Apple Freezes Snow Leopard APIs

DJRumpy writes in to alert us that Apple's new OS, Snow Leopard, is apparently nearing completion. "Apple this past weekend distributed a new beta of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that altered the programming methods used to optimize code for multi-core Macs, telling developers they were the last programming-oriented changes planned ahead of the software's release. ...`Apple is said to have informed recipients of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build 10A354 that it has simplified the`... APIs for working with Grand Central, a new architecture that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of Macs with multiple processing cores. This technology works by breaking complex tasks into smaller blocks, which are then`... dispatched efficiently to a Mac's available cores for faster processing."

Comments

Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't video game programmers been doing it forever, doing some things on the CPU, some on the graphics card?

And I heard functional languages like Lisp/Haskell are good at these multi-core tasks, is that true?

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Haven't video game programmers been doing it forever, doing some things on the CPU, some on the graphics card?

The problem is shared-memory, not multi-processor or core itself. Graphics card have dedicated memory or reserve a chunk of the main memory.

And I heard functional languages like Lisp/Haskell are good at these multi-core tasks, is that true?

It is true, because they privilege immutable data structures which are safe to access concurrently.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Tenebrousedge]

No, they haven't, with few exceptions. Doing multiple things at the same time isn't really the issue here, we're trying to figure out how to effectively split one task between multiple 'workers'. Video games are one of the harder places to try to apply this technique to, because they run in real time and are also constantly responding to user input. Video encoding is the opposite. One of the big problems with multicore is coordinating the various worker threads.

You could learn a lot by taking the time to read the wikipedia article on multicore.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Trepidity]

And I heard functional languages like Lisp/Haskell are good at these multi-core tasks, is that true?

It is true, because they privilege immutable data structures which are safe to access concurrently.

Only partly true. Even in pure functional languages like Haskell, the functional-programming dream of automatic parallelization is nowhere near here yet; in theory the compiler could just run a bunch of thunks of code in parallel, or speculatively, or whatever it wants, but in practice the overhead of figuring out which are worth splitting up has doomed all the efforts so far. It does make some kinds of programmer-specific parallelism easier; probably the most interesting experiments in that direction, IMO, is Clojure's concurrency primitives (Clojure's a Lisp-derived language with immutable data types, targeting the JVM).

Lisp, FWIW, doesn't necessarily privilege immutable data structures, and isn't even necessarily used in a functional-programming style; "Lisp" without qualifiers often means Common Lisp, in which it's very common to use mutable data structures and imperative code.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[xouumalperxe]

Haven't video game programmers been doing it forever, doing some things on the CPU, some on the graphics card?

Yeah, and they sync an unknown (but often quite large) amount of "cores" (ie, the shaders, etc in the GPU) quite easily too.

Of course, the only reason it's so easy for video game programmers is that raster graphics are one of the easiest things ever to parallelize (since pixels rarely depends on other pixels), and APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D make the parallelism completely transparent. If they had to program each individual pixel pipeline by hand, we'd still be stuck with CPU rendering. The purpose of Grand Central is to, hopefully, make CPU parallelism as painless a process as GPU parallelism (which is hyperbole on my part, since CPU parallelism will typically hit resource contention a lot more often).

I reckon that functional languages as a whole are pretty good for parallel programming provided they're purely functional (ie, no side-effects). Even a naive "first come first serve" policy to assign free cores to function calls would keep all those cores reasonably balanced. In practical terms, I don't know exactly how that goes, though (but Erlang reportedly has brilliant parallelism support).

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[A.K.A_Magnet]

I know it was partially true, I should remember not to be too lazy when posting on /. :).

Note that I was not talking about automatic parallelization which is indeed possible only with pure languages (and ghc is experimenting on it); but simply about the fact that is is easier to parallelize an application with immutable data structures since you need to care a lot less about synchronization. For instance, the Erlang actors model (also in other languages like Scala on the JVM) still requires the developer to define the tasks to be parallelized, yet immutable data structures make the developer's life a lot easier with respect to concurrent access and usually provide better performance.

My "It is true" was referring to "functional languages" which do usually privilege immutable data structures, not to Haskell or Lisp specifically (which as you said has many variants with mutable structures focused libraries). As you said, Clojure is itself a Lisp-1 and it does privilege immutable data structures and secure concurrent access with Refs/STM or agents. What is more interesting in the Clojure model (compared to Scala's, since they are often compared even though their differences, as functional languages and Java challengers on the JVM) is that it doesn't allow unsafe practices (all must be immutable except in variables local to a thread, etc).

