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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."
...if this will be a free upgrade similarly to the upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1. It would seem hard to justify a purchase price of anything more than $20 that adds only additional stability and developer tools. If anything, this version seems more geared for developers than end-users.
How about NTFS, Apple? About damn time OS X supported read-write for NTFS - hard to bring it into corporate environment when you can't read from a Windows partition. NTFS-3G drivers are stable, they ought to have been integrated with Leopard to begin with.
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It is rumored that 10.6 is going to be the end of PPC support. I suppose it's time, although there are some PPC machines that are less than 4 years old. Still, as bittersweet as it is, it's probably time to let go of the legacy code and firm up the OS. I'm happy running Leopard on my Frankenmac 1.8ghz (Sonnet upgraded).
A good analysis of this decision can be read at RoughlyDrafted Magazine.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
XP to Vista, arguably, was a more minor upgrade. (And, I use the term "upgrade" very loosely. That should be good for a few mod points.)
I am personally through with using Apple's "codenames" for their OS releases. It will never be anything other than "ten point six" to me.
It's almost as if Apple is trying to prove that FOSS projects don't have a monopoly on horrible names.
Yeah... "Leopard"... "Snow Leopard"... that's not gonna cause any confusion, right?
If I have to pay for an imcremental upgrade that doesn't even fully change the name i'll be pissed but they can all it "leopard monkey" or whatever if it's a free upgrade that increases stability and gets me my 16 TB of ram
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
It is about time. We have zillions of programs for every major OS; so why waste time and money on adding features to the OS while third-party already do it? I believe it's a clever idea to enhance the core OS while keeping the outside intact (no new feature). Microsoft tried it with Vista, and they failed miserably. Was the task too big? Maybe. I hope Mac can achieve a complete OS core overhaul in a timely manner. It would set the bar pretty high for other OSes.
Jobs announces he's going to enormously simplify the morass of parallel programming and then also take GPU programming languages far beyond NVIDIA. And he's going to make this all in the core of the OS so it will be ubiquitous.
Oh and one more thing, we've already done it and it's going to be in our next release
Then I read posts about "well what about NTFS or Power PC".
Jebezus! get a sense of proportion here. Yeah NTFS might sell a few enterprise computers. So maybe that matter financially. But apple's doing fine with it's cash flow and we won't be talking about NTFS 5 years from now.
We will be talking about the future of computing which is how to tame and unify alternative and multicore architectures in a way the programmer does not need to worry about.
That's earthshaking if it could be done next year! Now a lot of people have blunted there spears chargin at this one so one needs a healthy dose of skepticism that it could be accomplished in a decade let alone in a few months. On the other hand the one person we know not to scoff at when he says he's going to make something complex really simple, retain 99% of it's power, and deliver it ubiquitously and accessibly is Jobs/Apple.
So doubt and wonder. Pour awe and skepticism. But fuck, don't ask about NTFS when this kind of thing is being annouced. You might as well ask about Zune support in Itunes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"That doesn't help with dual-boot PCs"
The GP was referring to a 'coporate' environment. It's pretty rare to have dual boot machines, it's either one or the other, with networked resources. If you want to dual boot, your data would still be stored on remote servers and accessed via CIFS/whatever in a corporate environment anyway.
I.O.U One Sig.
Only after posting did I realize it was the "first" and got swept up in the excitement of it all. I promise it won't happen again. :)
Let me get the rest out of my system, so I am not tempted:
o Does it run Linux?
o Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
o Profit!
o In Soviet Russia, post firsts you!
I'm sure many slashdotters have shared in the experience of a project rewrite that ended up bigger, buggier, and all around worse than the system or project it replaced...
For a while there, I was thinking that perhaps Apple would merely *say* they wouldn't release many new features in Snow Leopard, but then turn around and at the last second release a feature-laden OS. But then I realized how hard it would be to do that. Too many third-party developers would have to be in the loop for this to work.
The idea would be to stop Redmond from using Apple as the R&D labs, as many suspect winds up being the case ("Start your photocopiers"), and deny MS even the opportunity to borrow for Windows 7.
The more I think about it though, the more obstacles I see to this. But it would be sweeeeet...
