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David Pogue Takes On Vista
guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.
kdawson, the link to video not working...can you fix it?
Darn you broken video hyperlink!
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
Microsoft is just trying to express how much they love Apple.
Are we going to get a "someone doesn't like Vista" article every day until the operating system is released to the general public?
here http://nytimes.feedroom.com/?fr_story=d14603c1e23e 6ce37920a8134a2e27b1405a4991
Pogue is correct. Vista is a joke and MacOS X the coming leader.
http://cars.engine.net/
Since the poster broke the link to the video, it is available here:8 aabc2:10f959c69f8:-76e0&fr_story=d14603c1e23e6ce37 920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&st=1166446268999&mp=FLV&cp f=false&fvn=9&fr=121806_075108_718aabc2x10f959c69f 8xw76df&rdm=415999.3568509814
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=a71
This is a double feature. Its a "Slashdot Editors Suck" article AND a "Someone Doesn't Like Vista" article!
Its like Christmas a week early!
I didn't notice when I clicked on it, was it Zonk?
I've been testing Vista Business edition all weekend and so far I really like it. I'm also a Mac user, so I can compare the two firsthand. Vista takes a lot of the nice features of OS X and does them the right way in Vista. The gadgets are so much nicer in Vista than in OS X. They're easier to manage and they work more smoothly. The Vista user interface is absolutely beautiful from an eye candy point of view, and yet it doesn't seem to take any significant performance hit. My Mac Book Pro is not nearly as fluid in running OS X as my Dell laptop is with Vista. Both OS'es are 64-bit also. Even Photoshop CS3 runs much faster on Vista than on OS X.
Microsoft may have copied a lot of features and look from Apple, but they left the bad, took the good and have a much better implementation in my opinion.
Now if only Linux worked this well....
might remember that even before OS X was launched for its first version, the "vista" "road map" had been published clearly stating what major components would be part of Vista, on WinFS never made it while another, "Aero" has always been slated as part of the opertating system. Unlike apple Microsoft likes to get feedback from their customers before throwing something at them. So of course Mac users see 3d components, 3d windows and naturally assume that MS just ripped off the idea, however it's not fully the case - and the line isn't clear. The thing is: if you strip away the UI of vista and compare OS X and Vista based simply on their progamming models and underlying architecture - they are decidedly different. It would seem this author however is not qualified to make this evaluation.
Two, actually, if you plan on counting dupes.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
According to TFA: If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.
Would that really give you that much of a speed boost over using swap? Granted most USB sticks are pretty close to random access(a hell of a lot closer than hard drives at any rate), and have decent bandwidth, but wouldn't all of a sudden popping memory out of your system cause some serious system panicks? Also would you have to clear out the stick whenever you eject it? I am curious as to how microsoft did this.
I guess I will just have to wait to see some benchmarks to see how it performs.
Monstar L
For instance, when I found out that Mac OS's had the Unix shell I was happy & enthusiastic at the same time. Not because I use Mac but because I like that shell over so many others & I hope to see every operating system standardize their shell. I would also like to see the same done with security schemes.
Now, whether widgets came first or gadgets came first--I don't care. What I care about is that my job (and I'm sure a lot of people reading this are the same way) forces me to use Windows & sooner or later they'll get Vista. Should I really be bitching and making fun of Vista being an OS X clone? Or should I sit back and enjoy the fact that something is changing and--since they're mimicking an already successful operating system--it must be for the better.
I guess this is some form of operating system snobbery I'm not accustomed to.
My work here is dung.
Guess which feature the majority of users will disable.
Seriously, I hope there is some sort of privilege separation, only requiring password authentication for applications that need escalated privileges, otherwise this feature will be ignored left, right and centre.
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if that was either total bunk, or gross misrepresentation by the author.
The idea of using a flash drive to supplement main memory is assenine for a number of reasons. Like the above, yanking it out would leave the OS in a totally assed up state. As well, flash only has ~ 1-2 million write cycles. Your thumb drive would be toast in just a week or two if you were using it as RAM.
Didn't Apple steal from FreeBSD, and all of the millions of man hours that came from linux/unix clones. Not to mention Xerox... Oh and what about this David Pogue... he sounds a lot like Mossberg. Good artists borrow, Great artist steal. Grow up. Postings like this are boring. I am going back to Digg.
Apple is as evil as Microsoft.
It's doubleplusungood slashthink, comrades. Keep modding him flamebait.
There needs to be less shit thrown about who came up with what first. I don't really care who stole from who, all I care about is who does it best, and quite often thats the person who learns from the creator's mistakes and does it better.
"Some of the big-ticket Vista features and programs are eerily familiar, too. The biggest one is Instant Search, a text box at the bottom of the Start menu. As you type here, the Start menu turns into a list of every file, folder, program and e-mail message that contains your search phrase, regardless of names or folder locations. It's a powerful, routine-changing tool, especially when you seek a program that would otherwise require burrowing through nested folders in the All Programs menu.
A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer) window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited haystack. "
This stuff sounds like the google desktop search that sits in my coworker's taskbar as well as the toolbars that have been attached to everyones' browser for years; not some ripoff of the MacOS per se. By bet is that MS was likely looking at heading Google off at the pass and keep them off the desktop.
Mod parent up.
He should be Score: +5, GotBalls.
It's a bloody pain in the ass to port UNIX/POSIX/Linux software to it, unlike OS X.
http://outcampaign.org/
From the article
There's now a keystroke (Alt+up arrow) to open the current folder's parent window, the one that contains it.
Backspace opens the parent folder in XP & probably even in previous Windows version.
A summary of the fine article:
Sigh.
With a little effort, Microsoft could fit the David Pogue Takes On Vista review onto a sticker to put on the retail boxes. Until then, let's hope some enterprising Slashdot reader downloads a copy of Vista and offers something more substantive for discussion.
lame,slownewsday (tagging beta)
Dekker Dreyer
MS has a desktop monopoly.
Please don't redefine words as you wish.
I guess that by your own definition of monopoly, Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly, as they only controlled 91% of U.S. production at their highest ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
They'd have nobody to copy. Microsoft don't do anything unless they're forced to. Without Apple you would still be using MS DOS.
The question to ask, is, why use a knockoff like Windows when you can have the original? Especially when the TCO for Apple systems are a fraction of those for equivalent Windows systems.
