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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."
To summarize: It's a feature comparison, not performance.
A B A C A B B
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.
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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)
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.
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 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.
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.