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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."
I'm going to hold off until GoogleOS comes out.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!"
> As distributed, what can you do with it?
Nearly everything on your list is perfectly supported right out of the box...
> Word processing?
Wordpad
> Financial stuff?
Calc
> Photo & image manipulation (Paint prog?)
Paint
> Spreadsheets?
Calc
> Desktop publishing?
Wordpad
> Webpage authoring / editing?
Notepad
Come on, man. What more do you want?
Too true!
Here is another example that beautifully illustrates your point: Apple's Mac OS X vs a Pomegranate.
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 pomegranate, I cannot do those things. However! The pomegranate is aesthetically pleasing, tastes pretty good, is high in antioxidants and has a certain odour.
The fact that I can compare Apple's OS to an actual piece of fruit speaks volumes about their qualities. Apple truly trumps the hacker shop that is... uh... God.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I don't know that I agree. My sisters both use the dashboard alot. They are not super tech saavy (or any more than girls growing up in an engineer family would be), but they find it useful.
I still like Tiger better than XP, even if work and research dictated that I use XP and Cygwin (it is my last IBM-comp... I am convinced of that now). Features that I love having in Tiger and wish were in XP:
This guy is a fan boy for MS and I will give him credit: he gives Tiger something of a fair shake... kind of. Some of his claims are a bit crazy. Does he actually expect us to believe that MS had the idea for desktop search before Google, etc? I call shenanigans! He claims that the screenshot in here and a 30 second Bill Gates clip Bill Gates clip serve as evidence of MS and desktop search. Yeah right!
Windows had a search, and a crappy one at that. Search is not a new idea, exactly. But Google and others did it differently because the MS way was broken. And despite his review, Windows desktop search is NOT as good as Google (it builds a bigger cache and you can't pick where it goes...grumble). WinFS is/sounds like XML based meta data for files and database related ideas for searching on that meta data. This does not imply "building an index" as much as it implies a hashing schema for file structures. I.e. certain meta data allowing lookups based on hash values for the file.
WinFS is going to be slower... precaching is what makes Google Desktop fast.
But like I said, because Longhorn is so far from release and OS X is four gens deep, these are not even good comparos. Also consider that Darwin runs on multiple CPUs well. With the multi-core processors on the horizon, this is really the future of computing. I think/hope Longhorn/Vista is a disaster and helps to break the MS stranglehold a bit.
- I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows XP, despite people saying I would
- I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 2000, despite people saying I would
- I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 98, despite people saying I would
- I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 95, despite people saying I would
In short, everytime someone has said I would require new hardware for a Microsoft operating system release, I have had a perfectly usable system after upgrading to the new OS without buying hardware. Thats what makes me think I won't need to buy new hardware for Vista.And no, Im not running XP on the same hardware I ran Windows 95 on
Disregard the parent post. The author is a "known" Linux shill. She'll often post comments bashing MS and anything that paints Linux in a bad light. She'll frequently use ad hominem attacks to attempt to discredit articles posted by those who don't agree with her viewpoints.
/. And who is to blame her... after all her post was modded "Informative".
How can you debate a point when you must rely on ad hominem?
Despite the fact that her posts are horribly inaccurate she whores for a lot of karma by pandering to the Linux zealots on
I do agree with your main point. But I believe your math is a bit off.
Windows owns around a 95% marketshare and Macintosh has around a 1.9%, and Linux has around a 2%. Please note that I am talking client not server OS.
Now, I bet that way less than 10% of the Windows users will upgrade to Vista within the first month of release. So I do agree with your email in principle. The bad news for these users is that companies like Dell, HP and IBM will make Vista the default OS and that will drive Vista as the defacto standard within a couple of YEARS. Then after a year or so most large companies will standardize on it, and thus drive even more sales.
Now, having said that, it is my belief that Linux will continue to chew in to Microsoft's client market year after year and this will in a weird way also help Apple. It is my belief that when Linux hits around 10-15% marketshare the game will be over for Microsoft. At around 12% ALL companies will be forced to provide drivers and support and thus the core reasons for not using Linux starts to fade away. It is also my belief that it will take Linux far longer to reach 8% desktop market share than it will take it to go from 8 to 12%. Once the ball starts rolling it will be hard to stop it.
I say 10 to 12% because that is around the time management types start listening and reacting. A perfect example is Mozilla and Firefox. Quite a few companies around my area have started "fixing" their web applications because they didn't work with anything but IE. Well it took Mozilla to get enough traction for these companies to allocate resources to fix their applications. Trust me, NONE of those companies wanted to do this work. It took them time and time is money...
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
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.
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.