Deleted
Ole Bill better watch this guy if he ever meets him in his favorite San Francisco gay bathhouse.....its soaap on a
rooooooaaaaaaaap time!
a recent typical USB thumbdrive is something like 10x faster at random access of 4KB chunks than even the fastest hard drives. So Vista can use one of these USB drives as a cache for the pagefile, speeding up a system quite a bit *IF* it is using the pagefile quite a bit. That is, if you're a bit low on RAM and the pagefile is getting hit pretty hard. Pop in a USB stick and allow it to use a portion for this feature and you should get a pretty decent boost. If, however, you already have tons of RAM you aren't likely to see as big of a gain. On my 2GB machine I can't tell the difference with a stick in or not. If it only had 1GB, or god forbid 512MB or less, perhaps this feature would be more noticable.
They say it needs cookies enabled and a Flash plugin. My browser (Mozilla Camino on Mac OS) has both, but doesn't play the video. Neither does Safari, which the NYT lists as a supported browser (it displays a gray rectangle).
F***. Learn from Youtube or Google video, or better yet, post the video there...
Deleted
I believe if you go read MS's FAQ on the ReadyBoost feature they state that today's flash drives should be good for 10 years or so for this duty. I guess in part because flash drives already randomize write locations to spread out the duty, and because MS uses some algorithm to ensure the cache is used for frequent pagefile contents.
Some might argue that since Apple doesn't support OS X on non-Apple kit and, therefore, doesn't compete with Microsoft. But (a) OS X can be installed and run quite nicely on non-Apple kit and (b) users of newer Apple hardware have a clear choice to continue the OS X upgrade path or the Windows upgrade path (or both).
Not to mention that many new Apple products compete head to head with Microsoft products. iTunes vs. Media Player, iPod vs Zune, Keynote vs Powerpoint, Pages vs Word, OS X Server vs Windows Server, Apple Developer Tools vs Visual Studio ...
...Kool-Aid they're serving in Redmond?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
That's what filesystem cache is for.
Indeed. When you have RAM to spare for caching.
What they're saying really is that Vista is going to blow the RAM on all of the existing PCs out there, and this is a kludge to get round spending the extra £20 for the RAM rather than a USB stick.
No, they're saying if you do this, your system will be faster, because it will.
Even on machines with multiple gigabytes of RAM, it will *still* provide a performance boost (albeit a relatively small one) because in many cases reading from a USB flash disk is faster than reading from a hard disk.
Read about what this technology is, how it works and what it's objectives are, rather than commenting from ignorance.
>>Sadly enough, i think that's more or less right.
Why are you sad? Sounds like you think Vista is a good thing. And BTW, nobody can make you upgrade your current computer to it, and probably for a year or more you'll still be able to buy XP systems from all the major vendors.
Can anyone comment on this? Last time I checked flash memory (and USB, even 2.0) are S_L_O_W. Caching flash to system memory for faster access to the flash drive I could see, but this just doesn't make sense.
Most Vista reviewes (and the /. reactions) fail to consider the mission of Vista in most big corporations. Sure, there might be some comparisons to Macintosh for the look & feel, but in a corporate (> 500 employees) environment, the Windows platform really shines. From a robust permission scheme, remote control of group policies and really easy deployment there's nothing like Windows. (The macintosh really falls down in a controlled environment.
Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?)
If you add Exchange to the mix, Windows really shines in the shared environment. Sure, for "grandma's" use and other special applications the Mac is a bright and shiny object, but it's just not a good team player.
A common gripe I have with the Mac OS community is this seeming insistence that everything that is cool or nifty, or even useful, is somehow a rip-off of something Apple did first. If you look at articles like this one, you'd think Apple invented the on-desktop search bar (Google), or widgets/gadgets (DesktopX, Konfabulator).
Apple often does things *better* than other companies (with the exception of Dashboard) but they usually don't do it FIRST. This makes the claim that everyone rips off their stuff from Apple pretty silly.
Lets look at some of these claims in the article regarding what Microsoft is "stealing" from Apple:
1. Glowing Min/Max/Close Buttons
Ugh, I'm sorry, but this is not an Apple first thing. I've seen this in Windows custom UIs (WindowBlinds for example) for a good long while now, not to mention game UIs and a bunch of Flash applications. This is a very nice design element, and yes Apple did it well, but they didn't do it first.
2. "Instant Search"
Yes, I know... you're trying to compare it to Spotlight and the traditional Sherlock tool. Guess what though, well before Spotlight there was Google Desktop which gave you the in-frame search box. I like Spotlight a lot, it makes navigating files on my system a hell of a lot easier, but it's not new, and all similar search systems aren't instantly copycats of it.
3. Sidebar and Gadgets/Widgets
Like I said before, the Gadget/Widget thing has been around a LOT longer than Apple fans like to think. Dashboard was the first attempt to integrate them straight into the OS as a bundled feature, but it was pretty poorly implemented. Apple in this regard was several years late to the party. The MS Sidebar is also a fairly poor implementation... so I guess if anything you can accuse MS of stealing some of Apple's own bad design work.
4. The bundled apps "Photo Library" "DVD Maker" "Chess Titans" etc...
Umm... ok... I'll give you Apple folks this one. With the way MS broke apart the Outlook features into individual apps is a little too close to the iCal, Address Book, Mail.app scheme. This one is probably a straight-rip from the Apple playbook.
5. Flip3D a poor man's Expose
Bull. Flip3D is a cheesy way to show off the 3D capabilities in the desktop layer. It has nothing to do with Expose and the multiple ways to display everything currently running. I think Expose does things way better. Flip3D is a gimmick, nothing more. If MS wanted to ape the Expose design, they could have easily done it better.
There are a lot of things Apple does well, and the article does admit that Apple borrows, often even from Windows, to get its feature set. However, the claim that these features were taken from Apple as opposed to being taken from wherever Apple themselves snagged them is presumptuous.
Worked for me using camino on mac when I saw it a few days ago. Do you have the latest flash?
Crawl with it would be more likely. OS X doesn't even run fast on a modern dual core processor or dual G5's. I'm always having to wait on my Mac to open up windows and dialog boxes. I never have this problem with Windows of Linux of any version.
