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Spotlight Improvements In Leopard
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is set to feature several new enhancements to Spotlight, Apple's desktop search, and ComputerWorld outlines them. The improvements include searching across multiple networked Macs, parental search snooping, server Spotlight indexing, boolean search, better application launching (sorely needed), and quick-look previews.
Beagle has done this for a while.
Also from tfa As powerful as Spotlight is, it actually offers a somewhat limited set of search options. (then detailing the new, 1996 search engine style AND/OR/NOT operators).
Beagle's also ahead here:I guess sometime's Spotlight's ahead on features & at other times Beagle's ahead.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The improvements include searching across multiple networked Macs, parental search snooping
I'm not sure that's an improvement. a "new addition", but not an improvement.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I'm still somewhat of a Mac n00b, so perhaps I don't get it right now (using Tiger), but when I type in something in the search field at the top of a Finder window when I'm in a particular folder, why doesn't it just search in that folder instead of using Spotlight to search the entire computer?
Or am I missing something?
The FBI likes easy search tools the faster they get the easier it is for them to look for stuff it check points.
...it'd be great if they also indexed your offline media too?
The number of times I have to swap out CDs trying to find an image file or an old piece of code - it drives me nuts! Now with DVD it gets worse, HD-DVD, Blu-ray - forget it, that's a needle in a haystack. How difficult could it be to have the drive index offline media too - a bit like some tape library software or the like? Maybe it could index when you burn? The last time I saw something like this was when I got a Zip drive back in 1997 and some nifty free software came with it. Now, it seems that you can only search your local drive - a bad idea when removable media is the norm.
So, at the risk of sounding like a total banana; why doesn't anyone do this, or am I missing some glaringly obvious checkbox somewhere in OS X/XP/Fedora/Vista?
Yes, that is big ol flamebait title, but back when Spotlight first came out I was one of those foaming at the mouth Mac lunatics modding up every remotely positive Apple comment and down for anything remotely negative. I sat on the edge of my seating with my little old heart going piterpater hitting refresh when things like Spotlight were unveiled.
But after having used it for a long time now after all the hype and the koolaid having worn off for me, Spotlight is easily the worst of the search solutions for all three major platforms. Hidden by the usual Apple good choice of product name and UI polish.
but will it find widgets by 'wdgt' in /Library/Widgets? Will it find files inside .app? I'm unimpressed with spotlight in it's current form, especially the widgets.
That's because while MS is playing catchup feature-wise (you add a nice caveat right to your question). Everyone else is behind market-wise, but enjoys better features and security. Why add in something like "oh yeah, and there's also a POS from MS which doesn't implement this feature fully"?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The bias is crazy. Windows Search (in Vista) does all of these fantastically well already, but no-one even mentions it.
"Oh boy"
I do a search and bring up the Spotlight results window. The window is some sort of 'special' window that doesn't act like a real window where you can tab back and forth.
Why?
I want to look for something in the current folder. If there happens to be, usually, a folder selected Spotlight will only search in that subfolder. Arrrrrggg!
Why?
I want to look for *.cpp files. It looks like this is possible but a complete pain to do.
Why?
Where are all these amazing search plugins that we were promised when Spotlight was released?
I've used File Buddy exclusively since spotlight became the standard OS X search. I've only used spotlight couple times and I hate it.
Apple Sux. And yes. I am posting it from my mac. This shitty piece of personal computer doesnt have good drivers using which I can view all the *videos* I lay my hands on. I need to transfer files over to my *win2k* machine to do so. Search? What for? There isnt much happening here anyway! Quicktime *grey screened* my mac! Yes - it halted the mac!!!! And I have a paid version of it. Everytime I play many files on it and do a full screen, it crashes. It doesnt have a playlist!!! God, when was it invented? Like in 200 AD? All the "cool stuff" on Apple can be found on windows or other *nix platforms. I dont use their browser either. If I get IE7 on mac, I would use it. For now I had to be content with using Firefox. For the closed piece of crap hardware, in which I can change only the memory, this is too expensive. All idiots who support mac can blow themselves.
Well maybe because 4 of the 5 features have been demoed in Vista for over a year, and if the tables were turned everybody would be screaming "copycat" and "they stole that idea".
Maybe that's why.
It's because OSX is the new watermark instead of the other way around. Everyone has admitted Vista is mostly security and has few new features. Both Tiger and Leopard have new features many of which don't exist in the Windows world. It's debateable how many new features will be added in the next Windows release and yet there's little doubt there will be new features in the follow up OSs out of Mac. Windows really isn't trying to compete on features they are largely trying to play security catch up. It's not a troll it's a simple fact. Mac still won't replace Windows but they are starting to get like apples and oranges comparing them. The primary benefit to Windows is software and hardware availibility selection. If you want lots of user oriented features Mac wins hands down.
Do you really think that "all of the features are available on Vista right now" if MS hadn't seen what Apple was putting out, and tried a preemptive strike?
Remember, these are improvements to Spotlight, which has been out since April 29, 2005. In other words, refinements to what's existed for about 2 years. MS has had the advantage of watching their Cupertino R&D lab work out the kinks.
That's why no fair-minded journalist would claim that OS X is following Vista's lead.
(BTW, I'm not claiming that Apple has created everything great and magical in the world. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants; MS just happens to make a stomping motion when they do it.)
Now that Spotlight has been around for a while the parallels to AppleScript are amazing. Both products were announced and massively hyped in comparison to other platforms. If you believed what Apple was saying or implying other platforms were years behind with similar solutions.
Both AppleScript and Spotlight have the usual Apple polish as end user products with the usual Apple poor quality implementation.
New version of program contains features and bug fixes not present in previous version of program.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
18 million Mac OS X users already do.
"Sufferin' succotash."
From the fine article:
I'm supposed to treat my kids like criminals now? No unmonitored phone conversations, mail and all of that? Publisher's profits are more important than my family's privacy and dignity? No thanks, my house is not a jail. I have respect for the people who live here and my visitors.
It's stuff like this that keeps me away from non-free software, regardless of how difficult publishers and non free software companies would like to make my life. I'm not going to trust my life to software that comes with wiretapping as a feature. If Apple lacks respect for my kids, what kind of respect will they have for me? Well, not much considering the restrictions they put into unFairPlay and their OS in general. Apple can keep their pretty laptops and DRM crippled music players to themselves. Make no mistake, this is just one more step in removing your rights, and the future will be worse with non free software.
My wife and my kids get root on their computer. It's theirs, not mine, and what they do with it is their business. No one is downloading music and movies here because it's easier for us to get free stuff at archive.org and netflicks. They are free to share what they want and keep the rest to themselves. Anything more invasive than that, outside evidence of real wrong doing, is for paranoid control freaks.
Respect has to go both ways. If I don't have it for them, they won't have it for me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So, will they fix the "alias hole" while they're doing this?
That's because the media has woken up and taken Microsoft, supposedly the #1 software company in the world, to task for not being able to update its aging Win32 codebase when their most well-known competitor has been cranking out successful updates every 2-3 years and are still years ahead.
Because for Mac users, it's a case of "been there, done that." The majority of Vista is an indisputable clone of OS X features that Mac users have taken for granted for years, from hardware-accelerated desktop compositing to vector-based graphics APIs to non-admin user accounts to shiny two-tone plastic highlights and translucencies. And on and on.
Christ, even the filesystem layout was shamelessly cloned from OS X.
"Sufferin' succotash."
