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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."
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.
To summarize: It's a feature comparison, not performance.
A B A C A B B
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.
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.
Vista for x64 will release at the same time as Vista x86 32 bit. Like Windows XP x64, Vista x64 will be fully 64-bit capable with a compatibility layer for 32-bit stuff.
There will probably be some stipulations for driver signing on Vista that the vendors must support both platforms. Which is good, because it really doesn't take too much for fix drivers to work on x86-64. Most Linux distributions for AMD64 have had the full compliment of drivers for years.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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)
[...]Apple is the largest single hardware vendor[...]
Where did you get that idea from. They are certainly in the top 5 but they are way behind dell in terms of sales.
it still does it better than windows for a mere $1,000 more than your silly little white box."
Wow you can buy a small form factor PC for -$500 dollars? Sign me up for a billion of them. Oh, wait, you didn't mean to include minis. OK, just send me a few million of those free consumer grade laptops and a couple of those $500 professional laptops with the firewire, multiple monitor support, comprehensive software package etc.
Or maybe you can do a little research and stop spreading that ridiculous FUD about how expensive Apple machines are. Apple does not offer as many price points and form factors, but they are pretty competitive if you compare them on the included hardware and software vs. price.
Macintosh has never been accepted on corporate desktops
It hasn't?
*looks around the office*
Then what are all these white computers with apple logos on them?
Seriously - this is complete and utter rubbish. Try using 'Machines running windows are still significantly ahead in numbers compared to Apple computers'. A large number of graphics/film companies work on Apple computers, because that was the industry standard ten, five, years ago - and in a way this is a mirror of the home environment, where the evening-out of platforms and their performances fail to have significant effect on the number of X Y or Z machines, because of the status quo.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
It's called Column Browsing. Beautiful design it is...
example:
http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/usd/cts/ol/os/mac_osx/Pan
Well, maybe the fact that most of the reviews are saying that it runs as fast as windows XP on comparable machines. Of course, that would mean that you'd have to RTFA.
On a side note - you can do a comparison of Tiger and Vista on the same hardware now. Apple just doesn't want this to become too well known...
And they are behind HP/Compaq too
Let me apologize for my poor level of English...
Its not turned on by default, but you can if you want. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050 430233117572&query=nfs+spotlight
Once the share is indexed, I think the trick is doing a Find (CMD+F) in the Finder, not just using the Spotlight button in the menubar
It is funny to think he might actually be serious :)
Select the file you want to add metadata to. Hit Command-I to bring up the Get Info box. Click the disclosure triangle next to Spotlight comments. Add any additional comments.
The basic metadata is dependent on the developer to create hooks to Spotlight for. It's well documented on the developer site & relatively easy to implement.
By default, Spotlight only indexes the boot volume. You can enable indexing on other volumes with the command line mdutil tool. For shared volumes it's not advised since multiple users could try to create the index, causing conflicts. If there isn't an index, Spotlight will still be able to search it, but it falls back to the older search format
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.
As a network admin, you will appreciate these features of Vista:
- Users don't run as Administrator by default in Vista (and the OS handles installers / setting changes gracefully)
- Active Directory now works with Fast User Switching.
- Better error logging (fortified with XML!)
- Integrated memory diagnostics & SMART monitoring
- Fewer Images because hardware changes don't require a new image
- Windows Imaging for system imaging
- Firewall integrated with Group Policy
- Publically available WinPE for recovery that boots from USB drives
- Hybrid suspend/hibernate prevents data loss in suspend from power loss
- More advanced managment console
- Monad shell (better scripting)
- More advanced task scheduler
- Management web-services for remote management
- Windows Resource Protection (like Windows File Protection but also protects the registry)
- Windows Deployment Services
All of these are major useful features that help in a corporate environment. If don't think there's anything worthwhile in Vista, you need to look again.
Right. You won't *have* to buy new hardware for Vista either, provided you don't intend to use many of Vista's features. This has been documented several times already.
I remember upgrading from Win3.11 to Win95. It was a 100 MHz computer with some 32 MB RAM.
The slowdown was immense, although I cannot really claim the system was unusable - only irritating.
A 386 with 8 MB of RAM (IIRC the stated minimum was 4) was disastrous; the woman who worked on that computer literally came to work, started the computer and went for a coffee - by the time she was back, the computer was just about ready for work.
It was a 15-floppy version of Windows, too... By all the Greek Pantheon, that was a slow and tedious install...
When i bought a new computer, a Duron 600 (it is the one I'm presently working on) with 128 MB of RAM (now upgraded to 256), Win98SE worked OK. A re-install here and a re-install there, but it worked. I guess it still does; haven't booted into Windows for almost a year.
When XP came around, I went to see how it worked. Then I compared the computer it was installed on with my computer (pun alert) and decided it was not worth it - it would take way too much disk space and memory. It's not quite the same as the 386 and Win95, but it is nevertheless a big deal - I work on a computer similar to mine in college - it has Win2k and is much slower than my computer running Gnome with quite a lot of bells and whistles. Now imagine XP... Gods know I did.
So no, I never *had* to buy new hardware for any of the new Windows versions, but all - except maybe Win98SE - have shown a steady increase in resource hogging compared to the previous version.