Imagine a user who just bought an x86 Macintosh running OS X 10.4. Apple would like to sell that user a desktop upgrade when 10.5 comes out. Microsoft would like to sell that user a desktop version of Windows. That makes Apple and Microsoft direct competitors on the Intel desktop PC market.
I watched the video, which was actually some nice tongue-in-cheeck humor. Now I don't have much experiance with Mac OS, besides once getting frustrated because as a Windowised user I could find my way around and being too impatient to learn more about it.
Now having played with Vista and finding my way around it, the video suggest that the move to OS-X would be easier then ever!
Supporting MS products doesn't mean you have to like them.
you are attributing a hobby two two names, which refer to the same flesh&blood individual?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Microsoft copied the Apple Mac Computing metaphor (that was copied from xerox) They can do it again and again. In fact, this is the way of American Business today. Let the competition innovate and then offer the truly good ideas to the marketplace at a reduced cost. The courts said it is ok to do that.
-- Anybody here remember the Atari 800?
they use an author of numerous books and websites that are clearly OSX fanboy books. I use a Mac, and have read his books. However, to use Pogue as a reviewer crosses the line by a mile-- for Vista. Sure, Vista is a dry-rip of OSX components. Microsoft is clearly predatory. But the guy isn't a neutral observer. Shame on the NYT.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
...but that didn't stop MS from eventually dominating the desktop. Vista too will also eventually dominate the desktop.
I have been running Vista on my laptop (HP nc6320) since it was released to business users. My laptop is a Core Duo 1.66Ghz with 512MB of ram. It was sold as "Vista ready" and even had that wonderful 100% Vista Compatible sticker on the side. Sadly, it was not.
Vista failed to recognize almost all of the hardware. Thankfully, it did recognize the wireless card, so I was able to go to HP's site and download most of the hardware. It never did recognize the fingerprint reader (likely bad drivers) and there were two devices that came up as unknown device which I have yet to be able to track down. Also, since the video card is shared memory, I do not get all of the nice visual features on this laptop that I would on a more powerful desktop.
That being said, I am very happy with the performance of this latop. The boot time is significantly nicer, and it runs Office 2007 perfectly. I also enjoy the menu structure so much more. Some of the layout reminds me of Mac/Linux, such as not having a "Documents and Settings" folder, but instead having a "Users" folder on the root drive. Things like this are not massive changes to the user experience, but for someone like me, who works on both Macs and PCs all day, it seems more natural, and I do feel I'm a little more productive during the day.
I would actually like to replace Windows XP on my home machine with Vista, which can handle the special effects, but as I have a very old Brooktree tv tuner card, I will likely be stuck with XP until I can afford a new tuner card as well. The Beta releases of Vista did not recognize the card, so I don't have any hope for the final release.
Also, for those wondering, Windows ReadyBoost has done wonders for my latop performance. I can actually tell a difference in the opening/closing time of office documents when I have my 1GB thumb drive attached. My older 256MB drives were not even offered the option of ReadyBoost, but they are not USB2.0 native, so that is likely the issue with those units.
"It's a powerful, routine-changing tool, especially when you seek a program that would otherwise require burrowing through nested folders in the All Programs menu."
So is that because Vista is good or because XP was so badly designed...? (Everything in a single menu???)
"A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer) window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited haystack."
Where has Microsoft been for the last 12 years? I had that in IRIX back in the early '90s.
Still, the most insidious thing of all has to be the five different versions, with all except the "Ultimate" being crippled in some sneaky way that you won't figure out until you've paid your money thinking you've got the operating system you need. By the time you notice it, you've already gone to all the trouble of installing Vista, finding drivers, etc. so you'll pretty much be forced to pay for "Ultimate" - at $400 a copy.
No sig today...
I want to call this article redundant for a variety of reasons. First, it is somewhat superificial and hasn't move beyond what other superficial reviews have done in the past (This is the 50th time I heard the copy OSX routine). Second, does it matter how well Microsoft did its latest incarnation of Windows? If you buy a computer in the next year that is not from Apple computer, you will buy some version of Vista. It is not like you can choose something else to run your computer unless you do it aftermarket. Who short of a geek will bother?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Please mod the parent up.
You are missing the point. RAM is orders of magnitude faster than USB flash disks, both in sustained reads and random access reads (and the gap is even wider for writes). The argument is that if you add a bit more RAM and use it to do the same thing you are using the USB drive to do then you will get even more benefit without all the added complexity. Windows has traditionally used memory fairly inefficiently in this way, marking things as stale and getting rid of them.
Now there is a real counter-argument for this, and that is you can get a lot more storage space for $20 in flash memory rather than RAM. So where the cost/benifit analysis comes down is a bit more complicated. Oh, and you do have to add in the fairly high processor usage cost for going through USB to this.
If the review seems superficial, it's because of Pogue's target audience being average end users. I thought the actual review was quite balanced (features x,y,z seem to be taken straight from OS X but Apple also also rips off other dev shops and they aren't the only new features, for example q) and contained appropriate content for the target market. Most users don't really care about the guts of the system. They care mostly about the eye candy, whether it will work with their existing programs and peripherals, and how fast or slow things are going to run.
The unspoken message is Sure, X is 'evil', but you can't get away from evil. So, just use X! because, you know...
[X being MS, GWB, fossil fuel, blood-letting, etc.]
"...objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences, subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny." -Gould
Just a few questions:
.deb's -- Huh? That won't work either?
Where can I download the DVD iso's so that I can try it on a spare PC?
Huh? I have to pay for it? Oh. -- You mean like I have to contribute to a user group for the cost of the blank media, Right? -- No prob. I'll give 'em $5 and bring donuts to the install party.
What?! They demand a larger contribution?! How Rude!
Does MythTV 0.20 install OK on it? Once I get it loaded, I can just type 'yum install mythtv-suite', and I'll be set, right?
Huh? It doesn't use RPMS?! No prob, I'll just install the
What?! -- There aren't even any package repositories at all?!
You mean I'll have to build everything from source? -- Well, OK, I can see the benifits of that. -- No problem, I'll just download the Tarballs and type 'make'
Huh? I doesn't include a compiler?!
Frankly, I don't think the mirror sites will get much traffic for this distribution!
