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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."
...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
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.
...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*
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.
"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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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!"
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.
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.
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).
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
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...
It's called Column Browsing. Beautiful design it is...
example:
http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/usd/cts/ol/os/mac_osx/Pan
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
10 minutes? You n00b. I can do it in 2min.
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.
Now there's a scary thought... maybe Microsoft will refuse to activate anybody's copy if they don't sell at least 200 million copies. I mean it's bad enough that you have to ask MS for permission to use the software you paid for, but what would you do if they said 'no'?
Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
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.
"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
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.
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.
what, the combination "informative offtopic flamebait" doesn't make sense to you?
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.
The short answer: yes.
The longer answer: the issue isn't limited to "finding files on their own computer," although it's easy to misinterpret it that way. Usually, finding an individual file isn't that hard, assuming you already know what the file is. What if...
The fact is that the standard "directory/filename" method of organizing data requires a lot of consistent upkeep to work well over time, and is just terrible at storing information that other apps want to keep organized for you (eg, any mail application). Want to see this in action? Go to any medium-or-larger sized organization, browse to their file server, and drill down into a couple of random folders. Point at the screen and ask someone to tell you what's stored there. I'll bet money that the majority of people will have no idea what they're looking at, and it only gets worse once the people who put the files there leave, or the projects get stale - tons of files noone needs, sitting there because noone thinks they have the authority to say "I can go ahead and delete this now."
One more brief example: I recently bought the PDF version of Agile Web Devlopment with Rails online, and saved it - along with every "beta book" they sent me - in my "~/Documents/Documentation/" folder. Not hard to remember that at all, but it's still faster for me to hit command-space, type "agile rails", and click on the first result, than it is for me to double click the finder, drill down to that directory, and double-click the file.
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
"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.
-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.
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.