Leopard was the longest time we waited between OS X releases (And one of the top few longest between all Apple releases). You must be new to Macs/Apple. I would be very surprised if Jobs didn't say anything about the 'next' release. Whether it be 10.6 or 10.5.5
10.0 - March 24, 2001
10.1 - September 25, 2001
10.2 - August 23, 2002
10.3 - October 24, 2003
10.4 - April 29, 2005
10.5 - October 26, 2007
That's 6 months, 11 months, 14 months, 18 months, 30 months.
Heck looking at Wiki, Apple has always kept a relatively short release time (Nothing as short linux kernels, but absolutely nothing as long as Microsoft)
1.0 - Jan 84
2.0 - Apr 85
3.0 - Jan 86
4.0 - Mar 87
5.0 - ???
6.0 - Apr 88
7.0 - Jun 91
8.0 - July 97
9.0 - Oct 99
Step 1: Plug in monitor cable. Step 2: There is no step 2! What do you need a docking station for?
Not everyone internally was happy about the choices, but management got what it wanted.
Think about the cheaper and portable Macs though. The Mac mini and Macbooks could not have gone 64 bit immediately without increasing the size or heat output. And the tools in Xcode allow easy(ish) generation of Universal binaries which run on 32/64 bit Intel/PowerPC. I admit it's not as simple as pure 64 bit Intel, but it's not as bad as on Windows, where 64 bit adoption has been bad due to massive compatibility problems.
You see, this attitude of consumers is exactly why companies like Apple and Windows have so far focussed more on building OSes that look good, rather than work well. People want a shiny new thing, not a really efficient, rock solid operating system, because they have got used to crashes, useless error-messages, viruses and spam.
For me, this is the most enthralling idea in the End-User computer market in years. Finally, a company decides it's time to stop adding new eye-candy. Instead, Apple is taking a step back and taking their time to iron out the bugs and add actual innovation.
OpenCL sounds amazing. If it works as advertised, it will give developers who really care about performance the option to tap into the hugely parallel architecture available on the GPU that was inacessible to most of us so far (unless we wanted to learn the obscure proprietary semi-languages of ATI, IBM and nVidia).
Grand Central seems to be just the opposite of this: It will make sure those eight cores we'll soon all have in our machines will actually get used, even if the developers who wrote the programs we run didn't care to think about parallelization.
I'm bying Apple stocks. At a time when Microsoft's developers are once again falling victim to the marketing department (remember when Windows 7 was supposed to be a clean new start?), Apple is taking a bold step in what I think is the right direction.
...is solid as the Rock of Gibraltar on my MacBook. It's a stability improvement over 10.5.2 and a far cry from 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 which I avoided and stuck with 10.4.11. I'd put it right up there with Debian.
10.6 is something I'd be willing to pay for, though. Grand Central and true Intel 64 bitness would be awesome and make this MacBook rock. And as I mentioned earlier ZFS on a multi-disk future Time Capsule appliance would rock my world.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It's actually really nice to have a Mac around when pulling files from a possibly infected NTFS drive. You're not going to pick up anything that will infect your machine, and you can pick and choose through the files you want at your leisure after reimaging your Windows box.
There was no suitable 64-bit mobile platform when they made the switch (original Core Duo was 32-bit only).
When you sell as many portables as Apple does, that's an issue.
So the choice was either hobble along on the old-and-outclassed G4 for another year waiting for Intel (because there was just no way a G5 was ever going to shoehorn into a Powerbook), or endure a few years of mixed code.
16 Terabyte... ;-)
Don't forget that 10.6 drops support for PowerPC CPUs!
The last Power Mac G5s were released in late 2005 and weren't replaced by the Mac Pro until late 2006.
The last revision to the PowerBook line was also released in late 2005. I'm still very happy running 10.5 on my 12" PowerBook G4/1.33Ghz from early 2004.
The last iBook came out in mid-2005, replaced in mid-2006. The last PowerPC iMac was released in late 2005. We have 10.5 happily running on my wife's 12" iBook G4/1GHz from 2003 as our kitchen TV.
It's pretty shitty that Apple is dropping support for machines less than 4 years old, and older machines that run 10.5 very well. It's especially galling that they are dropping support with a release that sounds like it should really be a free service pack or point release to 10.5 anyway.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Core 2 Duo was only a few months away, and Apple had the roadmap. They even had samples.
Apple can't "go back" to something it never went away from. Tiger had limited support for 64-bit code, whether on PPC or x86, and Leopard had 64-bit versions of most of its userland libraries. The Snow Leopard page doesn't say much about what's being done other than "Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM - up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today."