It's pretty ironic that all the features in Vista Pogue is making fun of as having been "ripped off" by Apple were themselves things Apple "ripped off" from others: desktop search, dashboard, and 3D chess. The same is true of many other features Apple marketing likes to brag about: hardware accelerated windowing, metadata file systems, the Cocoa libraries, translucency, WIMP interfaces, etc.
None of this would really matter much: it's fine for companies to copy from each other. The only reason to even discuss it is because Apple's favorite marketing meme is that everybody is "ripping them off". So, Apple and Microsoft, since you're not willing to acknowledge where the ideas you are using actually have come from, can you both please STFU about "innovation" altogether?
So 2 million write cycles * 4 GB flash drive = 8,000,000,000 MB of total writing capacity. Typical throughput to a flash stick is on the order of 10 MB/s. 8,000,000,000 MB / 10 MB/s = 800,000,000 second lifetime. 800,000,000 second / 60s/min / 60min/hr = 222,222 hours / 24hrs/day = 9,259 days / 365days/year = 25 YEARS! If you were writing to the drive at a constant 10MB/s the entire time!!
1 million writes, and 1 gig flash = 3.125 years of CONSTANT usage to wear out the drive.
And either the OS or the flash stick can ensure that writes are evenly spaced around the physical drive while appearing logically just like a normal disk.
I think you will do just fine.
spotlight (ripped off of locatedb in linux, and quicksilver)
widgets/gadgets (google 'konfabulator')
calendar app (i'm sorry, it's a bloddy calendar, they all look the same)
photo app (a program that shows thumbnails of pictures, no iPhoto wasn't the first to do this either)
GL Chess (this is really grasping at straws)
i use linux and macs.
pogue's video is nothing but the lamest and basest mac fetishist tomfoolery.
i think the windows is ripping off OSX rhetoric is really weak. more than likely the general pool of OS/Desktop paradigm notions evolve simultaneously in the computing landscape and apple enjoys a faster time to market. i'm looking forward to apple claiming they invented 'workspaces' on the desktop.
i don't like microsoft but, the people who spend their days trying to make Microsoft out to be carbon copying Apple's ideas should shave their heads and don black turtlencks to complete the army of Jobbs image they represent to people who understand more than Cupertino marketing rhetoric.
human interface design is a painful process of trial and error. the way most recent innovations have appeared in it's realm is from the trial and error, survival of the fittest notions landscape that is the open source desktop world. apple owns none of these ideas. if microsoft is getting on the band wagon with them, apple does not get points for 'being into widgets before being into widgets was "cool"'
And then read some of his conclusions:
Granted, he does offer criticism along with the praise and does have some barbs. But over all, it was a fairly well balanced review.
What a fucking sad day this is, when swapping to usbflash is a "feature" (instead of having a proper swap architecture that _naturally_ allows swap on any device).
And what a fucking sad day this is when you have to explain generously to persistent ignorants why this is a bad idea. Swap to floppy, children, and witness computing at the speed of your own minds.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
I have a problem with choosing this specific reviewer, whose income and livelihood surrounds a competitive offering. I have to dismiss the content, no matter how good it is, because the reviewer derives his livelihood from Apple. It has inherent bias.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What a fucking sad day this is, when swapping to usbflash is a "feature" (instead of having a proper swap architecture that _naturally_ allows swap on any device).
ReadyBoost is not swapping.
And what a fucking sad day this is when you have to explain generously to persistent ignorants why this is a bad idea. Swap to floppy, children, and witness computing at the speed of your own minds.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Ironic that you should be calling other people "ignorant".
You are missing the point.
No, I'm not. I understand what you are saying perfectly.
*You* are the one not getting the points that *adding more RAM is not always possible* and *this is not meant to replace real RAM, but to supplement it*.
ReadyBoost is, essentially, a DIY version of harddisks-with-builtin-flash.
You get the feeling that Microsoft's managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, "Copy that."
If you believe what Marlin Eller (a former Microsoft exec) wrote in his book, Microsoft has been doing this since Windows 1.0. Why did the first few versions of Windows use cooperative multitasking? Because the Macintosh didn't do multitasking at all, and because cooperative multitasking made running a single app seem faster and more responsive to Bill Gates as he shuffled between the team developing Windows and the team working on the Applications Apple was writing for the as-yet-unrevealed Macintosh.
Bill Gates loved the Macintosh, and I suspect he still does... he sees Apple as Microsoft's unpaid unofficial brainstorming lab. He doesn't care if a few geeks think of Vista as an OS X clone, because he knows that 99.44% of the customer base simply don't care.
The much improved Internet Explorer 7 (also available for Windows XP) alerts you when you're visiting one of those fake bank or eBay Web sites (called phishing scams).
... unique among all browsers and other applications that display untrusted files ... a sign of improbable (and probably criminal) incompetance or mind-bogglingly callous cynicism.
Unfortunately Internet Explorer, Active X, and the Desktop are still the same incestuous codependant family, with he least competant member... the HTML control... left in charge of security.
The level of integration in applications that use the HTML control is so great that it's inherently impossible to prevent cross-zone attacks. I can only categorize their continued use of this bankrupt approach
How nice of Pogue to put that link in there. I wonder if he gets a kickback.
What does the "robust permission scheme" matter when Internet Explorer is always there to give that "typhoid mary" effect to the OS.
Oh, I know, I know, every new release of Windows comes with new tools to cripple all your applications so they don't have to fix the fundamental design flaws in COM/ActiveX-based applications like IE and Word. But by now even the biggest Windows fans have to admit, surely, that this band-aid approach can't work... the basic design has to be fixed at the application level.
nonsense, you have no idea what you're talking about.
apple's Mail program stores its mails in mbox format, i.e. one file per mailbox. spotlight finds your mails perfectly. Same for addressbook records.
Bart
What about "Looks, locks, lacks" don't you understand? Vista can easily be "infinitely more pleasant to use" than any previous Windoze incarnation and still suck eggs next to every other OS. Microsoft's unstable, disorganized, binary registry configured, single screen user interface is not much of an improvement over Windoze 3.1 and hard to make worse. DRM and treacherous computing are the things that can actually make things suck more, so Vista is heavy on that. The consensus opinion is that Vista will give you some eye candy at tremendous hardware and software cost. At ten gigs, it still does not match what NeXT gave the world back in 1991. Mac gives you much more and GNU/Linux will deliver more for much less cost to your current hardware.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
IE7 is not "improved" unless you mean "doesn't run right". And I suggest that M$ fire the idiot who put IE7 on the Automatic Updates "Critical" list.
