be useful to differentiate the secondary screens, so the Apple menu could only show up on the primary screen, but I could see it being very useful to those people who use multiple monitors as part of their work flow.
Re:"What's the point of HUGE icons????"
I'll tell you how I use huge icons on my Mac: to counter my worst tendencies.
A lot happens on my Mac's Desktop. Stuff gets downloaded there. I create new projects there before filing them somewhere else more appropriate in my user folder. But I'm kinda bad about putting stuff away. That Desktop can get cluttered pretty fast.
Solution: I set the icon size on the desktop to the largest size. Less room for documents then. End result is I clean up more often, my desktop stays uncluttered, and things get filed the way they should.
I'm not sure that's why they made big icons, but that's how I use 'em.
Google's entire tech model, since they were grad students at Dartmouth publishing it as a thesis, is that Google as much as humanly possible, retrieves data indexed in RAM. That's right, in RAM. They buy petabytes of the stuff, and I'll go out on a limb to say their UPSes are top-notch.
No personal computer with a HD can set aside enough memory to carry a live index of all the files, and it would have to be a separate bank of nonvolatile memory to let you shut down the computer.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Is this really slashdot?
Yes, this is Slashdot. But you missed the part that you aren't really supposed to read the article - it's perfectly valid to make a complaint without reading it!
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
bill gates is an owner of apple?...
Estable+Atractivo+Seguro=Linux
http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/mbp/bloom/ bloom_add.gif
First, you should be advised that I have a good friend that's a Mac biggot so I know the drill. Some games are ported to the Mac but MANY are not. In some cases, the games take many months before they are ported: Unreal Tournament 2k3 took over a year to be ported. That's simply unacceptible to any real gamer. Some Mac game ports are incapible of talking to their PC counterparts (for online play). I also hate the vast majority of console games. Additionally, I prefer the keyboard and mouse over the controller.
That's quite a mouthful. However, of all the things you mention, I can either 1) download software the gives me that functionality, or 2) don't need that functionality. In regards to performance, I simply don't have performance problems. I can have World of Warcraft running with a half dozen other apps running and everything is simply honkey-dorey. I'm sorry but I just don't see the benefit especially when you factor in the cost premium.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
So, you want explicit criteria for why Mac OS is better? Here's some:
- You run as a non-administrator by default, and it works properly
- there are a bunch of things missing in XP, like desktop search, a decent web browser, a decent text editor (TextEdit is much better than Wordpad), a good PDF viewer, etc.
- XP doesn't have any good scripting/automation stuff, whereas Mac OS has Applescript and Automator
- New Macs come with Garage Band, iMovie, iPhoto, etc.
- The Mac OS interface is better because of the ubiquitous drag-and-drop, Exposé, Dashboard, etc.
- Communications works better on the Mac because the address book is more integrated with email and IM. Also, iChat supports audio and video
- Mac OS is more secure, for a bunch of different reasons:
- it doesn't have a horribly insecure browser integrated into the system
- it doesn't have any services turned on by default
- it actually uses permissions effectively (yes, that's already been mentioned)
- Mac OS is UNIX-like, which means I can easily use the command line and that it runs most Free Software (including X11-based apps)
- Speaking of Free Software, big chunks of Mac OS are Free, including the kernel, Webcore, the BSD subsystem, ZeroConf (aka bonjour), etc. and Apple actually works with outside developers (yes, they do help the KHTML people!)
And finally, here's the biggie:"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I use a 2400x1920 display (two 24" displays in portrait mode), and it's vastly faster for me to zip up to the menu bar at top than to actually take the milliseconds to aim carefully at widgets in the local window--even when that window is at the opposite corner of the display than the menu bar is.
Dude, you must be doing it wrong. I'm a frequent user of spotlight and do not see the delays your talking about.
It seems to me and perhaps I am an idiot but Microsoft could buy Apple with the money that it has and combine Vista and OS-X together to make the best OS ever. It would have all the bells and whistles of OS-X, including reliability and functionality of the system and the software compatibility and corporate contracts that Windows has. As well they would get the iPod and iTunes business. The only problem is or us, Microsoft would surely screw everything up!
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
Great, the next version of windows resembling mac os x, more highly unusable interface design then...