In that case, from now on I demand that every article that talks about Vista's features also talk about my currently-in-planning operating system, Creysoft PsychOSis:
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Currently, I hardly use Spotlight on my iBook G4 800 MHz. The application launcher capability is what I need most, and I find Launchbar to be far faster than Spotlight for this. Launchbar even does a decent job for many of the searches I need, at the same speed as application launching, but Spotlight search for the same can take very long.
Can't Apple employ the technology used in Launchbar or Quicksilver along with their existing technology to make the searches faster? I know Spotlight is lower because it has to index far more data as it searches inside files. However, most searches perhaps don't need the data that is inside files, but merely the same metadata that is indexed by Launchbar/QS. So, why not have a two-step search: first search the data that is not inside the file and give results as quick as Launchbar/QS, then search inside the files to give other search results?
I understand this may be a non-issue for the latest Intel Macs, and so, Apple may not bother.
Although the "remote searching" feature isn't as complete as 10.5's, and it won't be until Longhorn Server is released.)
Actually, remote searching works quite well on Vista. In both a peer to peer and client to server environment.
Vista computers looking for network content can easily be told to search other computers on the network, and the systems use the localized index cache to return the results.
The same happens in a server environment when Windows Desktop Search is install on the Windows Server, which will be included by default in Longhorn as you note.
This also includes WindowsXP users that have Windows Desktop Search installed.
A person can easily hit their start button and type and get results from not only their computer, their server store, and even shared resources on all computers on the network.
This is just a feature MS hasn't 'trumpted', but it is there and works well.
MS just needs Apple's PR department and spin factory. I think it was Paul Smith's blog that also recently pointed out the insane Mac marketing and touting of features, and then even discounting the same features when other OSes have them.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog (Be sure to scroll down to see the Mac Switch ad, it is funny even if you are a Mac user.)
With all the shameless cloning in Vista, it's just really hard to overlook when comparing it to OS X. Blame Microsoft. Being demoed a year ago doesn't mean much since Apple demoed these things too. Vista only just came out for consumers, and Leopard is due out any month now. No doubt Microsoft will install it on their Macs (ex-devs have admitted they were looking at Macs when designing Vista's interface) and try to find new things to clone in Vienna. It's pretty clear that's how Microsoft operates today under the Steve Ballmer Marketing Regime. Until you guys get rid of him as CEO, you'll continue down this path of lameness. Excuse me, I meant to say "Windows Lameness Home Premium Limited Signed Edition SP2."
"Sufferin' succotash."
I am hoping Spotlight will be consistently fast in Leopard, rather than the current situation where sometimes it's instantaneous and other times it takes many seconds to display results.
I've tried getting rid of Quicksilver, since launching apps and finding docs is all I ever use it for; but Spotlight just isn't consistent enough speed-wise for me yet. Quicksilver's searches are reliably fast.
#DeleteChrome
example:
/tmp/already.exists /path/to/symlink /tmp/already.exists /tmp/this.is.a.new.name
/tmp/already.exists would work just fine and peachy when the file was renamed (or moved elsewhere on the disk) as above.
prompt% ln -s
prompt% mv
The symlink is now screwed. An alias set up to point at
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
New configuration of universe differs from previous!
Like, that's why it's NEWS, man.
If this was a Vista review, there would have probably been no fewer than 5 comparisons to OS X.
Well said, Citizen. Here is comparision #1.
There ya go.You are absolutely right. That will never change no matter what Vista (or whatever) can do that the current Mac OS can't.
Where is the Undo button for my life? Not to mention the Esc key.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of rabid fanboyism.
The majority of Vista is an indisputable clone of OS X features that Mac users have taken for granted for years, from hardware-accelerated desktop compositing to vector-based graphics APIs to non-admin user accounts to shiny two-tone plastic highlights and translucencies.
Christ, even the filesystem layout was shamelessly cloned from OS X.
I don't even know where to begin with this, but to say...
Your facts are really, really wrong.
OSX only has a bitmap composer that does nothing more than use the GPU textures for double buffering, it is NOT 3D accelerated, nor even 3D rendered. (Vista is BOTH.)
OSX's vector based graphics API is EQUIVALENT to GDI+ that has been available in Windows since 2001. Go look this up, please. Additionally, the Vectoring API of OSX is NOT EVEN close to the WPF vectoring concepts in Vista, from animation constructs to true 3D rendering and hit checking and is TRULY 3D accelerated.
Non-Admin accounts... Hmmm. Windows NT 3.1 (which is what Windows is based on, has had non-Admin accounts since 1992.) Far before Apple even moved from the 'single' user metaphor of their System software of the 90s. Old school Windows NT users have ALWAYS setup their company and user accounts in non-admin modes, just like *nix people have as well. It was WindowsXP and its use in the Home market where it became 'normal' to run under administration level, even though if anyone had any sense they would NOT let even their family members have Admin accounts on XP either. (This is NOT about MS not having the functionality, it is about end-user education that failed, hence Vista forces it.)
The FS was NOT cloned from OSX. Have you ever used anything but a freaking Mac? The only reference I assume you are referring to is MS changing the name of the "Documents and Settings" folder to "Users" to make it easier and it does borrow the name "Users" from a *nix standard that has been used for a LONG LONG time. However, there is NOTHING in this that comes from OSX.
Please do your own research, don't even believe me, and certainly stop believing the crap facts you would find in a normal Mac Site Forum.
PS There is so much to Vista that is far beyond OSX, it is really sad that Mac and other closed minded *nix users will NOT GET IT, until MS leverages these technologies to once again ensure their market dominance. Little things, like how the new Video subsystem in Vista can easily scale across multiple GPUS without SLI or Crossfire types of technology, making the new ATI multi-core GPU cards only workable on Vista without 'specific' application coding for the cards. Vista users and games will automatically just get access to the extra GPU power even on their OLD games.
(See Vista already multi-tasks GPU and GPU RAM on single core cards, much like the jump to preemptive multi-tasking CPUs had with OSes in the 90s, which to date is something no other commercial OS can do. As an example, OpenGL as OSX uses exclusively, is just now starting to take advantage of multithreaded OpenGL, which is just starting to take advantage of multiple CPUs, let alone multiple GPUs.)
Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Accelerated window manager thingie, ok, OS-Eks had it before Vista. But the rest is just apple-fanboy bullshit. Non-admin accounts? I'm sure the first NT had that. Or do you mean running applications as admin from a regular user account? Windows 2000 had Run As.
"shiny two-tone plastic highlights and translucencies." Again, WTF? At least you don't claim they stole the fugly brushed-metal style. Besides, Win2k had window translucency.
And the filesystem layout is cloned? So MS changed "Documents and Settings" to Users, and now it's cloned from Mac OS? Most Unix systems had a very similar layout (to Mac OS, not Vista), way before the Apple boys decided to drop their PoS OS and start over. Who's cloning now, bitch?
and I'm not convinced anything mentioned in the article is going to make the different and make me like Spotlight.
The Spotlight UI is what needs the major overhaul - it's freaking ANNOYING and inconsistent with the Finder. If you do a spotlight search from the menu bar, items in the drop down list cannot be dragged and dropped or have their path shown. You have to go 'Show All' if you want to actually USE that image you found.
If you do go to the 'Show All' window (which doesn't appear in CMD-Tab) then you have to click the stupid huge "I" to get the path - unlike in the Finder version where it appears at the bottom of the window.
I hate the Finder search - it is so slow that even if you just want to search that directory, it feels as though it is searching the entire computer and just filtering the results. It also recursively searches without any decent feedback as to where the files it finds actually ARE (and you can't turn it off). And the worst part is - if you trash something IT STAYS IN THE SEARCH RESULTS. That really fucks me off.
It's the small details that make using Spotlight (and spotlight-as-part-of-the-finder) absolute Hell. They have better fix that sort of stuff (and the whole freaking finder....) before stupid network searching!
>Everyone has admitted Vista is mostly security and has few new features.
o ws_vista
That's because "everyone" is a moron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_wind
I don't care about all of that stuff.
All I want is something that will stop command-F from always popping up with the idiotic search "Kind = Any," "Last Opened = Any Date."
How about letting me set a preference for the default search? Or...
How about repeating whatever it is I did on the last search?
(To all those who are going to flame me by saying there is some way of changing it by rewriting some XML code in hidden directory somewhere... oh, go away and edit a Registry, why don't you?)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
now free and open to all comers. One click GUI menu app install, open source free, open source cost cash brand, and "other", all your choice, including proprietary video drivers, media codecs, and so on. No more dodgy overseas servers and the wink wink nudge nudge 'this is how you can get to play tunes or watch vids or you DVDs" "instructions". all legal and functional, open to all comers to use. If your "distro" doesn't offer it, and insists on the command line or some almost works gui thing they push-their problem now, maybe a case of NIH-ism.
If any user can't figure out "mash the button here, this application gets installed", they don't need a computer, they need an analog TV set.
testing
"Windows Lameness Home Premium Limited Signed Edition SP2."
Great! Now, did you want the full version, the System Builders version, or just the the upgrade?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
1. Ability to exclude *any* drive from Spotlight. Right now you cannot exclude external FAT32 drives, which means every time I reboot, "mds" has to chug through 'em Microsoft style.
2. Ability to include non-standard file extensions. All I want to do is include my Perl scripts. But there's no "type" for Perl and I can't make Spotlight treat them as fuckin' text files. Give me a break. Again, relying solely on file extensions is hideously Windowsian.
Fortunately, there's "locate" but mdfind gives you the content search as well.
Like so many Apple products, Spotlight is so close and yet so far.
I am a Windows, but also want to buy a macbook. Should I wait until Leopard comes out? Does Apple give discount for the upgrade to people who buy very close to new releases of OS X?
Sorry I have to ask - does Uncle Bill sign them himself? Or is it Balmer? See with Uncle Bill signing them, it might be worth the extra money...
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
For Mac OS X debates Steve Jobs is the relevant person. You compare Microsoft to Steve Jobs's company. So when Microsoft had multiple user accounts in 1992, I point out that Steve was at NeXT in 1989 and they had a multiuser OS.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
BTW, for some reason after I read your post for the third time trying to make some sense out of it I suddenly realized that this is the mental image I came away with. That's you, getting ready to do battle with the forces of non-free software =)
"Just because Mac did it first doesn't mean we are ripping them off." "Windows, second place in innovation. First place in market penitration!"
OS X 10.5 is still very much a work in progress. I'd be surprised to see it before July or August, and closer to the end of the year, or at Macworld in January, is entirely plausible. Frankly, that's fine with me. I'd rather Apple take the time to finish the operating system than do the usual "set a date and release it whether its done or not" approach.
Spotlight has lots of room for improvement. It is often a frustrating step backwards from the older Mac OS search ability, despite the added features of being able to search more metadata.
I'm really looking forward to the integrated backup features -- assuming it works. There are a whole lot of rough spots in the Finder and interface in general that really need to be rethought and rebuilt (several bad ideas, aka features, that seem to have infected the project from the NeXT folks, like broken windowing behavior). I'd gladly wait another year for the OS if Apple took the time to fix all the little irritations and made sure the new features behave as expected. And yes, I have alerted Apple to the obnoxious little issues as I encounter them.
No man, no. While I agree that the more like quicksilver spotlight is the better, it SURE isn't the other way around!
Quicksilver is a freaking godsend and is much faster because the point isn't searching all of your computer! it makes some intelligent guesses (applications folder, home folder, desktop, etc) as a minimal starting set, but then it has you add other places manually. Also, it only reindexes every ten minutes or so..
Quicksilver rocks because it was designed to do what it does WELL. Spotlight does FS-wide search well.
The two should not be confused for each other, i cannot imagine why you would want one to do the job of both.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Windows Search is a piece of crap - it can't even understand Unicode text files! You have to go to the commandline and use FIND or FINDSTR if you need to search Unicode files and this has been a problem oft reported since Windows NT 4.0.
Try this: open Notepad and type in the text "hello world". Use File/Save as... to save this as "ANSI", "Unicode", "Unicode big-endian" and "UTF-8" encodings into an isolated directory. Now use Windows Search to find files containing "hello" in that directory - it only finds the ANSI version and the UTF-8 version (and that only by accident). The situation gets even more dismal if you start using international characters.
You tell me:
Dude! Don't use the feature if you don't want to.
Wiretapping is not a feature you can really turn on or off.
You should not trust people who conspire with you to violate others. Reading through your kid's stuff is a violation of their trust. The people who gave you this tool don't have any respect for your kids or you. They are likely to read through your stuff without waring too.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
switch to Vista now. ... Then you could search your kids stuff if you wanted, but if you didn't want to treat them like a 'criminal' it is easier to just use the parental controls so you know they aren't into crap an 8 year old shouldn't get into even accidentally.
Wow, that way I'd not only get a system I can't trust because it has a wiretap "feature" I'd also put M$ blinders on my kids. Do parental controls do like Steve and "brainwashed" them from iPod to Zune?
I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
Like I want that man controlling anything that has anything to do with my kids.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I used to use an app on System 7 that would recursively index a disc and create a parallel alias tree in a folder on your desktop. You could navigate the folder and if you accessed a file the Finder would ask you to install the proper disc. This was because it stored the volumeid number in the alias and the finder kept a mapping of volume names and volume ids for later use.
Something like this probably exists on macos today or you could do a shell script to recreate it. I'm not sure how to accomplish that unique volumeid/volumename on linux.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How in the hell you got modded insightful is beyond me.
Look, for windows:
1. Search the internet for a program that does what you want.
2. Read some reviews and see if its a legit program, and not some crappy ad-ware/botware.
3. do you want to pay for this program? A decision must by made here.
4. Download the program
5. Run spyware and antivirus software on it
6. Click install.exe
7. accept EULA
8. Choose if you are installing this for all users or your self
8. hope and pray that it doesn't affect other programs or change extensions
9. Use it, and if you dont like it:
9b. uninstall it and hope and pray you dont have to clean up after it.
However with Linux, if you know the package you want you could do a command line apt-get install foo
OR
You can open your package manager (synaptic in my case) and do a search for "search" and read the desriptions of the package, such as beagle, and click on it to install. DONE. Removal is just as easy.
Thats why windows is a pain in the ass, and Linux is just easy.
So dont spread FUD. The average linux user gets used to speeding things up, and learns a few shortcuts, like the command line if they are so inclined.
You do realize that the parent is discussing Windows Desktop Search which completely replaces the older search mechanism which has existed in Windows, right? Unlike Apple, the one you don't have to upgrade the OS to obtain. The one that supports networked indexing and file preview now, not waiting for an update. The one that supports indexing a single file for multiple entries, like a single contacts or email database, whereas Spotlight has no fucking clue what to do with those files and such programs have to maintain their own database as well as spinning out a shitload of single files just so that Spotlight can index them.
MS may have taken longer to get there, but that's because they did so much more. Spotlight is shit compared to Windows Search.
Oh, and Windows Desktop Search works perfectly well with Unicode, UTF-8 and ANSI files.
Can I PLEASE get spotlight to have the option to display any of the columns available in the Finder list view, and PLEASE let me sort by those columns? Spotlight is a pain in the ass to use until these capabilities are back from the 10.3 days. I just want to see the file size without having to open every search result.
-- As soon as I have an interesting sig, you'll be among the first to know!
just to install something?"
Just about anyone, I imagine. I'm using a Mac:
circe:/Users/me root# softwareUpdate -r -i; shutdown -r now
Do you insane zealots realize that was a fucking joke at all? Do you? Or are you just intentionally dense?
"Like I want that man controlling anything that has anything to do with my kids."
By the tone of your posts, it looks like you have this one running the show. To the detriment of your children.
For Mac OS X debates Steve Jobs is the relevant person. You compare Microsoft to Steve Jobs's company. So when Microsoft had multiple user accounts in 1992, I point out that Steve was at NeXT in 1989 and they had a multiuser OS.
Well then we should be even more 'logical' and properly compare Jobs to Dave Cutler that was the Windows NT Architect, and in the 80s when Steve was playing catch up to Atari and Amiga Dave was not only using but designing OSes with multi-user abilities as a core feature.
How does someone get logic like this?
OS X's vector graphics API? You mean NSBezierPath? That's been around since NeXTStep, which far predates Windows XP.
Almost as long as GDI from freaking windows which is the base vector graphics API. Go look it up, please.
Just because I was talking about GDI+, because it has the anti-aliasing and translucency features added in OSX, does not mean Windows didn't have a freaking vector language prior to that. In fact there is stuff from the original GDI of Windows in the 80s that is STILL not in OSX.
The compositor uses the GPU, which is 3-D acceleration. And QuartzGL, the fully 3-D rendering pipeline, was in Tiger in development form.
There is a difference between using 3D textures for window composition and actually using functions of the 3D library for accelerating the drawing inside an application and the desktop.
Vista also has a Vector composer to further speed up Vista and WPF applications, this is why you can remote desktop 4000 miles away to a Vista machine and STILL have 3D accelerated drawing on the remote screen. A Mac doesn't even have 3D accelerated drawing on screen in front of you if you are sitting at the freaking computer itself unless it is an OpenGL application.
Understand the difference?
Think about it this way, if you had to explain to someone to "go to website, navigate through the page (which may change), find correct exe, install/configure (yes, even windows needs configuring from time to time)." vs go to the terminal, type "sudo apt-get install ..." or better yet, use a search in synaptec, which one sounds easier?
Terminal-phobia is one of my pet peeves though.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, GP is correct, QuartzGL, which uses the GPU to render the desktop (not just composite) was in 10.4. It even renders font glyphs on the GPU. Not enabled by default, but I guess it should be in 10.5.
There's also CoreImage, a nifty GPU-accelerated 2D image processing API, in there. It runs chains of simple filters at video speeds. Not widely used yet AFAIK.
Speaking of the middle mouse button, is there any (easy) way in Linux, particularly either under KDE or XFE, to make the middle mouse button work like (ohgodIcantbelieveImsayingthis) Windows'? As in, acting like a scroll-with-pointer button? For the unfamiliar, at least on my work machine, if you press the middle button, the cursor changes into this two-arrows-inside-a-circle icon, which causes the window to scroll if you then move it up or down. It scrolls faster if you move it further, as you would expect, and stops scrolling instantly on release of the buttom.
I've gotten a bit addicted to this feature, and frankly I think it's the handiest thing I've used since the addition of the scroll wheel to the mouse a few years back. It's absolutely terrific for zipping through lengthy documents, and it's a lot better than PageDNing (even on 5-button mice where you can do that without moving to the keyboard).
I've never used a system that had middle click paste (or, if I have, I haven't used it), but the middle-click-scroll feature is pretty handy. I doubt it will appear in Mac OS X anytime soon -- it was hard enough to get Apple to make mice with two buttons, I'm not holding my breath on three, and I'm definitely not holding my breath on a feature that might make people think that they were admitting that their Mighty Mouse Balls weren't the hottest idea in the world -- but it'd be nice to get the option on Linux.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Ah, yes, it's once again time for Apple's yearly "milking of the consumers", when they their users to pay for bug fixes (which, had it been written properly, would not be necessary), security fixes (ditto, as MOAB proved), and software of dubious value at best.
At least with Windows, you buy it and you're done. They aren't renting me an operating system. Service Packs and their auto-update service is free, and it will ALWAYS be free so long as Microsoft is supporting that OS. Heck, you can still auto-update Windows 98, although no new updates will be released.
Talk about a tax. Funny how Slashdot pules about the "MS Tax", but never really discusses the "Apple Tax with yearly maintenance fees".
Apple: lifetime holder of Slashdot's "Prefered Monopoly Status"
So why does it need the administrator password? After all, I just want to use an application on my account, right?
Last time I checked, it was pretty difficult to install something from a CD, for instance (add it to "sources.list", or something as stupid as that). It isn't until people realize Linux is extremely counter-intuitive that it can get better.
A rude AC taunts:
Tell your kids you were only respecting their privacy after they are anally raped by a pedophile, you utter dumb fuck.
The funny thing is, that's exactly the kind of fear M$ is selling the service on. They are trying to ride the "shark attack" media blitz of fear. Well, it would be funny if it were not so counter productive.
Of course, it's total bullshit. The actual chance of anyone being molested by a computer creep is vanishingly small.
When you treat your kids like criminals you do real harm to their trust in you and their own dignity. Those are exactly the things they need in abundance if they ever are approached by a pervert. If they don't trust you, they can't get help. If they have low self esteem, they will put up with abuse and think it's normal.
That register article is so good, I think I'll journal it up and see if I can't work it into another front page article you M$ paid turds hate, insightful commentary that shows M$ and non free crap in it's correct light.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
While we're at WDS, I think it also has what one would call "boolean queries":d resources/advanced.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/ad
It still suffers from some "closed sourcedness" behavior, with e.g. how do I / who define more "kinds", what's each "kind" defined as? how is a "store" defined? and so on, but it can still do quite a bit more than what first meets the eye in Vista or XP using the WDS addon. It's a bit too heavily specialized for the wants of Microsoft though. What that application needs is a thorough, nice, API to define its behavior.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...and that's how the Leopard got its Spotlight.
Besides the filesystem red herring that you rightfully disputed, and the multi-user paradigm which others have already called you out on, what you're telling me is that DirectX 10 is the sole selling point of Vista. That ensures Microsoft's dominance in the PC gaming market alone, something that was never in question. Even in the console market, their developer tools and APIs give them a selling point, but they can hardly dominate that market when Nintendo is out-innovating them, undercutting them (and still making a profit), and bringing scads of new people into the market that were never the least bit interested in the traditional console paradigm that Microsoft's offering is a shining example of.
DirectX 10 means fuck-all for most desktop users. GPU-accelerated or no, Apple already tried the ubiquitous-transparency eye candy four years ago and discarded it. It's ultimately superficial and distracting, but it's the first thing you notice when you walk up to a Vista computer. Other than that, it's pretty much the same old Windows. That's why Microsoft chose to tie DX10 to Vista when they could've just as easily released it on its own, as they've done with previous DirectX iterations. They know that the vast majority of their sales come from OEM purchases, so to make a few extra bucks off upgrades, they needed a hook to draw in those customers who are on the leading edge of technology and are willing to blow a significant amount of money on upgrades... meaning your hardest-of-the-hardcore gamers. I'd wager you're one of those, because practically nobody else would be frothing at the mouth to get ahold of Vista, or really have much reason to be any sort of a Windows enthusiast.
When the hell was VMS a desktop OS?
The logic is that NT 3.1 Workstation shipped in 1993 and NeXTSTEP 1.0 shipped in 1989 (with 0.9 publicly available on a limited basis a year before that). If you want to quibble over the fact that Dave Cutler jumped ship to MS in 1988, fine, but then you have to recognize that he wouldn't ship anything for five years AND that development on NeXTSTEP began less than a year after Jobs and his chosen five executives left Apple in 1985. Windows NT was in no way, shape, or form the first robust multiuser GUI workstation.
Windows NT was in no way, shape, or form the first robust multiuser GUI workstation.
I never said it was... Nor was NextStep for that matter, by several years. You really need to pay attention to *nix of the 80s and something called XWindows if you believe NextStep was.
People also like to lump NextStep and OSX together far too much. There are a lot of fundamental and architectural differences between the two OSes, from the kernel all the way to the user interface paradigm.
My point about Cutler was meant to be in satire by attacking the ridculous argument 'that we should compare Jobs to MS instead of OSX to Windows'.
I don't care if Jobs vaccinated monkeys for a year in 1975, it has nothing to do with the conversation.
So please, can we get back to the 'logic' and stop ranting on hyperbolic crap that has NOTHING to do with anything?
In fact, it's most likely that whatever feature your favourite Language, IDE, Operating System or Windowing Environment is just now developing, was fully functional 25 years ago in Smalltalk-80
"OSX's vector based graphics API is EQUIVALENT to GDI+ that has been available in Windows since 2001. Go look this up, please."
.NET developer sites have thus been suggesting ways to avoid using it, including going through the DirectX 9 layer, which offers many of the same features without the performance penalty, but isn't as easy to use.
.NET Windows Forms used GDI+, and MS received many, many complaints about their slow drawing compared with (for example) VB6 forms. Despite several years of promises that this would be fixed, they eventually simply deprecated Windows Forms, thus leaving all the people who they initially told to "keep using Windows forms because the performance issues will be resolved by an update in the near future" with a slow mess that will probably need converting to their very different XAML-based system at some point.
And I suggest you go and look up the 110,000 pages Google gave me when I entered "GDI+ slow", because developers have been complaining about this since it was introduced (Microsoft admit that the most commonly asked question about GDI+ is "Why is it so slow?)". Yes, it has lots of nice features that aren't in standard GDI such as anti-aliased drawing and alpha blending, but the drivers don't use a graphics card's accelerator features, and although Microsoft promised that this would change, nearly six years later we're still waiting (it also has a nasty memory leak which still AFAIK hasn't been fixed yet).
NB:
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Quicksilver is *that* good. Anyone who uses Spotlight to launch apps hasn't tried, or doesn't fully understand, Quicksilver. Just like Coverflow, virtue desktops et al, Apple should buy them and incorporate it into Leopard. Either that, or they'll pull a Konfabulator on them and incorporate its functionality into their own code.
Actually, GP is correct, QuartzGL, which uses the GPU to render the desktop (not just composite) was in 10.4. It even renders font glyphs on the GPU. Not enabled by default, but I guess it should be in 10.5.
I was actually refering to Quartz Extreme, as prior it is OSX did double buffering in freaking System RAM.
However, what you and the GP seem to be missing, is that EVEN WITH Quartz Extreme it is NOT using 3D acceleration to speed up the 2D vector drawing engine. It is ONLY USING 3D TEXTURES from the GPU Via OpenGL to COMPOSE the Screen, so that the Window Textures are mapped to a Polygon and rendered with the Video Card directly via OpenGL.
This is STILL Just a BITMAP Composer, using OpenGL to store and render Textures on a simple Polygon surface for each Window.
Vista on the other hand does 3D acceleration even in the 2D GDI/GDI+ drawing by utilizing the GPU of the 3D card, and additionally for Vista and WPF fully accelerates ALL THE 2D and 3D application drawing. This means Vista is using 3D acceleration to draw Fonts faster, anti-aliasing using GPU features, etc before the application EVEN CREATES the Bitmap or Vector drawing it passes to the Composer.
This is why in Vista, even if you have an OLD video card that ONLY supports DirectX7, applications will get a performance boost even if your card is not PS 2.0 compliant and supports Vista Glass because of its need for the PS 2.0 blurring.
Even on WindowsXP WPF(Vista technology) applications are accelerated by any 3D GPU in the computer if it supports DirectX7 or newer. So Vista is using 3D to accelerate even basic GDI/GDI+ and WPF drawing operations on older 3D Video cards even when Vista does not even use the Desktop Composer(Glass/Aero) on these older cards.
Anyone that doesn't get this, load Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw with a complex drawing on Vista and time how fast the screen renders(Zoom in Out, Pan, etc), then do the same on XP and then on OSX. Vista will at the minimum be 10-20x faster in displaying the image because it uses 3D GPU features to accelerate even LEGACY applications that have NO CONCEPT of Vista.
And sadly Vista will STILL be this much faster than OSX even with 10.5 because Quartz Extreme does NO vector acceleration in hardware unless the application is already OpenGL.
Here is the best way to lay this out so people understand from both MS documentation and the current notes on Quartz Extreme in OSX 10.5 that are available.
OSX No Quartz Extreme
Quartz2D-QuickDraw/Software Rendering/Buffer/Software Rendering/Quartz Compositor/Software Rendering/Frame Buffer
OpenGL/Hardware Rendering/Buffer/Software Rendering/Quartz Compositor/Software Rendering/Frame Buffer
OSX With Quartz Extreme
Quartz2D-QuickDraw/Software Rendering/GPU Store/Hardware Rendering/Frame Buffer
OpenGL/Hardware Rendering/Surface/Hardware Rendering/Frame Buffer
Vista without DirectX 9.0 Card
GDI/GDI+/Software Rendering(Some 2D GPU)/Frame Buffer
WPF/Hardware Rendering(3D GPU)/Frame Buffer (Same on XP)
Vista with DirectX 9.0 Card (Aero/Glass/WDDM)
GDI/GDI+/Hardware Rendering(3D & 2D GPU)/Vector&Bitmap Buffer/Hardware Rendering/Composer/Frame Buffer
WPF&Vista Apps/Hardware Rendering(3D GPU)/Vector&Bitmap Buffer/Hardware Rendering/Composer/Frame Buffer
Notice that Vista has Hardware Acceleration from the 3D GPU to help the application drawing, not just at the end like OSX.
Vista also doesn't double buffer like OSX does, this is because the composer can do the application buffering and since it is essential a 3D manager then it directly writes these textures on two triangular polygons to the screen for each Window. This also increases the video performance. As long as OSX has to double buffer to acheive the same tear-free results, they will not be competitive when it comes to Composer managed Gaming or 3D application performanc
NeXTSTEP was pretty far beyond the contemporaneous X11 offerings and NT probably through at least NT 4, and numerous reviews from the period state as much. (They also remark on the very steep price, but it's arguable that Jobs wasn't a really good businessman until he returned to Apple.) Your point about Cutler, and most of the points you're trying to make, was lost in your own hyperbole and overeagerness to fight Slashdot's institutional bias against Windows.