I've seen enough installs (My dept manages 5500 pcs) of IE7 trying (operative word) to run on underpowered machines with not enough resources (poor school district) that the system becomes completely useless. I mean, what the hell is a browser doing using 150 MB Ram upon being opened?
I absolutely believe that M$ knew that this was going to happen, and is trying to get people to upgrade perfectly good computers because "the internet is broken", after IE7 has been installed. Our Dept is taxed enough trying to keep the machines functional, and we don't need any more "job security" from M$, thank you very much.
Suffice it to say, I've uninstalled IE7 from every computer its been installed on, because it simply doesn't work on any of them I've seen. I think I'm gonna scream the next time someone calls me and says "the internet is broken" when all it is, is IE7!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
oh -- it's this guy !!!!
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
This is especially important if you remember the old "joke" that listed the steps of several OS'es to change network settings. Simply enough in all the unix variants and a whole checklist in windows.
Nobody can deny that slashdot editors are biased but not including such faint praise "product version 2 is slightly better then version 1" is just common sense.
Now if the naming scheme or network setup were actually better then in OS-X AND that had not been mentioned THEN that would have been wrong, but as you yourselve note, the article doesn't claim that doesn't it?
Compare it like this. The first chinese car introduced to europe is actually dangerous to drive. The last one introduced is not as likely to kill you. Still doesn't mean it is a good car that can compete with existing brands. it just ain't as crap as the previous model.
When did it stop being a good thing to look at the completion and attempt to take the best parts of what they do and try to do it better? You see this type of behavior in every market, it's nothing new nor is it something to whine about. Sure there needs to be some genuine innovation, but there is nothing wrong with saying "hey those guys did a pretty decent job with this feature, we like it, but we can probably improve it a little."
proxy
if not redundant, here's a mirror of pogue's video http://youtube.com/watch?v=MDNuq94Zg_8
I don't care that M$ blatantly ripped of OSX (and they did) - I don't have a mac so I can't run OSX (legally). Also, there is one feature that I value in Windows that OSX doesn't have. I can't play any of my games, or run any of my programs on OSX.
End of story.
Thanks for all the feature R&D apple - I'll enjoy most of it on my PC now (actually truth be told I will turn most of the shiny off straight away - I like my solid grey windows with blue titlebars).
Feel free to make this a PC vs Mac ad.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
1: The most probable is that most existing machines won't have remotely enough RAM spare for caching and so Vista will suck badly. And they won't have enough RAM spare because
2: They think the NTFS buffer cache is crap.
You choose. Either way it's a kludge which just doesn't make any sense any other way.
Deleted
Apparently you weren't smart enough to read the "M$" bulletins that showed how to disable the automatic updates for IE7. I guess that's their fault. And I call bullshit on the 150MB on opening. I have about 4 plug-ins running and opening IE7 takes far less RAM than that. Also, if you want to talk about memory use let's have a gander at Firefox first. Run FF 2.0 for a few hours and then let me know how many hundreds of MBs of RAM it's using.
Balanced? That's a joke. It's pretty obvious he's a huge Mac fan. It takes about 2 minutes to Google and do a YouTube search and see what kind of bias this guy has.
For your benefit, i went as far as reading up on it. If you google a bit, you find:
Matt Ayers, who is the Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Client Performance group and basically owns the ReadyBoost feature, answers:
Q: What happens when you remove the drive?
A: When a surprise remove event occurs and we can't find the drive, we fall back to disk. Again, all pages on the device are backed by a page on disk. No exceptions. This isn't a separate page file store, but rather a cache to speed up access to frequently used data.
So what these gentlemen at Microsoft have is some data on disk that by having just been read or any other reason is deemed as desirable to be cached for faster access. In any sane architecture, you cache to RAM because that's where the orders-of-magnitude-benefit is to be found. But when you run out of ram you have to dump data to a storage device, like this USB solution. That is swapping, and these gentleman are swapping their disk cache to disk, which is telling. This design assumes that a multi-gigabyte RAM system is trashing and:
1) The data required to regain responsiveness is to be found on the fast seek swap (USB device)
2) That data is also small enough that reading it from USB with AES encryption will be done in smaller time than a direct read from hard drive (which is heavily scheduled due to trashing)
3) That the load level is just enough to trash the high-transfer-speed hard drive but not trash the easily overwhelmed USB thingy they gave you at the last trade show.
4) Data write scenarios aren't even considered, since your data is either all the way to the hard disk (like a man, dammit) or still on a USB drive that can be surprise-removed without system failure (no failure but no integrity either)
What these gentlemen at Redmond wished they had written was a performance-aware multi-device swap system. Which would have been somewhat praise-worthy, if you ignore the fact that a single dedicated kernel hacker could probably do the same in Linux in a long afternoon.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
I'm glad Pogue likes Vista but I'll be honest, my next machine won't be running Windows. I'm tired of the Microsoft game, particularly with the Zero Day crap that's been running around.
I just find it awfully odd that the Word Zero Day flaw comes out the same week as general distribution of Office 2007 happened, and because 2007 used docx, it isn't affect. Riiight!
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=d14603c1e23e 6ce37920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&rf=bm
-- kieran
Dude, can we just kill the "who did widgets first" argument forever?
n tosh&story=Desk_Ornaments.txt
Here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Maci
The idea is from 1980's ferchrissakes. And the dashboard is the best implementation of widgets I've seen. I don't WANT them sitting on my screen. I want press and hold F12 to check things out and I want them to disappear when I release the button. That's what Widgets do.
You sound like a guy who's never used Mac OS X for more than 5 minutes. There's life outside Microsoft bubble and it's pretty vibrant and exciting. Macs just are not what they used to be in mid 90's. Mac OS X stomps all over Vista in pretty much all regards that matter to the consumer (business customers are another story). I pity the fools who are too lazy or stupid to check it out.
Call BS all you want. I've seen it. I have seen the M$ bulletins on how to disable the automatic updates of IE7, and that seems to be rather backwards, at least to me. M$ should have made the bulletins on how to automatically install IE 7 (MSI anyone???).