Some of the PowerPC machines were 64-bit. The notebooks and the Mac mini were 32-bit.
If the things we value most in an OS are stability, performance and technical advancement, why are those the very things for which we are least willing to pay?
2.0 - Apr 85
3.0 - Jan 86
4.0 - Mar 87
5.0 - ???
Profit!?
6.0 - Apr 88
7.0 - Jun 91
8.0 - July 97
9.0 - Oct 99
I just started to use a Mac a little, after leaving it mostly alone for about 5 years. It's not really as simple and intuitive as it once was. All kinds of special Mac knowledge about where to look for buried UI widges, modes that mean you can't always do what worked in some other mode, lots of "Desktop similes" rather than "Desktop metaphor" (eg. you can't deal with the Desktop widget as if it were the real thing, but only in some special virtual Mac way), and generally the exact same kinds of necessary expertise that gives Windows and Linux users "tunnel vision", a narrow skillset only within the apps and features they use.
Maybe it's Apple competing with Windows that's somehow gravitationally moved the Mac experience closer to the Windows one, even as Windows has sucked ever closer to Apple's innovations. But it used to be easy for a beginner (or just an "uninformed expert" like me) to "just do it" with a Mac, with a much shallower, barely noticeable learning curve.
What we need is a GUI revolution. The iPhone offers one, with its multitouch innovations. As does Nintendo's Wii, with its unconventional new controllers. The Mac, like everyone else, is still stuck in a transitional metaphor to an office/desktop physical environment that's now been totally replaced by its simulation on the Mac. That metaphor doesn't really help people use "documents" and "tools" from past experience with the real things, liberating us from them. It's now a trap that constrains us to only the small set of characteristics that both the real and the virtual versions share in common.
I hope Apple will spend the next year "streamlining" MacOS into something more simple and immediately usable, the way Apple has delivered in the past. Because usually Windows, Linux and everyone else follows and improves likewise. But if it doesn't, then I hope that inspires people to do something really new that's really simple, yet delivering the vast power of all our new devices. Because those people will inevitably be the ones to drag everyone else along into the new, simpler paradigm. And probably get rich along the way.
--
make install -not war
Translation: "Let's see if we can distract Mac owners from the fact that the recent Apple developer conference produced no new upgrades, no new hardware, no Jobs-ian announcements on OSX, just iPhonery."
Translation: "We're an iPhone company now"
Translation: "We've put off any serious work on OS X for eleven months"
Translation: "We're hoping to bugfix some of the the low-level tweaks promised for Leopard and finally get them out the door... if we're not too busy with the iPhone."
Translation: "We really might be able to fix those bugs..."
Translation: "Yet another feature, like resolution independent graphics, that didn't make it into Leopard, because we were way too busy with the iPhone. But we might have it for you in a year. Read-only, of course. And not turned on by default. For developers only. And only in beta, of course. Use this feature at your own risk."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In regards to the comment about Cisco's clunky VPN client, a better option can be found at http://www.lobotomo.com/products/IPSecuritas/
Admittedly I've only used this to connect to Sonicwall firewalls, but I found the interface clean and it worked for me where other VPN solutions wouldn't even connect.
I work in a multi-OS educational environment and see the weaknesses of all popular OS's in a short-exposure, high-contact learning context. The one area OS X really falls down is in the area of file-system and application navigation. I often see a student coming from Windows become comfortable managing both their files and applications with Linux (GNOME or KDE) far faster than they do with the Finder/OS X interface. While perhaps being a tired metaphor, the application tray, where any application minimised or otherwise can always be found (regardless of virtual desktop) works: they have per-application visual contact with what is active in their desktop session, uncomplicated by a dock doubling as a menu of popular applications.
After years of complaints from OS 9 and OS X users about the Finder Apple should confess to the difficult reality that - for many, not all - it is a major bottleneck to ease-of-use and therefore adoption. Students of mine - in general - spend far too much time second-guessing OS X where file and software management is concerned. Why are users' *losing* software and files so often that they need a *Finder*? Why are they so dependent on Spotlight that OS X might as well house all files in a flat-file-system? Why does the parent-window of an application still dominate the core navigation context even when minimised? This stuff confuses and frustrates people far too often I think.
It may not be the case for pro-users but I see students of mine spending far too much time clicking and dragging windows around in the course of trying to find and get stuff done on OS X.