When any Windows power user installs the OS, the first thing he or she does is to disable all the cumbersome graphical nonsense (animations, mostly). In Vista, we can look forward to a second layer of useless features in need of disabling: desktop search nonsense. Though the search itself may be a step above Tiger's (unusable half the time because it searches while you type), it's not a useful feature for anyone with any organizational skills, and the indexing has a prohibitive performance penalty.
Featurewise, Windows XP is complete. It would be nice to see some serious changes in the way security is handled instead of flashy new features over the same vulnerable core.
But isn't OS X just a Beta, too? I'm still waiting for the real NeXTStep 5.0....
With OS X, I can perform instant desktop searches, organize my music and photos very easily, and it has a hardware accelerated desktop.
With the apple, I cannot do those things, but it is a healthy snack.
The fact that I can compare Apple's to apples makes this a valid comparison.
Of course Windows will try to look like the Mac. As Steve "Developers! Developers! I'm sweaty and insane!" Baller once proudly crowed to MS employees in a speech, "We *will* continue to allow others to innovate!" Like that was a virtue or something. Look at us! We're real good at imitating!
./ moderation system in our time.
In lieu of an expected mod-down as Troll, I will Meta-Moderate today and mark all Troll, Redundant, and Flamebait mods as Unfair. I encourage anyone reading this to do the same. We *can* destroy the
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Why do I even bother?
I can see that line starting every conversation in the future of computing. Okay, maybe not EVERY one...
.NET framework, the myriad of technologies that make it easier to work and create applications in a Windows environment. With the next iteration of Windows Server, we will see this idea enhanced even more.
/.ers, we focus on the here and now, of what OSX offers us in terms of ease of use, customization, and 'neato' applications that are included in the bundle of OSX, or free of charge after the fact. And our continual comparisons (and yes, I'm guilty too), only shows us that as nerds -- and this is a suprising thought -- we are interested more in what the look and feel of an OS provide rather than developer functionality.
.NET. I'm not saying it's the best solution, but it's right now, the only one that is being offered.
.NET technologies.
Microsoft's latest release only shows that they are focusing more and more on their
Unfortunately for us
The line "Microsoft is just doing what Apple did first, in a crappier way" has been said here in some form or another many, many times. And frankly, it's true. The Desktop Search seems to suck, the UI improvements suck, WinFS isn't being released putting it already behind the OSX and *nixes of the world. But developer support... Microsoft enhances and makes easier and easier, and allows ease of deployment with
And so we will say that Windows Vista sucks when it's released -- and it probably will. But when, let's say a financial corporation has needs for spreadsheets and already uses Excel, and then they decide to build a custom app.. and find that Microsoft offers them the cheapest and fastest way to build it, in addition to the fact that they are already so widely supported well... you can bet that that company will build their next application using
So when one of the VPs comes home, and his wife is sick and tired of her piece of shit crashing Windows Vista, he will only get to reply "BUT HONEY!!! -- I can't get a Mac because I need Windows for work!"
And that folks, is the brutal reality. Until Linux and OSX make strides in ease of development in terms of tools and technologies, they will always be a distant second or third compared to crappier, poorly thought out and implemented early, Microsoft technologies.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
In some programs, startup time is significant so it's much nicer to open another window than a whole copy of the app. Also sometimes it's simply ewasier to open up a new app window from the app than in the OS launch mechanism.
An example of this would be Terminal vs. CMD. I far prefer how easy it is to open up new terminal windows verses opening up a new CMD shell every time. They do start up pretty quickly but I hate having to use the start menu (or a shortcut) to launch a new one.
Also, I far prefer the approach OS X takes for app window grouping over either way Windows does it. In Windows I can make things horribly hard to reach either by grouping them under one icon which opens p a submenu of running windows that takes too long to navigate through, or I can alternatley have too many windows open to tell what is what on the taskbar and take to long to reach it that way.
I really like either using Expose to find a particular window for an app, bringing them all forth by clicking on the dock so I can probably see the window I want, or as a last resort use the submenu that is just like the Windows grouped one (though in fact I never use it).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, if it doesn't take any time then who wouldn't rather see search results as you type? Then (possibly) you can stop typing earlier and just use the thing you are looking for. Why make it an adventure to guess how much data Search needs before it will find what you are looking for, then hitting return to see if you are correct? That's just how that !@%^#!%$ "Find doggie" works today, and I can't even own a real dog because of my residual hatred for that singularily useless pooch.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree with you there.