As for FF taking up huge amounts of ram, not on first load. Right now, mine is only 40m, which is a lot less than the IE 7 installs I've seen.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I think pogue forgot that mac os is a rip off in its self Hello, its Darwin (a free os) with a pretty gui, thats pretty much a commercial rip off of gnome/kde widgets, lol, look in kde/gnome for those as well mac os is about as inventive as microsoft windows
Does anyone take this guy seriously? He's not only the lowest life form known on this planet, a fanboi(with an "i") he's also a spammer and been known to abuse digg's(for example) system to get his articles on the first page. Just skip this one...
Even for the end user, what new features might interest them. Eye candy was so 2003. Right now, I am looking at eye candy provide by OSX. Yawn!! How can I find out whether any of these features will improve the general computing experience of those around me (who have not open up to OSX). I don't want to buy Vista to figure that out. Then, the end user has 3 version to choose at both ends of the price scale. Do they take basic or shell out for ultimate? Do you see the questions left open by his review?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
single screen user interface
To what are you referring to here?What idiot modded this offtopic?
How do you figure? http://www.hyperosforum.co.uk/images/LAURENT/VISTA /Vista15a%20-%20Games,%20Chess%20Titans.jpg
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Somehow, why I am not surprised that this has already been modded Flamebait???? It's good information... I may actually be able to talk someone into letting me test on Vista here in the office! :D
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
I just installed Vista on my laptop over the weekend, and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the biggest new feature of the OS...
Solitaire--basically unchanged from Windows 3.0 to Windows XP--has been totally overhauled. It's a DirectX game now. It's even been rated E by the ESRB. (Minesweeper, OTOH, is rated M for extreme violence and nudity.)
The real problem with BOB is that it didn't really matter. It keeps getting brought up as a scapegoat however, as it if were Microsoft's one problem from back when, and "hoo-boy, wasn't it a funny thing and what where they thinking?"
Noise about BOB entirely distracts from the fact that BOB wasn't Microsoft's one mistake, but rather characteristic of everything Microsoft has done since: a bad idea designed by committee and given a ridiculous interface that looks lame and insults the user.
Does his rant about BOB even make sense? Is he trying to say that entire tech media conglomerate has a conspiracy to fool all of us, and they are using BOB to do it? I enjoyed reading the article up to the BOB part. The parallels of Cairo to Vista are interesting and worth thinking about. But after the BOB and Cringley, thing, I don't know... I don't get it.
*shrugs, closes browser, gets back to work*
The read speed of a hard drive is ABOVE the read speed of a USB stick.
Even the fastest USB memory has a read speed of 20-30 Mbps, and a write speed even less. Hard drives routinely have 40+ Mbps read/write speeds.
So once again, I fail to see the benefits of supplementing your memory with a flash disk, when hard-drive based swap would be faster in almost all circumstances.
Microsoft's unstable, disorganized, binary registry configured, single screen user interface is not much of an improvement over Windoze 3.1 Sorry, but that's totally laughable. The NT-Line is pretty much a very different platform in comparsion to the DOS-based Windows. The early network-stack of the first NT was pretty similar to the BSD-Stack at that time. Of couse, that's only because microsoft hired some very skilled BSD-Developers. All that talk about how the one OS is so superior and the other is 10 years behind... todays desktop OS are not THAT different in their core functionality. Linux, NT and even the Darwin/Mach-Kernel, all three are more ore less monolithic/hybrid kernels, all have lots of kernelmode-drivers, protected memory, multitasking, networking integrated. So after all there seems to be a some kind of design-approach that all popular, modern Desktop-OS share. And as long as it benefits my user experience, I really don't care who invented it. I am also still trying to find a graphical Systemmanager for linux, which gives me the same power the registry or the MMC does in Windows ...
I disagree with your characterization of Apple's development methodology. In fact they have a lot of salaried people working directly on the kernel, incorporating the functionality Mac OS X needs for features like Disk Journaling, Spotlight and Time Machine, the design and incorporation of which are determined by the OS team. It's true that Apple includes a lot of open-source software and established standards in the OS, but frankly both Apple and Microsoft suffered for a long time from the Not-Invented-Here prejudice. I see Apple's willingness to use well-designed open source tools and standards as a refreshing change.
Also, although the Mac OS X kernel uses BSD in its subsystems, it is not "mostly BSD." The kernel is a hybrid of Mach 2.5 with BSD subsystems available. But you don't even need the BSD subsystem to use Mac OS X. The BSD subsystem is an optional part of the OS installation. Just in terms of raw bytes, the majority of the OS resides in the frameworks. The lowest-level frameworks like Foundation and ApplicationServices were originally developed by NeXT and are brilliantly executed. The choice of Objective-C may seem like a strange choice now, but it's lean, easy to learn, and makes software development far simpler. If NeXT/Apple only ever used what they could get out of the Darwin project, there wouldn't be very much to excite us about Leopard. So frankly, Apple is far more innovative than most Windows fanboys think.
The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.
You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it. The kernel source is just endian-agnostic, it's not rocket science. There wasn't anything much deeper than that to build Mac OS X on Intel. But where they deserve serious credit is in making the developer tools, the headers, the excellent developer documentation... and providing it all for FREE and nicely ahead of their OS releases. Microsoft doesn't come close in its support of developers, nor in having the courage to revisit and rip out the crumbling foundations of their OS.
I agree that technically Windows in the 90's had some better things going on under the hood than Mac OS 7 through 9, but I still preferred Mac OS during those years. The main thing that kept me on the Apple platform was the consistency, aesthetics, organization, and manageability of the OS. Some of the things that bothered me about Windows at that time were:
- The centralized and cryptic registry (vs Mac OS Preferences folder)
- DLL Hell (vs Mac OS Extensions folder)
- BSOD from several fronts (vs Mac OS mysterious lockups)
- That flat, gray feeling (vs Mac OS sleekness)
- Inconsistent menus and interfaces (vs Mac OS well-established Human Interface Guidelines)
- Inconsistent text editing behavior (vs consistent Mac OS text services)
- Ugly font rendering (vs Mac OS decent typography)
- The word "Microsoft" preceding everything (vs no market-speak in Mac OS)
Meanwhile, there were some things that bothered me about Mac OS at the time:
- Mysterious lockups, requiring several long Conflict Catcher sessions
- Rare use of threading in software, system-modal dialogs
- No free developer tools
- No protected memory, often making software development into a reboot-fest
- The best VM system was third-party
- Expensive! hardware
- Not even an option to show the folder hierarchy in a Finder sidebar (Apple should copy MS here)
- Mac OS toolbox tedious to use (but lots of cool APIs and SDKs)
- The dark years (3rd-party licensing, dwindling marketshare, Copland...)