Not all of us can afford computers new enough to run the upgrades to our operating systems... Hell, if push came to shove, I couldn't even afford Windows (no, I don't own the copy on my computer - it's one of the reasons I run Linux, although practically no-one in Croatia really buys Windows they use at home. *Way* too expensive.) - when I bought this computer, although new, it was already a not-so-good middle-class model - a month or so later, the weakest processor widely available was Duron 700.
My next upgrade (coming soon, thanks to a quiz show a while ago) will not be forced by Windows, but my upgrade of Windows (should I choose to waste some disk space only for a few games and troubleshooting service for my friends) will undoubtedly coincide with my hardware upgrade. Care to guess why?
Ignore this signature. By order.
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
The DRM stuff will require an upgrade in order to function with new media formats, but given that no vendor is legally allowed to let the HD content run on current hardware, you can't pin that one on Microsoft. Additionally, since it will take a long while before a healthy number of consumers have access to HD-compatible hardware, I suspect it will be some time before real quantities of content are available in those formats.
I don't know if transactional NTFS will require the WinFS service pack yet, but I know it will be an absolute godsend to IT departments.
TFA doesn't mention anything about the performance of Vista. So, reading it wouldn't have helped the grandparent.
mbbac
"Surprisingly, Windows Vista Beta 1 is a speedy performer. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see statistics showing that it's already faster than XP on the same hardware. This is somewhat confusing to me, since early betas are generally not tuned for performance. Plus, Vista has an incredibly dense UI compared to XP. I'll be interested to see whether this changes over time."
1 _03.asp
Found on: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_beta
Have you ever compared the speed-feel of using a crappy XP machine (say my 1.3Ghz Pentium M laptop) to, oh, say a top-of-the-line OS X machine?
Nope. But I've certainly done a lot of comparisons using middle of the road, but similar OS X and Windows Systems. For a very long time my desktop held two machines I used for very similar tasks, mostly using the same software. The PC had a little more RAM and a lot more Ghz, but all in all they were both middle of the road professional machines. You know what I found? Windows is faster at some things, OS X at others. For example, opening a folder with many items in it was faster in Windows. Opening applications was faster on the mac. Running Perl scripts and performing intensive text mapping in Adobe applications was much faster on the mac. Previewing images was faster in Windows, but it could not handle nearly as many types of images. The most important thing for me, however, was multitasking. Windows was just fine at running an application. It was a little slow running an application while several other applications sat idle. It sucked donkey balls when trying to run a dozen programs simultaneously or when trying to have multiple programs actually do things at the same time. I kind of like to tell an application to do something, then move on to another task. With Windows it sometimes took more than a minute just for focus to switch to another application and then doing anything was like working on a 386.
I use a lot of different OS's, but when comparing Windows to the mac, well Windows takes forever to accomplish tasks and can't handle many of the things I do every day. Right now I have about 15 applications running, including several web browsers, some Adobe apps, mail, terminals, calendar , graphics editor, chat client, word processor, XML editor, diagram layout app, etc. That just did not work for me on Windows. I had to be content with a terminal, layout app, and maybe one other application if I wanted it to be responsive enough to get anything done. I still use Windows for tasks where it is faster or better and for compatibility testing, but it just can't cut it as a general workstation OS.
you can turn off all the slow Finder animations," but no one at the Mac store has ever been able to demonstrate this to me.
This right here tells me you have never given OS X a try as a working OS. Pretty much anyone can figure this out in about 15 minutes. All of the whizbang animations, etc. are able to be turned on or off in the system preferences pane for that feature. Apple is offering a 30 day trial of mac minis right now. You can sign up at their website and they will ship you one. Try it for a month and if you don't like it, ship it back. It will cost you as much as it takes to ship it back. They are certainly not fast machines, but they are fine for most general purpose computing or to get a feel for the OS. Personally, I don't think I could ever give up plug-in system wide services (like spell checking, grammar checking, and translation for all text, everywhere) nor do I think I could give up the functional multitasking and real CLI.
This is not exactly true. When an AMD64 (IA32e/EMT64) is executing in long mode, the cpu does offer a compatibility mode, but it is up to the operating system to set the necessary descriptor tables and initiate the 32-bit task. Likewise, the OS has to be aware so that it can thunk 32-bit library values (change from 64 to 32-bit on the call and from 32 to 64-bit on the return). So a fair amount of OS support is required to run 32-bit native code on a 64-bit native OS. Is it a lot of code? Not really, but the ramifications could be far reaching depending upon kernel design/structure. With MS having built Alpha and Itanium 64-bit builds of the NT kernel, I would think that most of those issues were tackled in a nicely portable way years ago.
I understand that this was a joke, but I'm gonna reply helpfully anyway:
I would venture a guess that Duke Nukem Forever would have similar hardware requirements to that of Unreal Tournament 2007 because it will (supposibly) run on the Unreal 3 engine. Game and graphics freaks should definitly check out the Unreal 3 Technology page
http://brandonbloom.name
WinFS = MS SQL server (and associated cache/index technology), functioning AS the filesystem. No underlying NTFS or FAT garbage, just pure database tech powering the filestorage/retrieval. How can you possibly think it will be slower? Seriously? We are talking about something DESIGNED for this functionality!
Precaching is "fast" relative to just using the filesystem for a search. Obviously this is because windows filesystems were not initially designed for fast indexed searches. WinFS however (so we are told) will be. The way it will be used requires that it will at least be able to retrieve results at the speed we now browse directories. In reality it will hopefully be a lot more powered.