My 2 clicks.
As the person responsible for a 4,400 desktop environment and as someone who deeply, deeply dislikes Microsoft, I can tell Apple in one sentence how to get Mac OS X into my environment....
Let me run it on non-Apple hardware.
I have a collection of Dell Optiplexes, HP dc7700 desktops, and a bunch of MPC 4x4 all-in-one systems. I would gladly, and with executive support I believe, pilot a Windows to OS X project on a few hundred systems within a quarter of that ability coming available.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
That settles it, I'm moving to Korea!
I'm an Apple admin (thank god) and talk like yours is getting really old.
Everyone has that one thing that keeps them from buying Apple products. ("real" video card in iMac, video camera on iPhone, etc.)
You already have an option. What's wrong with:
I have a collection of Dell Optiplexes, HP dc7700 desktops, and a bunch of MPC 4x4 all-in-one systems. I would gladly, and with executive support I believe, pilot a Windows to Linux project on a few hundred systems within a quarter of that ability coming available.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
> Translation: "We've put off any serious work on OS X for eleven months"
Pshaw. Means they're just done screwing with the interface for a while. They have a stable and useful user experience in 10.5.3. It'll get a few tweaks along the line, 10.5.3 changed Spaces considerably. They're also talking about major architectural changes to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the hardware. You may not care about optimizing for multiple cores or offloading processing to the GPU, but the bioinformatics people who run racks full of Xservs in a compute farm were dancing in the aisles at WWDC.
>most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments
Licensing full Exchange support sure as hell will. The return of VB support in MS Office a year or so after 10.6 comes out will also help enormously. The Active Directory support keeps getting better and better every release too. With, again, more stuff licensed from Microsoft Apple will be able to play in the enterprise.
It's easier to be funny when you have a clue.
I'll give you the bug fixes though. Adding a new hardware platform did disrupt 10.5 and increased their bug rate as Apple tries to manage a common codebase for two very different platforms. Arguably, 10.5.3 represents where Leopard should have been at release, and could have been but for the iPhone. They're late, but catching up.
10.5.3 is full ready for use if you haven't switched yet, Check the remaining issues before committing though, there are (always) some bugs left.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
For the follow-up to Leopard to focus on under-the-hood improvements without changing the UI and user experience dramatically has precedent in Mac OS X Tiger for Intel. Apple did Tiger with many new user features, then Tiger for Intel was made to look completely identical to the user, but it brought with it dramatic under-the-hood differences. Leopard and Snow Leopard are the same thing again.
With Tiger they said "come get Tiger" and with Tiger for Intel they said "come get Intel". With Leopard they're selling Leopard and with Snow Leopard they'll sell a larger number of processors and more memory than Leopard can support. One release they sell the software then one release they sell the hardware. They don't have to worry if Snow Leopard in-a-box doesn't sell all that well, because Snow Leopard in-a-Mac will sell really well, it'll be designed to drive new Mac sales. They already mentioned ungodly amounts of RAM in their first PR about Snow Leopard.
I've got five Macs. My daily driver is an 8GB, 8-core Intel Mac Pro. My carry along a is loaded dual-core Macbook pro. Both are typically running linux, windows, and OSX all at once. I write graphics software for a living. Powerful graphics software, written at the metal level. I'm all for multicore/multiprocessor at the OS level; the easier, the better, and likewise, multi-machine for even bigger jobs. However, this does not change the fact that Apple is mostly doing iPhone work, and that not adding obvious consumer-level goodies to OS X will cost them dearly -- which they don't care about, because -- wait for it -- they're all about the iPhone now. I meant the post to be funny, all right, but only because it's true.
The very idea that low level improvements and bugfixes precludes feature addition at the GUI/high level is absurd, and if anyone at Apple had half a brain focused on the Mac, they'd never have said anything like that, or even implied it.
OS "features" can be as simple as adding a nice set of programs to the stable. Things like a decent personal finance manager. Wouldn't affect system stability one whit, but it'd increase the value of the Mac to the first time buyer by quite a bit. How about a nice, basic paint program? Or a set of kids coloring books / tools? A basic expert system? Lots of middle to high end users could use one, and heck, they're not that difficult to write. I wrote one in python that, minus the knowledge base, isn't even 10k and you'd be blinking amazed at how much it knows about rocks and minerals, and how well it can generalize and leap to conclusions. How about including a language teacher? How about a finder with a decent feature set? Something like... Pathfinder - buy it, maybe tweak it, and ship it. That would be @#$%^&*$ awesome. Heck, I'd probably pee right down my leg if they simply shipped a working, color version of midnight commander (a findery thing for shellfolk.)
See where I'm going here? Put an expert programmer in a corner, say "make a COOL one of these apps" and leave them be. In a year, if you don't have something really cool, the programmer should be shot. Total investment, one programmer's salary. Put ten programmers to ten tasks, watch em decently, and in a year, you'd have ten new selling points that had ZERO to do with OS stability, etc. Or just reach out the the Mac community and buy a few things, again, there are tons of them out there and I can assure you that many of them could be had for what amounts to peanuts. And also as we know, Apple's got more than peanuts in its pocket, and dropping a few million on programmers and/or acquisitions isn't a problem if they simply want to. So when they say "no features for you", what they're telling you is, "we're not going to exert ourselves on your behalf." They're not saying why... but just wake up and smell the iPhone marketing, man.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It should be noted that this is "A Quantum Leap". Quantum particles are extremely small particles so this obviously refers to a very small change.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I'm revealing my age here, when I say that my first unix based OS was NeXTstep.
One of the things I liked about Next was that an application kept to itself: Wherever you installed it, everything was in a directory "ApplicationName.app" This made uninstalling easy. It also meant that installing an application on a network file system made it available to all NextStations on the local network. (In some cases a 'dwrite global applicationname value' was needed for licensing for individual machines.)
Apple has not insisted on this. While many applications will work this way, now files are also stuffed into various Library directories. Uninstalling applications manually is no longer trivial.
Furthermore, some applications insist on writing to their own program directory.
I wish that apple and other OS's would implement a new security model regarding file spaces.
1. There are three file spaces: OS, Application, and user. Each can be divided.
2. The OS space consists of the distro along with applications from the distro vendor. For Windows the OS would include WordPad, but not Office (sold separately) For Mac it would include Mail, but not Aperture. For linux it would include
2a. The OS space has at least the following three subsections:
3. User space.
By default user space has a directory for each user, with access restricted to and controlled by that user. This is pretty much the way things are now.
3a. User space/group space. Methods for collaborating and sharing documents.
4. Application space.
app space is done on 1 top level directory per vendor. Acrobat reader goes in
The key here is that the adobe installer does not have write privileges outside of the
Just as user smith can't write to user jone's files, nor should Adobe be able to write to microsoft files.
This implies that some program equivalent to Next's 'buildservices' needs to periodically run to pick out what programs provided services for other programs.
5. In a general setup, no user should be able to execute a file in a directory they have write access to. Some mechanism for installations, and for developers needs to be made, but as a general rule this would go a long way to intercept malware. For users (as opposed to developers) having executable code in their directories is not a benefit.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
OS engineers do not write "cool apps". We write the kernel and libraries that enable other people to write "cool apps".
All the "features" that you're talking about aren't part of an operating system, and thus have no place in a discussion of how easy or hard it would be for Apple to add significant features to a future OS. They are applications. It's possible that an apps team at Apple might write them and include them for free with the OS, but they aren't part of the OS in any meaningful way.
When an OS vendor says that they're focusing on stability and performance, they mean that the engineers who work on the system libraries and kernel aren't going to spend their time making it do fundamentally new things, they're going to focus instead on making it do the thing it already does faster and more correctly (which may require a complete rewrite of huge sections of code).
This has essentially nothing to do with the sort of "features" that you're talking about. Trivial little toy applications are neither here nor there.
Actually, I'm fairly comfortable saying that. Deep underlying changes, complete rewrites... those are great ways to break the living heck out of a system that is mostly working very well. Whereas adding tools for the end-users (even kids) that don't yank the entire rug out from under every program in the system and replace it with a brand new rug which may be slippery, a fire hazard, contain uncounted numbers of weevils, and - by accident of course - is missing the rubber backing so you slip on it every time you step on it...
But really, I'm not worried about it. You know why? Because what I actually think we're going to get a year from now is an announcement that there's new iPhone software available. Perhaps accompanied by the news that there's a new iPhone, too. If we do get an OS X that has been substantially rewritten internally, I will (a) be astonished, and (b) let you test it for a couple of years before I make even the slightest move to upgrade. Because momma didn't raise no fool.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.