But all that is behind us, thank goodness! The future is in Unix and Unix-like systems with all the great strengths we had only been dreaming of all those years.
-- thinkyhead software and media
It's much simpler to look at it another way.
A 4 GB flash drive takes ~ 400 seconds to fully write at 10 MB/s.
400 seconds is 6.67 minutes.
To overwrite each cell 1 million times, assuming constant overwriting, would therefore take 6.67 million minutes, or 12.68 years.
But you're making a HUGE ASSUMPTION there that each cell has 1 million write cycles. That's actually the average number for the whole drive. Some cells have less, some more. As cells fail they are mapped off the disk.
So the lifetime could be less.
What if Microsoft patents its entire business model, products, etc.? Would that be a viable way of of getting the state to ENFORCE their monololy instead of trying to BREAK IT?
Anti-trust + Intelectual Property Rights = Doublethink
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Microsoft did not steal anything from apple!
They stole it from GNU/Linux! duh...
Most of those features are already available in linux, albeit probably not completely standard in the distributions. Compiz for 3d features (including exposé like functionality), tomboy for writing notes, deskbar-applet + beagle for searching (though ubuntu is apparently going to use something else, forgot the name), etc.
I'm not sure who came up first with what. For instance, I remember KDE having a note-taking application way back when, but it didn't allow you to link notes. In any case, I am apparently still one of the few people who think the nautilus spatial browser is a very good and clean design. If you go to the non-spatial version it also looks very similar to the new ms browser. (albeit a bit more bland, which I actually like)
Personally I don't mind everybody copying from everybody. I think it clearly shows how innovation happens in the computing industry as opposed to other engineering disciplines. On a philosophical note, you cannot really "steal" an idea. If the other person gets to know the idea of the first person both of them have it, it is not lost to either of them. People who use this kind of language are usually the same people who support software patents, and entirely for the wrong reasons.
Most Vista reviewes (and the /. reactions) fail to consider the mission of Vista in most big corporations.
My employer only completed its migration of client machines to Windows XP not quite a year ago. Most of those machines still run Service Pack 1 and the XP service pack 2 rollout will not be fully executed until after the public release of Vista. Out lineup of software products was only fully validated against SP2 this past spring. IE7 breaks most of our corporate intranet--it was (inwisely IMO) designed against IE6 and even Firefox handles it more gracefully than IE7--the default browser.
The reason that most vista reviewers overlook the "mission of Vista in most big corporations" is that it is basically IRRELEVANT to Vista's fortunes. I would say that a large-scale XP-to-Vista migration in our company would take almost as much time, money and effort as a migration to Linux would. None of our software is validated against Vista and we won't widely support our products on Vista for another year. Though I can see Vista client machines starting to filter in some time in 2008 there are no plans for a comprehensive, wide-scale deployment until FY2009. This sort of situation is typical of large enterprises (those with 10000+ computers to manage).
The early adopters of Vista are the individual/retail customers and smaller organisations. That is where MacOS shows its strength and that is what MS has to market against. Big corporate adoption simply doesn't happen quickly, so if MS can't retain and grow its home and small/medium enterprise with Vista it is in SERIOUS TROUBLE.
From a robust permission scheme, remote control of group policies and really easy deployment there's nothing like Windows. (The macintosh really falls down in a controlled environment.
My experience with Mac OSX is limited to the desktop so I cannot fairly comment on its abilities. However I have a great deal of exposure to Windows in large corporate environments (my employer is a fortune 500 companies and I've been to two fortune 500 customer sites in the past month--these are true LARGE enterprise situations). I'm not sure what you mean by "robust permission scheme" but I've found security (authentication and access control) for Windows to be a royal pain in the a$$--dealing with ugly mixes of NT4-style and AD-style domains, DCOM configurations, etc...MS is supposed to be about seamless integration but when they make a sea change it might as well be a mixture of MacOS, UNIX and Windows. Eight years ago where I worked they were migrating from old AT&T UNIX machines to ProLiant's running Linux (yes--this was eight years ago before all the hype and before the internet bubble really started to inflate). For all the fragmentation in the UNIX world that migration was smoother than what I've seen when upgrading VERY large systems from NT4 to Server2003 Active Directory. To be fair though the end result with Windows 2003 "looked prettier" and was a big improvement, but it sure took a lot of work.
I'd say that for the strengths of Windows that you are touting are more significant for real enterprise systems, and in that space MS is not competing with Apple at all--it is competing with Red Hat, Novell, Oracle and IBM--specifically their Linux- and UNIX-based solutions. UNIX-style platforms have a LOT more history in the enterprise environment andwhile they might not be "point and click" easy, they are MUCH more powerful and robust.
Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?)
My mother worked for the largest newspaper chain in Canada. I'd venture to say that most of their worksataions were Macs by far. I do not believe they are a fortuen 500 company but they were big nonetheless--it was a multinational company that owned newspapers all over North America and in the UK. Macs still have a commanding presence in their niche markets--publishing being one of them.
PLEASE copy the damn menu bar up the top.
I don't know what it's called, but I used osx*cough*86 for a couple of days about a month ago and frankly that menu bar up the top is a fantastic, logical design decision.
This comes from the fingers / mouth of someone who DOESN'T like licking the asshole of apple too,........ but honestly it's just such a fanstastic, simple design decision which made me embarassed for Microsoft.
The bar changes depending on which app you have open, but generally maintains a consistent layout at all times, awesome.
Also the widget "engine" in OSX is substantially quicker than the one which Yahoo provides (and I can say this as a fact, since I did try on exactly the same machine for both - 1gb ram Dell 8600)
I've installed a third party app called "topdesk" now for switching apps (along with alt-tab of course) - because it's quite similar to apples expose, not bad but just not as good as Apples solution unfortunately.