Interesting times on the JVM indeed.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Trepidity]

Yeah that's fair; I kind of quickly read your post (despite it being only one sentence; hey this is Slashdot!) so mistook it for the generic "FP means you get parallelization for free!" pipe dream. :)

Yeah, I agree that even if the programmer has to specify parallelism, having immutable data structures makes a lot of things easier to think about. The main trend that still seems to be in the process of being shaken out is to what extent STM will be the magic bullet some people are proposing it to be, and to what extent it can be "good enough" as a concurrency model even in non-functional languages (e.g. a lot of people are pushing STM in C/C++).

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[DJRumpy]

I see a lot of talk about programming data structures, but what if their tackling this at a much lower level? Taken to a simple extreme description, each core is simply processing a single task at a time for X number of clock cycles or less (although I understand they can process multiple tasks via piping or somesuch). There is already a balancing act between the CPU and memory as it has to sync I/O between the two due to differing clock speeds. What if they are doing something similar here?

By that I mean tackling this at a low level so that the bits it breaks up among the worker 'cores' are extremely small bits of instruction out of the larger whole, not whole chunks of data structures or routines themselves but rather individual instructions?

Apologies if I'm butchering this horribly as I'm not a low level programmer. I feel like I'm stumbling about verbally trying to figure out how to say it.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[tepples]

Video games are one of the harder places to try to apply this technique to, because they run in real time and are also constantly responding to user input. Video encoding is the opposite.

Since when does encoding of live video not need to run in real time? An encoder chain needs to take the (lightly compressed) signal from the camera, add graphics such as the station name and the name of the speaker (if news) or the score (if sports), and compress it with MPEG-2. And it all has to come out of the pipe to viewers at 60 fields per second without heavy latency.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Lumpy]

only the CRAPPY video cards use any of the main memory. Honestly, with how cheap real video cards are I cant believe anyone would intentionally use a memory sharing video card.

It's like the junk winmodems of yore. DONT BUY THEM.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Tenebrousedge]

I didn't specify live video encoding. That sentence does not make sense if interpreted to be referring to live video encoding. I would be remarkably misinformed to have used live video encoding as an example of something that does not run in real time. Live video encoding is not often encountered in a desktop PC environment, and I would go so far as to say that the majority of video broadcasts are not live.

I am somewhat confused as to why you're talking about live video encoding. Does this relate to multicore processing in some way?

Also, your sig is misleading. Most PCs have VGA or DVI-I output abilities, and the conversion to the RCA connectors requires no special electronics. To imply some sort of inability or incompatibility between PCs and SDTVs is...strange, and increasingly irrelevant as PCs and TVs both are moving towards HDMI (or DVI, which is electrically compatible).

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[moon3]

Heavy parallelized task can also be leveraged by utilizing CUDA and your GPU, even the cheap GPU of today have some 128-512 SPU cores.

What do you think the GPU driven super computer fuzz is all about?

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[DrgnDancer]

I'm by no means a multiprocessing expert, but I suspect the problem with your approach is in the overhead. Remember that the hardest part of multiprocessing, as far as the computer is concerned, is making sure that all the right bit of code get run in time to provide their information to the other bits of code that need it. The current model of multi-CPU code (as I understand it) is to have the programmer mark the pieces that are capable of running independently (either because they don't require outside information, or they never run at the same time as other pieces that need the information they access/provide), and tells the program when to spin off these modules as separate threads and where it will have to wait for them to return information.

What you're talking about would require the program to break out small chunks of itself, more or less as if sees fit, whenever it sees an opportunity to save some time by running parallel. This first requires the program to have some level of analytical capability for it's own code (Let's say we have two if statements one right after the other, can they be run concurrently? or does the result of the first influence the second? What about two function calls in a row?). The program will have to erect mutex locks around each piece of data it uses too, just to be sure that it doesn't cause dead locks if it misjudges whether two particular pieces of code can in fact run simultaneously.

It also seems to me (again I'm not an expert), that you'd spend a lot of time moving data between CPUs. As I understand it, one of the things you want to avoid in parallel programing is having a thread have to "move" to a different CPU. This is because all of the data for the thread has to be moved from the cache of the first CPU to the cache of the second. A relatively time consuming task. Multicore CPUs share level 2 cache I think, which might alleviate this, but the stuff in level 1 still has to be moved around, and if the move is off die, to another CPU entirely, then it doesn't help. In your solution I see a lot of these moves being forced. I also see a lot of "Chunk A and Chunk B provided data to Chunk C. Chunk A ran on CPU1, Chunk B on CPU2, and Chunk C has to run on CPU3, so it has to get the data out of the cache of the other two CPUS".

