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Mac Pro, Mac OS X Virtual Desktops Announced at WWDC

haym37 writes "Of the many announcements yet to come at WWDC, the first is the announcement of the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro contains two Intel Xeons, up to 3 GHz, and is supposed to be 1.6x to 2.1x the speed of the PowerMac G5 quad. It can hold up to 2 TB of internal storage and up to 16 GB of memory. The graphics card can be up to a Radeon x1900 or an FX4500. The case will be the same as the PowerMac." MacRumors.com is providing running coverage from the floor (Note: "[U]pdates will be automatically inserted at the top of the updates section. Do not reload manually."), including another announcement that OS X will include virtual desktops. What a great idea!

8 of 647 comments (clear)

  1. Minor Quibble... by e4g4 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The case will be the same as the PowerMac

    The outside of the case is almost the same as the G5 case...the inside is completely different, and has a pretty sweet setup for the drive bays, not to mention the 8 ram slots and room for a full length graphics card.
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  2. Apple pages by godawful · · Score: 4, Informative

    apples page on leopard is up here

    and the mac pros are here

    i noticed nothing was said about the finder.. shame.

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  3. 30" Cinema Display price reduction by cheezycrust · · Score: 5, Informative

    The 30 inch Cinema Display has it's price reduced from $2499 to $1999. I don't think this was said on the keynote, but you can see it on the website.

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  4. Re:My keynote thoughts so far... by also-rr · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dashboard sucks up WAY too much CPU (especially when starting)

    Are you sure it's Dashboard and not the widgets? I installed SuperKaramba and a few changes to the widget files dropped CPU usage from 30%+ to under 1%.

    If the widgets for Dashboard are also written by non-programmers they may be suffering from the same problems of polling too frequently. Why on earth do you need to update a display of how much hard disk space there is available every 100ms anyway!

  5. Re:Sounds like a nice GUI for versioning though by sp67 · · Score: 5, Informative

    VMS? Try RSX-11M - that's mid '70s for you young boys and gals.
    Yup, everytime you saved a file you'd get a new version; if I saved file.ext, I actually got something like file.ext;17, and accessing file.ext would get the latest version, in this case 17. You had commands to purge files or entire directories - that is, delete everything but the latest version.
    And this at a time where a 40MB hard-disk was a beast the size of a washing machine. I can't believe I had to wait about 30 years to get this nice little feature back... oh wait, we just got a preview, I'll have to wait a little longer to get my hands on it.

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  6. Re:Photocopied! by mblase · · Score: 5, Informative

    About time with the virtual windows! Took them long enough...all other major *nix based window managers have them. Makes their "photocopying" comment at WWDC seem double edged, eh?

    In all fairness, Leopard's Spaces implementation looks like a quantum improvement on other virtual desktop managers I've used. (Granted, it's been awhile since I tried any since I was never very satisfied.) None of the other VDMs I recall were quite "Mac-like" enough--by that I don't mean flashy and animated, but easy to use and understand.

    They borrowed some design ideas from Exposé, it looks like; you can view all four of your desktops at once; you can drag-and-drop windows from one to the other; and they all use the same Dock instead of using different Docks for each desktop, which is the one thing I always wanted.

    See also Leopard's Time Machine. There's a dozen ways you could make this kind of backup-restore tool just as functional; you could probably make it flashy and animated a dozen different ways as well. Leopard's approach uses just enough flashiness to make it easy-to-use.

  7. Re:My keynote thoughts so far... by vought · · Score: 5, Informative

    Timemachine? Gee Windows XP has had that feature for quite a while...


    Apple's appears to be a versioning file system, rather than a "save everything in a hidden partition every x days" hack.

    But thanks for letting us know how great XP is.

  8. Re:Time Machine == ZFS ? by BDaniels · · Score: 4, Informative

    It doesn't appear to be a filesystem, just a backup app:
    http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.ht ml

    "Time Machine will back up every night at midnight, unless you select a different time from this menu."

    That's not a versioning file system, alas.