I only upgraded to IE6 from IE5.5 because I had to. I'll upgrade to IE7 when I have to.
On my old laptop, a Toshiba Libretto with 64M (and that was the max you could fit in it) I used Opera as the browser.
I'm kind of at a loss as to why anyone running into resource limits on a Windows PC would use anything else
their corporate solution could've evolved from XENIX and could've much more closely resembled the competition of the day
:)
Oh, god, I loved where Microsoft was taking Xenix before they abandoned it to those clowns at SCO. We had seamless networking between Xenix, MS-DOS, and VMS to the point where someone on DOS could open a tape drive on Xenix from a DOS port of tar and it would *just work*. We had programs on DOS and VMS talking through named pipes on Xenix and they *just worked*. Their Windows based networking has never reached this level of integration, and I haven't found a "native" UNIX network to touch it.
Thanks ever so much for opening up these old wounds. You're a lovely bastard...
The average PC user wont know or care that things were stolen from Apple OS X. They dont even know about IE7 ripping off Firefox, or all the other things that were innovated elsewhere but then copied into Windows over the years.
But the reviewer does. I have Pogue's missing manuals. His bias is clear and known, but only to those that have read his books. Unrevealed to the reader is the fact that what Apple does clearly lines his next, not directly, but as a consequence. I'm amused that he did the Missing Manual for OSX3 on a PC-- a confession of his. He also gets facts wrong about both Windows in that book, as well as OSX-- and key points.
It's the fanboy quality of his background and his income derivation that makes me believe that he's the wrong reviewer for that spot. It's not like hiring Gates to review Google; rather to have Cringely review InfoWorld. You can't expect a non-biased opinion; and an opinion that's has outcome in his income depending on what he says, whatever it is. If he was a neutral reviewer, an even hand with his books and sites, then I'd not cry foul. But that's not the case here.
Bias on the part of the reviewer queers the review. He has this bias. It's like asking Gartner.... the result is always suspect because they're so handsomely paid off by vendors.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I have Tiger running on my old Yosemite G3, and the performance is more than adequate. I've pretty much retired that box to media service duties, but I'll occasionally use it for other things. It's still able to do useful work, and it has successfully run 5 OS revisions since I bought it in 1998.
Show me a Windows box that can do that without installing Linux on it.
You know, as much as I try to take discussions in the spirit they are presented I have a hard time taking anyone that goes around spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign seriously. If you think Apple is doing what they are doing for anything less than maximum benefit of their shareholders you are seriously deluded.
single screen user interface ... To what are you referring to here?
The whole Microsoft experience. Mostly, I'm talking about their lack of virtual desktops and pagers, for which they substitute that pathetic menu bar. Yes, I've seen their sorry XP power toy. It's does not come close to being as useful as any decent free window manager and the hapless user is forced to use two or three monitors to spread their work out. The ever changing configuration interface and lack of useful programs are also show stoppers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So what these gentlemen at Microsoft have is some data on disk that by having just been read or any other reason is deemed as desirable to be cached for faster access. In any sane architecture, you cache to RAM because that's where the orders-of-magnitude-benefit is to be found.
Which is what Windows does.
But when you run out of ram you have to dump data to a storage device, like this USB solution. That is swapping, and these gentleman are swapping their disk cache to disk, which is telling.
No, they're not. You need to do more reading. This rough outline of data flow might help you understand.
With ReadyBoost:
CPU <-> RAM <-> flash disk <-> hard disk
Without ReadyBoost:
CPU <-> RAM <-> hard disk
This design assumes that a multi-gigabyte RAM system is trashing and:
No, it doesn't (and the correct terminology is "thrashing"). It assumes that a USB flash drive provides better performance for small random reads than a hard disk does, and that better performance can be used to speed the overall system.
What these gentlemen at Redmond wished they had written was a performance-aware multi-device swap system.
ReadyBoost is not swapping, nor is its primary purpose to be used in leiu of real RAM. So long as you labour under that incorrect assumption, your conclusions will be similarly incorrect.
Which would have been somewhat praise-worthy, if you ignore the fact that a single dedicated kernel hacker could probably do the same in Linux in a long afternoon.
Well, maybe one of them will be encouraged to spend that afternoon copying ReadyBoost in the near future, then, so Linux can benefit from this as well (which is about the time Slashdotters will start calling it a "cool idea" rather than a "kludge").
Reading all of the "Microsoft copied this, copied that" posts, it stretches the imagination to discover that discerning between OS X and Vista seems pretty easy for you...so I imagine it's rather easy to tell the difference between the OS's after all, which probably doesn't bode well for the "copy" conspiracies. My favorite such conspiracy, though, tells of how Apple "copied" Microsoft's support for x86 cpus--not to mention ide, agp, pci, etc., ad infinitum..;)
Personally, I just don't understand the "copy" conspiracy lingo at all. It's not like Apple, after all, invented either the GUI or even the concept of the GUI. Those things clearly predate both Apple and Microsoft. Talking about a GUI is to me like talking about a wheel. All of the automobile manufacturers on earth employ the wheel as a foundational concept, and all of them do it in similar ways, but rationally no one ever thinks that "GM owns the wheel and it isn't fair that Toyota copied GM," etc. Such sentiment would be ridiculous, imo.
Such is the same in personal computerdom--exactly. The concepts that are foundational to the industry--and the GUI is merely one of them--belong to *nobody* and thus are never, ever "copied"--but merely shared. The difference is in the implementation of those concepts, and that's exactly where you can see the differences between what Microsoft and Apple are doing. I believe the differences are stark and very easy to see.
Fanboys, ha ha ha. Silly!! ha ha ha.
;')
Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, Industrial Strength!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Windows!
Good one
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I had seen the mbox files in Mail directories, read about mbox format, and assumed that was the way it worked. Thanks to your post I had a look in the Mail directory, and you are 100% correct.
My apologies.
However; the address book data are in one file (~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Addresbook.data), and spotlight indexes that just fine, as individual records, which was the point of my rant.
Bart
Virtual desktops, at least for me, are a pain in the ass. I have tried using them (on Linux and Windows) and every time they have pissed me off.
Just my opinion, obviously.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbl4vQLfr4
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy