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OS X Snow Leopard Details
JD-1027 writes in to kick off a discussion of OS X Snow Leopard. Apple's stated goal: "Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard's enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality." The technologies: Grand Central to get better use of multiple processors and multicore chips, OpenCL to tap the power of the GPU, 64 bit so we can finally have our 16 TB of RAM, QuickTime X for optimized modern codec performance, and built in Exchange support in iCal, Address Book, and Apple Mail that most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments. We've previously discussed ZFS in the server version of Snow Leopard."
Sure, the boosts in efficiency and stability will be welcome, but I for one am very excited about full Exchange support in iCal and Address Book. Heck, the Exchange support in Mail is a bit spotty as well, so touching that up would be great as well.
But what would really be great (and very much in line with the whole "embracing enterprise" thing) would be native support for Cisco IPsec VPN connections. As it stands, you have to use Cisco's own clunky client; if you could use the built-in client you could connect via a menubar icon. (Shimo does this pretty nicely, but it just became crippleware.)
It seems like an obvious addition, given the iPhone 2.0 OS is supposed to have it. Anyone know if it's on the docket for Snow Leopard?
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
I don't like NTFS either, but I do regularly run computers with all three OSs (Mac mostly for work (developer), Windows for home (WoW), and a Linux server). I think the slowest format is either HFS+ or ext3, I've certainly seen ext3 be quite slow. So long as you use the "quick" option for NTFS formats it is quite fast. Of course, with all the grahpic goodies everything on Macs seems slow, but it's also hard to time how long it takes.
And no, I'm not a switcheur nor a noob. I've used/owned Macs since System 7, I've been using Linux for 8 years now, and I started with DOS 5 on an 80286, and ran every Windows and Mac version from then to current.
XFS is a fast format, ext3 takes a few minutes depending on the size of the partition, and NTFS is a few seconds in quick mode. Quick format has been there for quite a while (even DOS) and without it I always assumed format was zeroing the partition, which is slow of course.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.