OK, here's why Google makes Microsoft paranoid. You are right that Google is not, and will not be, a "platform" in the sense that the Windows OS is. And all those things you mention are expressly designed to drive traffic to Google services in order to increase advertising revenue. But what they also do is create ubiquity. The more Google services can meet the needs of users, the less important the operating environment becomes. That's because Google is a network service rather than a program that runs on an operating system. With the exception of a couple of Windows programs, Google is offering search-related services accessible from nearly any networked device. I wouldn't argue that they will render Windows obsolete, but they may well lessen its market dominance.
Seriously. That is the most unbiased source for performing a comparison between products from Microsoft and one of its competitors. Ever.
In related news, it's been discovered that unicorns are real, and that Han did NOT, in fact, shoot first.
According to Forbes, Apple's global market share for last quarter (computer sales), was 2.5%.
:)
"Piper Jaffray maintained an "outperform" rating and $52 target price on Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ), noting Apple's market share of worldwide PC shipments rose to 2.5% in the second quarter, up from 2.3% in the first quarter. "
The market share in the United States is over 4% now, and they are now the fourth largest computer manufacturer in the country (after just passing IBM/Lenovo).
As another poster points out, that isn't there installed base, just sales. I tend to see a lot more older Apple laptops than older Dell laptops. Just saying
Andrew
You, sir, have become my first fan.
You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.
Bloat is when MS Office allows you to import DV, edit movies, and burn DVDs
Monopoly abuse is when Microsoft raises the price of Windows for Gateway or Sony because they bundle their own DVD makers to replace or supplement MS Office DV+
GPL Deconstructed
I don't have this problem at all. What were the system specs?
Mine: Athlon 2800, 1gig of ram, all IDE DMA/100. I start a DVD burning (either from my fileserver or the local drive) and then go about my business. I rarely notice any slowdown that I can definitively attribute to the burning (i.e. any slowdown I see may just as easily occur during non-burning times, usually with particularly hard to render websites).
Most notably, not long ago I was burning a CD, printing out my resume, and reading my gMail. At the same time, Thunderbird was checking mail in the background. My resume was in PDF being printed from Adobe. Nero is my preferred burning software on Windows.
All those pieces of software are massive and bloated, but they managed to cooperate in WinXP. The burn completed correctly, the resume was fine, and there was no stuttering in the other apps.
it's vastly faster for me to zip up to the menu bar at top than to actually take the milliseconds to aim carefully at widgets in the local window
Right. So when you're done with the menu bar, and need to get BACK to that relatively small window someplace else on the screen? That's where the accuracy complaint really comes from.
Of course, a variant kind of popup menu (such as a pie) can be better than either menubar style: the menu targets are "infinitely big", plus your cursor is still near the document when done.
See here.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I don't understand. How will people in the future enjoy these Vista features if the software is terminated? ;)
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
The thing is, until I can install OSX on my current Windows system IN PLACE OF windows, comparisons between Windows and OSX have no meaning precisely because I am required to buy new hardware to use OSX. Vista is a rip off of Tiger? Maybe, but until OSX appears on generic x86 platforms, OSX is not a competitor to Windows despite coming out with the features first. - +4 Insightful
INSIGHTFUL!?!?!!
The most ignorant comment I've ever read (at least this week). You can't compare Windows and OSX because they run on different hardware? If you can't compare OSX and Windows then you pretty much can't compare anything.
If you can't afford to buy a new computer then you can't compare the two. I can't afford a copy of Windows so I can't compare the two (legally) but that doesn't mean the two can't be compared.
So what we can't compare a Ford and a Toyota because they use two different engines. What kind of stupid are you?
They both 'drive on the road' dummy. Who cares what kind/size of pistons are used to get you there? People want to know which car gets you there faster. The fact that you can't buy two cars doesn't mean they can't be compared.
-- The Wolfkin
This is simply not the case. I know that Chicken of the VNC is located in "/Applications/Chicken of the VNC.app," but there's no way I'm going to navigate to it when I can type cmd-space-"chicken"-down-enter. Just because I know where something is doesn't mean I want to go find it.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
- You run as a non-administrator by default, and it works properly
- there are a bunch of things missing in XP, like desktop search, a decent web browser, a decent text editor (TextEdit is much better than Wordpad), a good PDF viewer, etc.
- XP doesn't have any good scripting/automation stuff, whereas Mac OS has Applescript and Automator
- New Macs come with Garage Band, iMovie, iPhoto, etc.
- The Mac OS interface is better because of the ubiquitous drag-and-drop, Exposé, Dashboard, etc.
- Communications works better on the Mac because the address book is more integrated with email and IM. Also, iChat supports audio and video
- Mac OS is more secure, for a bunch of different reasons:
- it doesn't have a horribly insecure browser integrated into the system
- it doesn't have any services turned on by default
- it actually uses permissions effectively (yes, that's already been mentioned)
- Mac OS is UNIX-like, which means I can easily use the command line and that it runs most Free Software (including X11-based apps)
- Speaking of Free Software, big chunks of Mac OS are Free, including the kernel, Webcore, the BSD subsystem, ZeroConf (aka bonjour), etc. and Apple actually works with outside developers (yes, they do help the KHTML people!)
And finally, here's the biggie:Non-admin works just fine in XP. It can sometimes be an annoying experience because some applications haven't caught up, and still do stupid things that assume admin priv. Apart from that it works as advertised and expected.
Yes, but spend 5 minutes on the web and you will find fantastic freeware xp versions of each app-type you mentioned.
Once again here we have freeware to fill in the blanks (cygwin/perl/etc...). Personally I'm a developer so I can earily whip up a C++ app to automate anything in the OS. For non-devs, well they wouldn't care about this either way, would they?
Granted neat apps, but nothing that doesn't have a handful of XP counterparts (XP even has MovieMaker built in)
I'll give you this -- the OSX interface is prettier.
You mean how Outlook/OE Contacts are integrated with MSN Messenger? As I write an e-mail in my To: field it shows if that person is online. Or how Msn Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ support audio/video chat? How about this for cool -- in Office Communicator, I can right click on a contact and have my office phone dial up the individual.
Firefox
Have you even tried XP SP2?
What exactly do you mean here? XP has an robust ACL system. Run as non-admin and everything in the OS is protected. Or do you know of any vulnerabilities we're not aware of?
Have you ever heard of cygwin?
What do I care if the OS has free/open source components if it works?
Give me a break, you forgot to write Micro$oft... Apple is hardly the company to bring up as an open source hero. Not only do they lock you into their closed OS, but they lock you into their HW and *don't allow you to buy it from anyone but them*. Apple's philosophy is 'use our stuff, only our stuff, and only buy it from us. don't question our prices either'. You would have the moral highground if you chose Linux in this respect, certainly not Apple.
So your diatribe basically comes down to this: OSX is better because it has nominally prettier UI, and has a few apps built in that in XP you'd have to download and install separately. That doesn't quite give me enough of a reason to be locked into their overpriced hardware/OS platform
I was burning a CD, printing out my resume, and reading my gMail. At the same time, Thunderbird was checking mail in the background. My resume was in PDF being printed from Adobe. Nero is my preferred burning software on Windows.
It is interesting to note what applications you mention. Nero uses a lot of RAM, but little CPU and no network. The speed at which it operates is regulated by the speed of your burner and available RAM. All the other applications you mention are restricted by your network speed, not by the applications themselves. While Windows XP does not do a great job of distributing network resources, I think it's major failing is in distributing CPU resources properly and maintaining proper resources for the Windows GUI environment. Having a lot of RAM and using applications that do not tax the CPU will result in reasonable performance, but having less RAM or CPU than is required by your task (like doing any task that actually uses all the CPU it can get for a period of time) will result in a horrible user experience.
Some games are ported to the Mac but MANY are not. In some cases, the games take many months before they are ported: Unreal Tournament 2k3 took over a year to be ported.
Actually it was just under 6 months. And UT2004 was released within a month. What does that prove? It took a year for Escape Velocity to be ported to the PC. I guess if games are your primary concern you should have one of each.
all the things you mention, I can either 1) download software the gives me that functionality, or 2) don't need that functionality.
Of course you don't. Of course you don't need Windows XP either, you can get by with Windows 98. The point is that just off the top of my head I can list a dozen things that are simple as pie on the mac and either impossible or expensive on a PC. And those are just things I use every day. The system-wide services capability of OS X makes it easier to make your whole computer have functionality, rather than have to run a separate application for each little thing. If I want to be able to translate things from german, I install a german translation service and I can use it in my e-mail, chat, IRC, terminals, word processor, web browser, etc. The whole architecture is more stable (I host all our Warcraft3 sessions on my laptop since none of the PCs can seem to do so without either dropping random people or bluescreening due to graphic card driver problems) and more cleanly designed. If I want to install an application, I drag it into any folder on my hard drive. That's it. If I want to uninstall it, I drag it to the trash. In general applications don't require administrative privileges and they certainly don't require total access. I can run as a regular user, install applications in my home directory, and not have to worry that anything I do will ever screw up the computer as a whole. There are no exposed system services, except those I enable, so by default I can run without a firewall between me and the world without being instantly compromised by a internet worm. I can launch applications more quickly, search for everything instantaneously, keep my personal files encrypted and unencrypt them on the fly. Basically, it just works better in many, many ways. Every time I use my PC I try to invoke Expose, because it is just the best way I have ever used to select between many windows. It has become a habit and I don't even bother to minimize windows anymore.
Sure it is not needed, but that does not mean it is not better. You don't need a mouse, or multiple monitors but that does not mean I want to go back to a ten year old system and give them up. Considering how small the delta in price is between macs and pcs, it is no wonder so many computing professionals are moving to the mac. Sorry, but Windows has just fallen several years behind the technology curve and all your excuses do not change that.
Non-admin works just fine in XP. It can sometimes be an annoying experience because some applications haven't caught up...
Many of those applications are very common and some are written by MS themselves. No one I know runs Windows as non-admin. A new employee here prefers Windows and was set-up as a non-admin. It lasted one day before she had to get admin access to accomplish her job. You can't even install most software unless you're an admin on Windows.
I've actually found that Windows has less useful freeware than either the mac or Linux. I'm sure you can find a text editor, but will still be sub-par because Windows does not support text services.
once again here we have freeware to fill in the blanks (cygwin/perl/etc...)... For non-devs, well they wouldn't care about this either way, would they?
Automator is automated tasks without scripting and yes, non-developers use it. I have a friend who could not write a script to save his life, but he figured out how to use Automator to automatically rename a bunch of images rather than doing it by hand. As for perl, don't you think it's odd you have to install an emulator to get halfway decent scripting. Running Perl scripts is about the only reason cygwin is installed on some of the Windows user's desktops here.
Granted neat apps, but nothing that doesn't have a handful of XP counterparts...
I think the author meant good applications, that are free. Not crappy shareware, half-baked freeware, or expensive proprietary applications. Sorry but Windows just does not compare as far as included applications or available, free applications.
"It doesn't have any services turned on by default" - Have you even tried XP SP2?
Yup. RPC and WMI are both still operating on network ports by default. The firewall is turned on as well, but a firewall should be an extra layer of security, not your only defense. OS X can be plugged in with the firewall disabled, in its default configuration and still not have problems with automated attacks. That's because it does not do stupid things like rely upon a network port for services running offline.
Run as non-admin and everything in the OS is protected. Or do you know of any vulnerabilities we're not aware of?
First, you can't run as non-admin because the environment is practically unusable, especially for a novice user. Second, Since you can't rip out IE without killing Windows explorer and since IE runs at elevated security levels you can be pretty sure any non-admin user will still be able to infect the entire system and destroy it. Does Windows even try to stop local privilege escalation attacks? Last I heard there were a few dozen outstanding.
Have you ever heard of cygwin?
cygwin is great, but it is not exactly integrated into the system, or a first class citizen. It runs in it's own space (which can overlap user space) and it does not exactly allow for integration with other apps. Lets see you pipe data to or from firefox or outlook using cygwin. MacOS X can run Windows in VirtualPC, does that mean it has all the advantages of Windows too?
What do I care if the OS has free/open source components if it works?
Because closed source does not work everywhere and cannot be easily made to do so. Because if something doesn't work, you can fix it or hire someone to do so, whereas with closed source you can ask the vendor and if they don't want to do anything about it you're screwed.
OSX is better because it has nominally prettier UI, and has a few apps built in that in XP you'd have to download and install separately.
Bullshit. OS X is better for many tasks because the architecture is a much better design, it is more functional in dozens of ways, it has UI features and search features that are years ahead, it
"Actually it was just under 6 months. And UT2004 was released within a month. What does that prove? It took a year for Escape Velocity to be ported to the PC. I guess if games are your primary concern you should have one of each."
That's funny, my Mac buddy had to wait a year before he could get it. Then another month or two before they patched it so that the frame rate wasn't horrible.
"Of course you don't. Of course you don't need Windows XP either, you can get by with Windows 98..."
Yeah, yeah. I predicted this response. There's a big difference between going from 98 to XP and going from XP to the Mac. I presume you're intelligent enough that I don't need to explain why? And I'm sorry but the stuff you talk about is just sugar. Windows has everything I need. It's not that I think it's a great OS, but it's good enough that I'm not going to spend a crapload of money to buy a machine with an OS that has more bells and whistles (of which, I don't need any of them.)
As for security...I have a hardware firewall. I don't have to use Windows firewall to block ports or any of that shit. Anyone with any sense has a hardware firewall anyway. Also, since XP SP2, the vulnerabilities you speak of are gone anyway.
Please explain to me why I should spend $2k for a few features that are worth, at most, $50 to me.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
As for security...I have a hardware firewall. I don't have to use Windows firewall to block ports or any of that shit. Anyone with any sense has a hardware firewall anyway. Also, since XP SP2, the vulnerabilities you speak of are gone anyway.
I'm not talking about vulnerabilities, I'm talking about lousy design. Currently, there are no well known and published vulnerabilities due to the fact that RPC etc. are exposed on the network, that does not change the fact that they are still there. Unknown exploits may well exist or crop up at any time. No one with any sense designs a product so that local services have to run on a network port because it gives crackers a great place to look for holes. I guarantee you there are flaws and they will probably be exploited. And yes I'm talking about Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
Great, you have a hardware firewall. What OS does it run? I bet it is either an embedded OS, BSD, or Linux variant. Don't you feel great knowing you have to buy a second specialty computer to keep your primary computer safe because it's security is so flawed?
There's a big difference between going from 98 to XP and going from XP to the Mac. I presume you're intelligent enough that I don't need to explain why?
There are plenty of differences. Conceptually, however, I don't see much difference at all. Both are upgrades from poorly designed and outdated systems to newer ones that work better and have a lot more, useful features.
Please explain to me why I should spend $2k for a few features that are worth, at most, $50 to me.
I won't argue with how much you have to spend because I don't know what your hardware and software requirements are. Just think, however, next time you upgrade that there is an alternative to buying a new Windows machine or OS. You are putting a $50 value on features you've never used. For me, well OS X saves me an hour of work a day and often more than that. I squander that time here on Slashdot. You'll probably remain a Windows user for a long time and you'll probably rave about all the new Vista features OS X users have been enjoying for the last few years. Why should you switch? I don't know that you should. It all depends upon what you do with your computer and what your specific needs and resources are. I can tell you this though, over the last several years more than half of the security experts I know have switched from Linux and Windows to OS X and plenty of people in other fields. Of all the people I know, none of them have ever switched back to Windows. Why do you suppose that is?
http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/677 .html
Give them time.
Don't you see it? At first Google was just competing with web search (MSN competition). Then they moved into email space (Hotmail competition). Then they moved into the Desktop search space (Vista compeition). Now they're moving into IM space (more MSN competition). And unlike many other companies, they're INTEGRATING all their stuff together, just the way Microsoft does. Not only are they expanding their turf, but they're doing the job RIGHT. They're releasing damn good products everytime, and they're being recognized for it.
Microsoft has good reason to be scared shitless of Google. Not only does Google have all the real talent (Phds and smart geeks) in this day and age, but they have a wallet large enough to do something with that talent, and the public opinion to net a vast flock of users. On top of that, they're expanding like crazy. It seems like every other week they're releasing some new product, branching in some other direction. Personally, I believe it's only a matter of time before they release a whole OS. Though I think a Google browser is the next logical step.
I don't think you give Google enough credit. They're innovating and expanding at a rapid pace. Most search engine companies would sit on their laurels and "just do the job" if they released a search engine as good as Google's. 5 years ago, could you have imagined Google releasing an email client, or a desktop search program? Or let me put it in a way that isn't biased by current day thought. Could you imagine Infoseek or Webcrawler or Excite or Altavista doing the same? There's plenty of examples of web search companies that "did their one thing." Google is not one of them. They don't see "a market". They see "markets."
I have no intention of defending Windows security design because I know as well as anyone else that Msft doesn't have a fucking clue what they are doing. My point is that, as sucky as Windows security is, I get by just fine. I have never been infected by a virus except at work but that's outside of my control. Stuff in my control I nail down tight. I use password safes, I NEVER type in passwords. All sensitive data is encrypted, etc. This stuff you can do quite easily on any Windows box.
You keep focusing on this whole "which one is better" idea. That's only a small part of it. The real question is: "How much will it cost me to move to the on that's better?" This is simple economics and the benefit has to justify the cost.
I'm a gamer so I need a pretty badass machine: faster processor, very fast video card, plenty of RAM, etc. As for raving about new Vista features...I dunno. Usually the only reason I upgrade Windows is because I have to because some app I need requires it. It's hard to imagine I will ever rave about anything Msft builds since most of it is ass. Finally, if you think simply switching from XP to OSX makes you secure, you have a lot to learn about security.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I'll have to test that sometime, perhaps running Prime95 while burning to see if there is any degredation. Any other suggestions for a way to really test this theory?
That's what I'm talking about: Apart from all the problems, it works as advertized and expected. So you're agreeing with me that Mac OS is better!
You shouldn't need to find freeware replacements. All that means is that you're admitting the included software sucks.
See above. Additionally, tools like AppleScript and Automator are for end users, not developers. That's the point: they're easy. Perl and C++ are most emphatically not a replacement for this!
The point I was trying to make is that the Windows counterparts aren't as good.
You missed my point. It's not that it "looks prettier" (although it does), it's that it works better. It actually is more usable and efficient.
Alright, fine -- I concede that point.
As I explained above, third-party apps don't count!
Doesn't SP2 break bunches of stuff?
My point is that it's not possible, practically speaking, to actually run as a non-admin user. Therefore, any claims that "it works if you're not an admin" are irrelevant!
For the fourth time, we're comparing OSs, not third-party apps!
Well, I care for ideological reasons, because it's more efficient, because I can look at the code and see how it works, because the "many eyes" theory says it's less likely to have defects... I'm sure there are other good reasons too.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Great rebuttal! For that, you just became my friend.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Windows 95 through ME (but not any Windows NT, which includes 2000 and XP) are basically GUI shells on top of a 32-bit DOS extender, with some interesting behaviour because of this, notably excitement caused by multiple device drivers for the same hardware (16-bit DOS MSCDEX versus the Windows VXD that performed the same function, for example).
Windows NT started out with graphics device drivers in the kernel, and the remainder of the GUI in user space. This was found to be unacceptably slow on the hardware of the day, so large chunks of the GUI were moved into kernel space, and hacked around until they functioned.
I've no idea if Windows XP has stabilised those kernel add-ons, or if Microsoft have reversed this decision; however, a kernel bug has the potential to damage anything running on the system, while a process bug is more limited. Thus, running the GUI in kernel space gets you speed at the expense of system stability and security.
For a single-user system, it's not so bad that a GUI crash takes out the entire system; the user probably can't do anything once the GUI's down, and on the hardware of the day, we did not have soft power buttons, so the only sane reaction to a crashed GUI was to toggle the power, making the chances of saving any work slim regardless of where the GUI ran.
With soft power buttons, it becomes possible to (e.g.) sync the discs when power is hit, which would allow programs running under a crashed GUI one last chance to save state, ready to recover when the machine restarts; with the GUI in kernel space, there's no guarantee that the disc driver is in sane enough state to let you write without trashing all drives, so this sort of reliability improvement can't be implemented.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.