The only reason we're talking about NeXTSTEP is because you wanted to argue architectures and APIs in the first place. Like it or not, OS X IS directly descended from NeXT's codebase, and it's a testament to that codebase that the core APIs remain similar even if a substantial portion of the code behind the scenes has changed. By your own admission, Microsoft has changed Windows more often and more drastically than Apple has OS X, and all it's bought them is a couple months of clear technical superiority. DirectX 10 may be a strong technical advantage, but it's one that matters to a vanishing portion of the desktop market. All the other new bells and whistles in Vista are superficially different from the alternatives that are available or will soon be available, and your arguments have done little to convince me otherwise.
And I suggest you go and look up the 110,000 pages Google gave me when I entered "GDI+ slow", because developers have been complaining about this since it was introduced
Well anyone that knows anything about Video Cards and GDI from the past 15 years can easily answer this question for you...
Video cards started adding 2D acceleration, most notably with the IBM 8514, and with the popularity of Windows, the 2D acceleration design of most Video cards is SPECIFICALLY designed around the Windows GDI to basically make the Windows desktop as fast as possible.
GDI+ came out at a time when Video Card manufacturers were more concerned in 3D acceleration and performance, so 2D acceleration for GDI+ was never added to the 2D hardware acceleration features of most video cards. If I remember right, MS even requested that Companies like ATI and NVidia not focus on adding GDI+ 2D acceleration, as they expected Vista to come out much sooner than it did.
So why is GDI+ slow in comparison? Many of the features it offers like anti-aliasing and translucency are not in any Video cards 2D hardware acceleration feature set, which is what they use to render the pre-Vista Windows Application Drawing and desktop.
So, yes GDI+ is slower than pure GDI, and you will also find that the features of GDI+ that slow it down, when implemented on other OSes that also don't have 2D acceleration for these features, these operations on other OSes are also slow.
Again remember most Video Cards 2D acceleration set is more closely designed around Windows and GDI than Display Postscript or XWindows, so anything that goes beyond GDI features just plain sucks performance wise.
So if you take professional cards (like a Quadro) that have 2D acceleration for GDI+ 'like' features, you will find that GDI+ isn't a slowdown.
MS did screw up with GDI+, as it wasn't used like it 'could' have been, and even though it is fairly rich, MS new they would be replacing GDI and GDI+ with the new graphics API in Vista. The problem is Vista didn't make it to market until late 2006, instead of 2003/2004 as originally planned.
Vista's replacement WPF is impressive and goes far beyond anything out there, but it is very late for a lot of developers that were wanting to use GDI+ and other advanced features much earlier.
It still suffers from some "closed sourcedness" behavior
:)
Well it is closed source, so that is a given.
However, go lookup the APIs for Desktop Search for XP and Vista, MS has made available a very rich set of APIs for not only adding custom readers and plugins for application content, but also APIs for tapping into the search features within your application as well.
If you look at the add-ins for Desktop Search, you can see other MFRS have provided several filters using these APIs so that their document formats are easily indexed and tagged as easily as plain text file or jpg that are natively handled.
Also if you look at OneNote of Outlook, you will notice that they also use the APIs for their content to be indexed, and they both using the OSes Desktop Search engine inside the application when searching for notes or Email respectively.
Desktop Search in Vista and XP even can handle advanced filters like searching audio, images, or ink for words or other cross content references, which is kind of cool. - Again see OneNote for an example of some of this, all it takes is a conversion/recognition filter and tap the APIs provided.
I have ran into the APIs several times on the public side of MSDN content, so you should be able to easily find them.
Good Luck...
All the other new bells and whistles in Vista are superficially different from the alternatives that are available or will soon be available, and your arguments have done little to convince me otherwise.
. aspx
It was never my intent to convince anyone. My intent was to provide factual information that very easily gets ignored or overlooked.
I'm sorry you don't get the WDDM of Vista, and why DirectX 10 is locked to Vista because of the features that only a WDDM driver in Vista can do. Maybe this link can help people like yourself to understand what is unique and why DirectX 10 is more than just a new revision.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220
You also seem quite quick to dismiss a lot of other features inside Vista that won't be available in other OSes any time in the near future, some of them are related to the WDDM and new video subsystem, but many of them are not graphically or even search relevant.
These I will leave for you to discover as they 'do matter' and MS could easily maintain their OS marketshare because of the progression of technology that will need Vista to utilize new concepts other people in the industry doesn't even see coming. I do admit a lot of Vista is not easily seen on the surface, but I also think MS kind of likes it that way.
In a way some of Vista is like the XBox 360, when the PS3 would announce a new feature, MS would send out an update and turn the feature on, as their hardware is far more extensible than the industry or Sony anticipated. Vista has a lot of tricks up its sleeve as well, and I hope people in the OSS and even over at Apple figure it out before MS continues to leapfrog every new idea that could be competition for them.
PS As for Windows changing in comparison to OSX, you are confusing the Win32 Subsystem and NT to make such a comparison. The NT Kernel has had many optimizations, but the core features and functionality has not changed very much since it was designed in 1991, which does give a bit of kudos to the Cutler design team for the extensibility of the NT design.
Ha, if this were true I'd never leave the house!
No, actually. Apple "fanboys" don't think that. You must be thinking of one specific Apple fanboy, Artie MacStrawman.
Aliases are more powerful than symlinks, and for a single-user system that's probably enough, but it would be nice if they'd consider multi-user security a bit more while they're integrating these features into an existing system.
... but you can tell if there's a "stealth" hard link pointing to a path element, by the link count. And, yes, checking the link counts for all directories back to the root is something that properly designed software that depends on traverse checking does.
However, if MS ever left a security hole this big, the industry would have a field day with it.
NT doesn't do traverse checking by default, you have to turn it on (and then see how much Windows-95-quality software breaks).
The fact is OSX is still more secure as there are less users and is therefore much less of a target.
OSX has four main areas where its security is better than Windows:
* Web browsers are not integrated with the desktop.
* Daemons (services) are bound to interfaces by default, so firewalls are optional.
* It uses a uniform system call interface, so there are fewer opportunities for "crashme" type attacks.
* Applications from UNIX do not require a low security level to run.
I'll keep it simple, perhaps overly so, as that seems fitting. It's not meant as a flame in any event.
Every OS I've ever run across has had- in its time- little tasty, tasty bits to it; even the stuff from MS. The problem is that all those succulent morsels are always wrapped up in the rest of the thing.
In MS's case, Vista is chock full of all those tasty, tasty morsels you mentioned but they all come buried in the large turd that is the balance of Windows. I don't know how you feel about it, but when I get handed a turd, even if it's been stuffed full of tasty, tasty candy, been polished to a dull luster and brightly painted to match its brethren's appearance, I'm still having to deal with a handful of crap.
What the hell is a Media Access Control Man?
Desktop Manager is a fantastic tool that's available now.
You seem to like telling other people to "look it up," but frankly, you need a bit of that, too. Specifically, Quartz 2D Extreme. And I don't know even one single person who uses Windows with non-admin users. It's not a question of education, either. It's a question of usability.
Oh, and yeah, if you're a hardcore PC gamer, don't expect a Mac to do the job.
"anyone that knows anything about Video Cards and GDI from the past 15 years can easily answer this question for you..."
.NET developers have thus become accustomed to intermixing GDI+ code with calls to GDI via pinvoke, or using DirectX's drawing system.
I didn't ask a question, but stated something, i.e. that GDI+ is slow, and also made the point that the reasons for this are in its drivers.
"Video cards started adding 2D acceleration, most notably with the IBM 8514, and with the popularity of Windows, the 2D acceleration design of most Video cards is SPECIFICALLY designed around the Windows GDI to basically make the Windows desktop as fast as possible."
The problem with GDI+ though is that it doesn't use the acceleration features even for things that should "map" more or less directly to the standard Windows GDI, so it is much slower at doing standard "GDI-ish" things than GDI is.
"If I remember right, MS even requested that Companies like ATI and NVidia not focus on adding GDI+ 2D acceleration, as they expected Vista to come out much sooner than it did."
I don't recall any major card manufacturers offering to implement GDI+ functions in hardware, because a lot of the functionality that MS added to GDI+ was already present in their cards, but Microsoft's GDI+ drivers don't use it, just like they don' t use the GDI-compatible hardware that's been in most of them for a decade or so.
"So why is GDI+ slow in comparison? Many of the features it offers like anti-aliasing and translucency are not in any Video cards 2D hardware acceleration feature set, which is what they use to render the pre-Vista Windows Application Drawing and desktop."
Lest we forget, the post I was answering compared GDI+ to Apple's equivalent system, which in this case would be Quartz 2D. The Apple development site says the following in its introduction:
"The Quartz 2D API is easy to use and provides access to powerful features such as transparency layers, path-based drawing, offscreen rendering, advanced color management, anti-aliased rendering, and PDF document creation, display, and parsing."
With the exception of the PDF bits, this is pretty much what GDI+ does, yet Quartz 2D manages to do it a lot more quickly than GDI+ even on Macs with less than stellar graphics hardware. In Microsoft's defence is the fact that Windows has to run on a much more varied collection of graphics subsystems than OS X, but by the same token, so does GDI and indeed DirectX. This raises the question (and it is one that many developers have asked) of why MS didn't write GDI+ as an abstraction layer that tied existing hardware-supported GDI functionality together with stuff in DirectX, both of which would be supplied by existing OEM drivers, instead of writing something that requires a different set of drivers.
"So, yes GDI+ is slower than pure GDI, and you will also find that the features of GDI+ that slow it down"
It is the way the features are implemented that slows it down, not the features themselves.
"when implemented on other OSes that also don't have 2D acceleration for these features, these operations on other OSes are also slow"
What developers are moaning about isn't the fact that it's slow at doing things GDI couldn't, but that it's slow at everything, including stuff that GDI was already capable of.
"if you take professional cards (like a Quadro) that have 2D acceleration for GDI+ 'like' features, you will find that GDI+ isn't a slowdown."
I think you need to check your facts here, because Microsoft admit that GDI+ is _significantly_ slower than GDI on all graphics hardware, professional or otherwise, because the only drivers for it are their own, and they implement _everything_ in software, and are thus incapable of using any advanced 2D drawing support that may be present on certain cards.
"MS did screw up with GDI+, as it wasn't used like it 'could' have been, and even though it is fairly rich, MS new they would be replacing GDI
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
HAHAHA! So Microsoft and Apple and the Mozilla Foundation (and tons of other companies, I guess) are likely to be reading through my stuff right now because they create products which allow people to snoop on what content other people consume? You're cracking me up.
Interestingly enough, Apple also produces software with features that specifically allow you to protect yourself from snooping (Safari's private surfing feature comes to mind). What does that make them?
Maybe they simply add features to their apps which their customers actually need and demand? Some parents actually want to know what their kids are doing - not that I personally think that this is a good idea. It's probably also useful in settings like schools.
Is this some kind of joke I'm not getting?
Besides "command line" apt-get, and Synaptic, you can also download .deb files and double click em just like you do with Windows .exe files and if you have all the right required libraries, it will install using an installer. Synaptic is easier though, because it's connected to the repository and all the dependencies are current to that repository.
Too complicated for you ? Have your grandma explain it.. I'm done.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
You seem to like telling other people to "look it up," but frankly, you need a bit of that, too. Specifically, Quartz 2D Extreme. And I don't know even one single person who uses Windows with non-admin users. It's not a question of education, either. It's a question of usability.
You know, I should have mentioned Quartz 2D Extreme, the 'development' feature that isn't even enabled by default and has to be turned on by the debugger, only affects applications after it is turned on, and resets itself to off, oh, and the fact that there are lots of compatibility issues that prevent it from working properly.
I also didn't mention the performance concerns of using it as it requires double the RAM that has to be paged from System to VRAM, instead of elegantly using System RAM as VRAM as Vista does with no double overhead.
I apologize for not mentioning this, just like I didn't mention other test technology. Is there something else being tested out there we should mention?
Apple has to this date not even committed to Quartz 2D Extreme on 10.5, as they are hitting compatibility issues left and right, so it may only be enabled on new Macs and that is a 'big if and maybe' at this point due to the massive issues they are having with it.
It also doesn't help QuickDraw or QuickTime rendering technologies, and the performance of Quartz 2D without 'Extreme' is more than twice as slow as QuickDraw with the 10.4 software optimizations for QuickDraw. Making Quartz 2D less likely to be used even though it was to be the star new Graphical API for Apple. And sadly, in comparisons to a lot of other graphics technologies out there, not only from MS, but in the *nix world, Quartz 2D is outdated before it has the performance to be used like it should have been.
So, as I said before, Vista accelerates WPF, and even LEGACY GDI and GDI+ calls through the GPU, something OSX does NOT DO even for Quartz 2D, and probably will not even do in 10.5.
(If you really want me to look up the links to reference this stuff, then you are vastly out of the OSX loop, as this is a BIG topic in the development and 10.5 beta news.)
As for not knowing a person that uses Windows with non-admin users, you apparently haven't used Windows in a corporate environment or with an old school *nix or NT person setting up the computer.
However, I can agree with you completely that MS was stupid with WindowsXP to go the compatibility route instead of enforcing the NT security model even if it did break applications; they should have broke applications and forced XP users into non-admin roles by default.
MS was way to worried about the market move from Win9x to XP and the applications that were security unaware, and for that XP took quite the security beating for it.
but Microsoft's GDI+ drivers don't use it,
You sounded like you were on track, and a lot of what you state is correct, however this line is a bit of a stopper.
Microsoft DOES NOT make the Video Drivers, nor do they have control over what features the MFR puts in the drivers. They can certify or require features for certification, but they do NOT write the drivers, and this is where the optimizations would need to be if the hardware even supported the acceleration features.
There are issues with the GDI+ features that are GDI like but perform poorly, but if the Video Driver from the MFR doesn't accelerate this as they are DIFFERENT calls, GDI+ will be slow.
However, with that aside, WPF is fully accelerated, even on XP via DirectX7. So MS didn't make the same mistake as they did by leaving GDI+ out in the cold.
Take Care...
I remember installing Magellan on my ALR 286 with a 40 meg HD around 1987-1988. I don't remember the exact feature set but after indexing the drive I could do pretty much everything I am able to do with the modern OS searches like Spotlight.
I'm glad that Spotlight is getting smarter but I think it's silly that these things were not part of the original release.
You don't always need to break new ground. Sometimes you just need to make sure you at least cover the ground already handled by the original innovators.
"Microsoft DOES NOT make the Video Drivers, nor do they have control over what features the MFR puts in the drivers"
.NET programmers, and .NET had other issues that prevented it from being used for the sort of high performance applications that sell graphics cards (e.g. CAD, gaming, animation, etc.), so there wasn't enough customer demand to justify writing GDI+ drivers when most consumer Windows applications only used GDI, and other graphics-intensive software was written for DirectX or OpenGL.
Microsoft does in fact make video drivers, but they tend to be the default ones such as the VGA GDI driver Windows loads when it can't find anything suitable for a machine's hardware (or when it's being run in safe mode), and the software rendering layer that DirectX and old versions of Windows OpenGL use in similar circumstances. The problem is that while most card manufacturers have specialist driver sets for GDI, DirectX, and OpenGL, they didn't write any for GDI+, so everything gets rendered using the Microsoft default software engine even on hardware that's easily capable of doing everything itself, as for example is certainly the case with DirectX 7 compliant systems, and probably DirectX 6 ones.
"There are issues with the GDI+ features that are GDI like but perform poorly, but if the Video Driver from the MFR doesn't accelerate this as they are DIFFERENT calls, GDI+ will be slow."
There are AFAIK no MFR-supplied GDI+ drivers because the only people who used GDI+ to any extent were
"However, with that aside, WPF is fully accelerated, even on XP via DirectX7."
I know, hence my statement about developers feeling that Microsoft's default GDI+ driver should also have used DirectX instead of a lame software renderer, because DirectX 7 has been around since 1999, and GDI+ wasn't publicly launched until 2001, so it was an obvious choice. Alternatively, they could have made such a driver available for download a year or two later when it became clear that OEMs and graphics chip-set manufacturers weren't going to release their own GDI+ drivers, and developers were first complaining loudly, and then avoiding it because of performance issues with Microsoft's default driver.
"So MS didn't make the same mistake as they did by leaving GDI+ out in the cold"
I don't think anybody cares about GDI+ itself, but a lot of developers are pretty pissed (although I'm not one of them) at having followed Microsoft's instructions about using GDI+ to ensure that they'd be compatible with Longhorn, only to find out that it's being dumped for yet another shiny but totally incompatible system, leaving them with large bodies of code that will either have to be completely rewritten, or run inefficiently forever.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
twitter, I think you're confused. I love how you got modded up though. I guess that "M$" thing is still pure magic with the mods. You realize this is an article about a feature of an Apple product, correct? What "M$" service are you talking about?
Of course, it's total bullshit.
That link is 404'ed. I wonder why?
When you treat your kids like criminals
Please, you've proved beyond any reasonable doubt that you are not fit to be a parent, or at least that you shouldn't let kids use computers under your supervision (or lack thereof) Give it up.
That register article is so good, I think I'll journal it up
I doubt it will, considering it's 404 and your "write up" has your usual grammar and spelling mistakes, not to mention the hysterical "OMFG M$ IS TEH EV1LZ" tone.
you M$ paid turds hate
Yes twitter, anyone who disagrees with you is on Microsoft's payroll.
insightful commentary
Just like your posts!
In order for DX10 to work on XP, Microsoft would have had to release a service pack for XP that redid the video device driver layer and introduced virtual memory to your graphics adapters. Its a huge, very breaking change. If you look at the trouble people are having now getting the correct video drivers for Vista, and imagine that every XP user would have had to have scrambled in the same manner to get their system to keep working (and they wouldn't have had the aid of the new driver upgrade tools and the much smarter system restore), it would have been a disaster.
DirectX 10 is very exciting. You're right, its all about the games, but that's an important part about our PCs to many of us. Its also about a longterm simplification of one of the most complicated parts of Win32, something which I think will benefit all users in the longrun.
Dude, I don't know what the hell you are saying. Probably something to do with drawing things on screen. I'm using a Mac, and it works just fine. Are you trying to tell me there's something broken with my computer? Well, I can tell you there isn't.
But tell me, whenever I try to create a File->New on a windows application (like notepad), it just clears the current file; shouldn't it be File->Clear, then? Now that seems like a broken feature to me.
Wow; I'd never noticed that before. Guess that's another point for Firefox over Safari...
It'd be nice to get that system-wide.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
google has a cache. I'll fix that right away. You trolls are useful after all.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
*THIS* is *STILL* what the desktop search wars are about? Whether or not you can search by the basic attributes of a file using wildcards and conveniently launch it afterwards?
.info files were displayed as icons, but other than that what you did with a file did NOT depend on the last three (or even... get this... *four*) characters of its name.
For fsck()'s sake someone give me the damn code for a few days. LMAO people are patenting this shit and having wars over it, and *still* noone (not Mac, not MS, not Linux) has a relational FS, 'like X' searching, result grouping, file-types not determined by extension... C'mon the Amiga had that one in 1989!!! Everybody knew it was a hack that
ROFL, I wonder how many millions have been spent presenting the same search technology from pre 1990 in a different way in the last 18 years? Gotta get a job doing that. If you can't write it in a single line of SQL then it ain't a search function worth having, right? My sides hurt, seriously.
What really surprises me is forum searching. There are so many open source bulletin boards in use, but not one of them has an even remotely helpful search function, despite their widespread use and (supposedly) active development cycles. The human race is doomed to be crushed under the weight of its own information, and all because it's about whether your search engine has a dog or a butterfly on it that talks to you, rather than ACTUALLY MAKING SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES. Actually slashdot tagging is one of the best 'innovations' I've seen lately. Haven't used it but it certainly seems to work from the chump end.
This one will keep me grinning for days. Stupid humans!
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
This is STILL Just a BITMAP Composer, using OpenGL to store and render Textures on a simple Polygon surface for each Window.
Sorry, you're wrong. You're thinking of Quartz Extreme, since then apple has introduced Quartz 2D Extreme (what a terrible name). Here's (for example) an ars article:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 14
OS X 10.4 renders 2D vectors with the GPU.
You're right that they have different architectures. The mac is still 2D bitmaps (though drawing is GPU-accelerated), whereas vista has gone for a more ambitious display list thing. It'll be interesting to see how they match up over the next few years.
"Where did Apple go yesterday?"
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Sorry, you're wrong. You're thinking of Quartz Extreme, since then apple has introduced Quartz 2D Extreme (what a terrible name). Here's (for example) an ars article
Actually I'm not...
Yes Quartz 2D Extreme is something available on OSX 10.4 as you can find me discussing in another post in this thread, but is a developer test feature, and works far from well. (You know get developers to actually start using Quartz 2D before it is outdated by seeing it finally be faster than QuickDraw that is twice the speed of Quartz 2D without Extreme enabled.)
Quartz 2D Extreme is also something that probably will not see the light of day even in 10.5 due to the problems and compatitibility issues it causes.
Has anyone else played with a 10.5 beta, still no Quartz 2D Extreme with the last build I was involved with, not a good sign...
I just hope that Apple make Spotlight actually work. Ever since it replaced Mail's built-in search I haven't been able to find anything. Admittedly I'm probably a special case, as my mail archive stretches back over 14 years. Still, when I type something into the search field I have to wait minutes for anything to happen, and then the results are both numerous and irrelevant. I get better and faster results with "grep".
I'm a big fan of the underlying technology in Spotlight -- observing writes and incrementally maintaining a database is a great idea -- but the usability is terrible.
I'm not interested in any of these new "features". I just want old-style Mac usability.