Remember that data access isn't a flat speed. l1 is faster than l2 which is much faster than RAM, which is MUCH faster than I/O buses. Anytime data has to pass through RAM to get to a CPU you lose time. With lots of little chunks running around getting processed, the chances of having to move data between CPUs goes up a lot. I think you'd lose more time on that then you gain by letting the bits all run on the same CPU.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[DJRumpy]

I think I understand what your saying and it makes sense.

A = 1
A = A + 1
If you ran the first line on Core 1 and the second on Core 2, how would it know that the second line would need to be processed after the first (other than it's place in the code itself).

I wonder if they are using this parallel process only for isolated threads then? I thought any modern OS already did this? Does anyone know exactly how they are tweaking the OS to better multitask among cores (In semi-technical Laymen's terms)? I wonder if this technology is being openly discussed in detail around on the net. Not guesswork but actual technical knowledge as to what they've done?

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[AndrewNeo]

Unfortunately that's not the issue at hand. You're referring to the video card using system RAM for it's own, but the issue they're talking about (which only occurs in the 32-bit world, not 64-bit, due to the MMU) is that to address the memory on the video card, it has to be put into the same 32-bit addressable block as the RAM, which cuts into being able to use it all, rather than using it physically. At least, that's how I understand it works.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[DrgnDancer]

On top of the fact that Core 2 needs to somehow know not to run the instruction until after Core 1 runs its preceding instruction, you're also moving the value of A from Core 1 to Core 2. Normally, when one instruction follows another and the same variable is used, that variable's value is cached in CPU level 1 cache. It's almost instantly accessed. In your example you have to move it between Cores; that means it has to go out to CPU level 2 cache from Core 1's L1, and back into Core 2's L1 so it can be accessed for the instruction. That's going to take A LOT more time than simply running the ADD () on the same core would have. Now imagine that Core 2 is busy and you had to move to Core 3 (on a different chip). Since Cores 1 and 3 don't share L2 cache, the value of A has to move through RAM to get to the new core. LOTS slower.

The way it mostly works now, unless things have improved in the last few years since I last looked at this seriously, is that I, as a programmer, have to determine what parts are safe to run in parallel. The most common example you see is very large matrix calculations. The larger matrix can be broken down into a number of equal sized smaller matrixes which are then sent to the other CPUs as threads. Since they are all working on different pieces none of them care what the others are doing. The master thread than simply waits for all of the sub threads to give it their answers and then combines them into the final answer. Obviously this is a pretty specialized algorithm (though more common than you'd think), but it serves as a simple example. The matrix calculations are very computationally intensive, so the overhead of moving data around is more than made up for by the time saved dividing the task up.

Basically what you do as a programmer is go through your code (or more properly your algorithm, you should do this as part of your design) and figure out places that will (a) be helped by concurrency and (b) are safe to run concurrently. By safe it's generally meant that the same pieces of data won't be accessed at the same time. This could be because the threads are working one different pieces of data (like in the matrix example), or because you've somehow ensured that the data is protected. By "helped by concurrency" its generally meant that the overhead of moving data between CPUs (and managing the threads in general) is less than the time saved by breaking the task out.

Hopefully someone will correct me if I've flummox this to badly, I took a class on this, but it was 3-4 years ago.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[mdwh2]

Haven't video game programmers been doing it forever, doing some things on the CPU, some on the graphics card?

Not really - although it's easy to use both the CPU and the GPU, normally this would not be at the same time. What's been going on "forever" is that the CPU would do some stuff, then tell the GPU to do some stuff, then the CPU would carry on.

What you can do is have a thread for the CPU stuff updating the game world, and then a thread for the renderer, but that's more tricky (as in, at least as difficult as any CPU multiprocessing), and hasn't been done by all games "forever". (There are also a few GPU functions that can be run in parallel, but these can be tricky to do right.)

The main area of multiprocessing is on the GPU itself - the reason that's easy is because graphics rendering is an embarrassingly parallel problem (plus the graphics card/libraries will do all the setting up of the threads for you - it's harder to do that for CPUs, because the needs for CPU SMP vary for each program).

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[mdwh2]

The problem is shared-memory, not multi-processor or core itself. Graphics card have dedicated memory or reserve a chunk of the main memory.

Surely it's just as feasible with CPU SMP to reserve a chunk of memory for each thread, instead of sharing memory? AIUI that's a standard way of avoiding locking issues when doing SMP programming.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[A.K.A_Magnet]

We call that processes and the fork model.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Brett Buck]

Even in pure functional languages like Haskell, the functional-programming dream of automatic parallelization is nowhere near here yet; in theory the compiler could just run a bunch of thunks of code in parallel, or speculatively, or whatever it wants, but in practice the overhead of figuring out which are worth splitting up has doomed all the efforts so far.

      Forgive my profound ignorance on the topic, but am I to understand that the determination of which can run in parallel is done at run-time (and thus requires overhead to implement it)?! In my extremely limited experience, we determined which items could be parallel ahead of time and split them manually. I would have presumed that any automatic system would do the same as it was compiled and/or linked. But on-the-fly? I can easily see how that might have some issues.

        Brett

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Trepidity]

The "overhead" I meant (and admittedly was imprecise about) was mostly the overhead of implementing the parallel execution, not of the parallelization itself. Things like spawning threads, managing work queues, blocking on futures, etc., all take time, and it takes a very smart compiler to only use them in cases where the parallelizing win outweighs the bookkeeping overhead.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[EastCoastSurfer]

What you're describing is Memory Mapped IO (MMIO).

MMIO is very fast and simple because you use the processors same instructions to read/write from the 'mapped' memory as you do to any other memory. This allows the processor to treat devices simply as locations in RAM to read/write from.

The 64-bit world still uses MMIO, but it doesn't cause an issue like in the 32-bit world because you have a much larger possible memory address space.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Tubal-Cain]

Honestly, with how cheap real video cards are I cant believe anyone would intentionally use a memory sharing video card.

Now if only I could fit a PCI-E card in my laptop...

G5?

[line-bundle]

what is the status of 10.6 on the PowerPC G5?

Re:G5?

[Anonymous Coward]

as i understand it, there is no 10.6 on PPC.

Re:G5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rumour has it that the betas are Intel only. No official word from Apple.

Re:G5?

[A12m0v]

Blame it on IBM and Motorola (Freescale). They couldn't provide Apple with the chips it needed.

Re:G5?

[Richard_at_work]

Its working well, thanks for asking...

Re:G5?

[jbolden]

They refused to provide custom chips without large binding orders. They were willing to provide Apple with chips just not à la carte.

Re:G5?

[chabotc]

Snow Leopard is going to be the first version of Mac OS X that only runs on Intel Macs, so I'm afraid you're going to be stuck on plain old leopard

Re:G5?

[Uberbah]

Excuse #527, and it doesn't change the fact that IBM promised 3 Ghz chips within a year, and never delivered. And it's not like Apple was small potatoes - they were selling four million Macs a year at the time, with higher margins than the Cell.

Re:G5?

[Uberbah]

They promised Apple 3 Ghz chips within a year and never delivered.

Fixed that for you.

Re:G5?

[BrokenHalo]

...stuck on plain old leopard

I guess that might be red rags to a bull for someone who only migrated from Tiger for the A2DP support.

Re:G5?

[jbolden]

If Apple had order (binding order) 4 million 3ghz chips IBM would have either provided them or paid large penalties.

Re:G5?

[Anonymous Coward]

$ uname -r

10.0.0d7

$ file `which bash`
/bin/bash: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/bin/bash (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/bin/bash (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

Re:G5?

[Uberbah]

OEM's don't generally have ginormous binding orders with just-in-time inventory. The issue is a red herring. It's not that Apple wasn't a big enough customer - and they were well out of the 90's doldrums - it's that IBM is a shitty fabber compared to Intel and this is a shitty excuse offered for them.

Re:G5?

[jbolden]

Microsoft which order 50 million in units of 10 million got a custom chip with all sorts of modifications. You may not like the fact that binding orders were the problem but:

1) IBM indicated this was the problem
2) What happened with Microsoft indicates that IBM was in fact willing to provide speciality chips for people with binding orders

Re:G5?

[DECS]

The main feature of Snow Leopard is its 64-bit kernel and an upgrade across the board to 64-bit apps.

The problem for porting this to PowerPC is that the move to 64-bits only makes things slower on PPC because, as it is based on a modern 64-bit architecture with plenty of registers, it's already gained most of the benefits of 64-bits even when using 32-bit apps. Moving to 64-bit apps just means it has to move around more memory.

On the other hand, 32-bit Intel CPUs are register starved, so the additional memory overhead of the move to 64-bits is far outweighed by the improvement in moving to the 64-bit "Intel" architecture (developed by AMD).

So faced with spending twice the efforts to optimize SL for PPC machines that Mac users have known to be marked for death since 2006, resulting in a product that only runs 64-bit versions of PPC apps slower than Leopard, Apple decided to target its modern 2009 operating system to its modern hardware platform.

There are probably some G5 owners who might like the idea of being able to upgrade to SL, but they probably don't realize that it would only result in some new trim and slower overall performance. And if you compare the number of G5 machines Apple was selling in 2005-2006 with the number of Intel machines it has sold since, you'll see another reason why Apple is supporting Intel exclusively.

FYI:

Apple sold 0.8 to 1 million PPC Macs per quarter in 2005-2006.
Apple sold 2.3 to 2.6 million Intel Macs per quarter in the last year.

Why Windows 7 is Microsoft's next Zune

Re:G5?

[Uberbah]

You may not like the fact that binding orders were the excuse for their shitty fabbing

Fixed that for you. Just In Time inventory. Try Google.

IBM indicated this was the problem

Then they shouldn't have promised Apple 3 ghz chips within a year, no ifs ands or buts.

What happened with Microsoft indicates that IBM was in fact willing to provide speciality chips for people with binding orders

And I'm just waiting for IBM to decline to make chips for the Playstation 4 or Xbox 3 because Sony and Microsoft were "too small" to bother with.

Snow leopard is such an apt codename

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Spread your tiny wings and fly away,
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day.
The one I love forever is untrue,
And if I could you know that I would
Fly away with you.

In a world of good and bad, light and dark, black and white, it remains very hopeful that Apple still sees itself as a beacon of purity. It pushes them to do good things to reinforce their own self-image.

I can't wait to try this latest OS!

Re:Snow leopard is such an apt codename

[Anonymous Coward]

I almost threw up.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the editor doesn't know how to edit?

Oh wait, kdawson, never mind.

Freezes Snow Leopard APIs

[orta]

Chuckles. Maybe we could be looking at a sneaky release for WWDC ( early June )

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[Fex303]

Why... is there... there so much... punctionations in the summary?

Because the summary is directly quoting the article and using ellipses to indicate that certain party of the quotation have been omitted. Usually there would be a space on either side of the ellipsis when this was done, but this is /. so I'll let this one slide.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[noundi]

Because it's a qoute. You see there are rules to any language and one of them in the English language is regarding quoting. When you quote a source the text written must be matching every word of the source. When the quote contains unnecessary text to the topic at hand you cut out that part and replace it with three periods. This indicates that there's a piece missing from the original quote, in case e.g. someone is questioning the quote at hand. So you see quoting is not interpreting, and must be, at all times, matching every word of the source.

Turn to side B for the next lesson.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[Trepidity]

Slashdot is kind of an in-between case, though; when the editors post a story by submitters, it's sort of formatted as if they're "quoting" the submitters, but it's not quite like quoting a book or speech or something. It's expected that when submitting a piece to a site with editors (assume for the sake of argument we can call Slashdot editors that), that your text might be, well, edited before publication. The Economist, for example, edits letters to the editor before publication for style and brevity, without using ellipses to indicate where they removed text.

Living in the past

[Cheech Wizard]

Alas, as when Apple stopped putting floppy drives in Macs, others followed. Those who wish to stay with old technology have that choice. I think I have a buggy whip here if you need one... ;)

Re:Living in the past

[evohe80]

I just hope the Optical Drive goes the same way on notebooks. Most people use it very few times a year (not more than 4 or 5 in my case), and it is more than 250gr (~ half a pound) to carry every time the notebook is moved.

Re:Living in the past

[Ash-Fox]

Alas, as when Apple stopped putting floppy drives in Macs, others followed.

Not really, PCs had disk drives for many more years. It was only when DVD writers became standards did it stop appearing in models.

Also, what other PC manufacturers even use PPC?

Re:Living in the past

[tepples]

I just hope the Optical Drive goes the same way on notebooks. Most people use it very few times a year (not more than 4 or 5 in my case)

From your comment I guess that either you don't watch a lot of DVD movies, or you are given DVDs as a gift 4 or 5 times a year and live in a country that lacks a DMCA counterpart so that you can rip the DVDs to your computer.

Re:Living in the past

[Hurricane78]

Just tell me this: How is an average user without a DVD/CD drive going to install an OS? Even I have problems with this, and I am pretty experienced.
(Booting from an USB stick never quite worked. Also I already need the one that I have, as a keyfile storage.)

Re:Living in the past

[alexandre_ganso]

No, he is probably downloading stuff like everyone else and his sister.

Seriously. The same thing that happened to audio cds is going to happen to dvd. They will become obsolete as long as bandwidth keeps increasing.

Re:Living in the past

[Anonymous Coward]

The Rewritable CD drive is not what killed off the floppy. The USB stick did.

Re:Living in the past

[cabjf]

Maybe not PC manufacturers, but all the current consoles have PPC derived processors.

Re:Living in the past

[LanMan04]

I believe the Xbox 360 has a PPC CPU.

Re:Living in the past

[drinkypoo]

Back in the day, you couldn't even take for granted that you could
boot off of a CD.

You mean, you couldn't take for granted that you could boot your PC off a CD. EVERYONE else had it well figured out. These days you can't take for granted that you can boot from USB, still! Some motherboards still bone it.

Re:Living in the past

[amliebsch]

You get yourself a USB optical drive. As an added bonus, you can schlep it around to any other computers that might have need of it.

Re:Living in the past

[evohe80]

I didn't mean that Optical Drives should be banned... I meant external drives should be the way to go, specially in laptops under 15". Few netbooks have an optical drive, and they sell like hotcakes, which I think proves my point.

Certainly some people watch DVDs on their laptops, but they are not that many (from my sample, only about 1 in 10), specially in small ones. There are also legal stores where you can buy movies online (iTunes, Amazon, ...).
Many users don't ever install an OS, anyway, and the ones that do, don't usually install it but once every few months. All other components on my laptops are used constantly, or are phisically small (say DVI output), but not the optical drive is most of the time is just additional weight.

Re:Living in the past

[mdwh2]

Alas, as when Apple stopped putting floppy drives in Macs, others followed

A common myth, but not supported by evidence. Some PC manufacturers were still shipping PCs with floppies years later. What actually happened was that over the years, various computer manufacturers dropped floppy drives, and it's impossible to claim that one caused the others to do so (and this seems an unlikely claim anyway - when CD/DVD writers and USB drives were commonplace, it was obvious there was no need for floppies - we don't need Apple to tell us this).

I might as well claim the Amiga CDTV (which dropped the floppy drive years earlier) caused Apple and others to follow.

Re:Living in the past

[Ash-Fox]

I believe the Xbox 360 has a PPC CPU.

Subject was computers not game consoles.

Re:Living in the past

[Cheech Wizard]

My only point is Apple saw the demise of the significance of, and need for, floppy drives early and was the first major computer company to stop putting them in their Macs as a standard device. While it took a while, PC makers followed, some sooner than others. I'm sure there are some out there somewhere that to this day have a floppy drive as standard. Nor am I saying Apple was telling anyone, except Apple Mac customers, that floppy drives were no longer of much value. As to the Amiga CDTV, having been an early Amiga 1000 owner, the Amiga was a great computer. It contained a lot of innovations. I wish the Amiga had become main stream. I liked it and was happy when Apple finally switched systems to 'nix after OS 9 because I like access to a command line. And I prefer 'nix systems. None the less, with all the innovation in the Amiga it was not a trend setter.

Re:Living in the past

[LanMan04]

Close enough...the thing is essentially a PC.

Re:Living in the past

[stewbacca]

Yeah, I wonder how all those Macbook Air owners are going to upgrade to Snow Leopard since they don't have optical drives!!??

Re:Living in the past

[stewbacca]

Back in the day, you couldn't even take for granted that you could boot off of a CD.

It was easy for Macs (hold down the c key), but unreliable (at best) for Windows. Thus it was much easier for Apple to drop floppy drives, and it took years for PCs to adopt the same (still a lot of new models with them though).

Re:Living in the past

[UnknowingFool]

Not really, PCs had disk drives for many more years. It was only when DVD writers became standards did it stop appearing in models.

I would argue that when USB flash drives became cheap is when floppy drives became discontinued. By the way, many MB manufacturers and PC makers still include PS/2 connections when most keyboards and mice are USB these days. Backwards compatibility is hard to break even when the technology is obsolete.

Re:Living in the past

[Uberbah]

That's probably why Apple tells you that you'll need to stream the install disk from another computer, or buy an external USB DVD drive.

Re:Living in the past

[BrokenHalo]

Now that is a very good question. Or at least it would be if there were more than two MacBook Air owners.

Re:Living in the past

[madsenj37]

The original developer version of xbox 360 was a custom G5 (as in Apple Product, not just PPC chips) with custom software if I remember correctly.

Re:Living in the past

[Ash-Fox]

The original developer version of xbox 360 was a custom G5 (as in Apple Product, not just PPC chips) with custom software if I remember correctly.

This isn't really relevant. Everyone knows consoles are computers - even in their simplest forms. However, they're just not PCs.

Re:Living in the past

[DECS]

Apple's solution was to enable Remote DVD sharing, so that the "BIOS" (EFI) of the disc-less MacBook Air can install its OS from scratch via the DVD drive of another computer on the local network.

But yes, a generic PC would have a problem installing Windows without a local DVD drive, because generic PCs have a completely retarded, ancient BIOS firmware that rarely offers any functional network boot support, and Windows makes 70's-era assumptions about what CPM drive letters it is installing on.

Re:Living in the past

[DECS]

No you're thinking of the Zune.

The MacBook Air is very popular, even though it costs a lot. People pay extra for "cool, sexy" Mac products (those are Microsoft's words used in its advertising about how cheap low end generic PCs are).

Actually I'm surprised by how many starving student types I see with an Air. I decided against buying one (which would have come in handy while traveling), but apparently the cool kids buy what they like, not what they "can afford."

They also buy expensive skinny jeans and $400 iPod touches and other stuff that Microsoft billionaires don't seem to think that they will. Of course, there are people who like to "save money," who go out and buy $700 PCs and then spend thousands of dollars putting GPU cards in them every six months to play the latest PC game.

And then there are those guys who saved money buying the Xbox 360 because it was so much cheaper than the PS3, except that it was only cheaper because it left off a lot of things like wireless and a hard drive. Plus they got a great deal on HD-DVD! And they ended up saving 80% on the Zune after it tanked and Microsoft dumped the extras on the market in a fire sale.

Microsoft is all about saving money! Except for the whole thing about Vista costing more than XP, and introducing a whole bunch of new licensing levels to force generic PC users to pay for features through software upgrades that "unlock" features for hundreds of dollars.

But yeah, your joke about there being two Zunes was funny stuff man, we should get together and play Halo in your mom's basement.

Re:Living in the past

[BlackSnake112]

Many new motherboards sold today still have a floppy cable header on them. The floppy is there to be used on PC's if you have need of it.

The only need I can think of now a days is loading drivers at install time for XP/server 2003. They required drivers (disk controller, RAID controller, etc.) to be loaded at install time. Pokie MS finally changed the setup in vista (need to check 7) to allow loading drivers from a USB stick or even CD/DVD during setup.

Floppies are now dated and sometimes too small to hold the driver in question. Which really ticked me off when the RAID controller driver was 3MB in size and the OS would only load it off a floppy. We did have one of those super drives that had a 120MB 'floppy'. The computer took that drive as a floppy drive. The ZIP drive was not a floppy for setup.

Re:Living in the past

[mdwh2]

But on what basis do you conclude that the Imac set the trend for later companies dropping the floppy drive, but not the CDTV? If you mean "It couldn't have been the CDTV, because the Amiga didn't set trends", that's circular reasoning...

My point was that Commodore saw there being no need for a floppy in the CDTV, just as Apple saw there being no need in the Imac.

Many of those innovations in the Amiga came later in other platforms, which I would say counts as setting trends just as much as the Mac did. Also note that in parts of Europe (including the UK), the Amiga was mainstream as a home computer.

Re:Living in the past

[Cheech Wizard]

I do have a USB floppy drive that works on my Macs and my PCs. I haven't used it in a year or so, but I still have floppies from the mid to late 1980's and into the 1990's. And so far, the ones I have trotted out for some arcane information I stored years ago, none has failed to read. I do keep my old floppies and my backup CDs in a dark, humidity and temperature controlled storage 'closet'.

I pretty much migrated to external hard drives for backups from CDs so I don't have many DVDs. In fact, about a month ago I found a deal on some 2TB drives so I bought 6 and transferred all my data from the external hard drives (I had just bought bare drives, not ones in cases, and a couple of them are over 8 years old) and connected them to my Mac via an ATA/IDE USB adapter to them one at a time. Now I have about 20 old hard drives stored in my 'closet' along with the 6 2TB drives. As you can probably tell, I'm a backup freak. I'm almost 60 years old and went through data loss scenarios years ago. Always keep a backup!

Re:Living in the past

[Cheech Wizard]

Well, the Amiga wasn't a very popular machine as far as the masses go in the US. Heck, few people would know what one was talking about if someone cited an Amiga these days (save some of us old farts). I do know that in parts of Europe and the UK the Amiga was somewhat big. In the US it was big in scientific communities. I loved my Amiga. I even drove from Cincinnati to Toronto to buy a 'sidecar' for my Amiga years ago. I even soldered in RAM (I ended up with a whopping 1 megabyte!) I even had a dual Iomega Bernoulli 20MB 5" floppy (courtesy of Jerome Johnson of Iomega who was a member of the old Homebrew Computer Club {I was a consultant to Iomega years ago}) drive attached and ran a BBS (BBS-PC) on a modem/phone line for 4 years on my old Amiga (1986 - 1990). I was also a FIDONET node for several years. But the Amiga CDTV was never a big seller, and it was a specialized system. The average consumer didn't buy Amiga CDTV's or the Amiga CD32. You are correct in that there was a lot of specialized computer equipment that had no floppy drive before Apple dropped the floppy from its line of computers.

The world of specialized computers isn't representative of what every day consumers buy. My original comment was not meant to say Apple is always a great innovator and 'superior'. Like the mouse, and the GUI, Apple has borrowed heavily over the years, so I'm not even saying Apple is particularly innovative. But there's not a computer designer out there that doesn't borrow from past machines, including specialty machines. Heck, we can say the same about OSes.

I stick with the essence of my original comment - Apple recognized the obsolescence of floppies to 'everyman' early in the game.

Re:Living in the past

[macmurph]

Why not ship the OS on a bootable Firewire stick for the the MacBook Pro? That might cost more than a DVD but not more than a DVD + Superdrive. Of course, you would have to invent a firewire stick first.

Re:Living in the past

[stewbacca]

Oh lighten up. Ann Coulter? Seriously? Perhaps we have a new Godwin--whoever evokes Ann Coulter first immediately loses the argument!

Of course, there are people who like to "save money," who go out and buy $700 PCs and then spend thousands of dollars putting GPU cards in them every six months to play the latest PC game.

That's one of the funniest things I've ever read on slashdot, regardless of OS preference. Hell, I have four Macs at home, but I too have built a $400 Fry's parts-bin computer (to save money), only to sink a $500 video card into it (and three power supplies in four years). Priceless!

Re:Any details on Grand Central?

[A12m0v]

it works automagically
this is Apple after all
MAGIC!

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[jbolden]

No ellipse is not a change to the text but a deletion from the text.

Why rush to use all the cores?

[BlueScreenOfTOM]

Alright guys, I know the advantages (and challenges) of multi-threading. With almost all new processors coming with > 1 core, I can tell there's now a huge desire to start making apps that can take advantage of all cores. But my question is why? One thing I love about my quad-core Q6600 is the fact that I can be doing so many things at once. I can be streaming HD video to my TV while simultaneously playing DOOM, for example. However, when I fire up a multithreaded app that takes all 4 of my cores and I start doing something heavy, like video encoding for example, everything tends to slow down like it did back when I only had one core to play with. Yeah, my encoding gets done a lot faster, but honestly I'd rather it take longer than make my computer difficult to use for any period of time...

I realize I can throttle the video encoding to a single core, but I'm just using that as an example... if all apps start using all cores, aren't we right back where we started, just going a little faster? I love being able to do so much at once...

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[MtViewGuy]

Remember, video encoding requires tremendous amounts of CPU power in the encoding process, far more so than audio encoding. That's why when Pixar renders the images for their movies they use thousands of Apple Xserve blade servers running in massively parallel fasion to do rendering at reasonable speeds.

We can make all the Beowulf cluster jokes on this forum, :-) but one reason why Beowulf was developed was the ability to synchronize hundreds to thousands of machines in a massively parallel fashion to speed up data processing, essentially creating a supercomputer setup "on the cheap." I remember reading about a biotech company using 1,000 small tower desktops powered by the Intel Pentium III 800 MHz CPU all synced together with Beowulf to do DNA modeling.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[jedidiah]

Yup. If applications start getting to good at being able to "use the whole machine"
again then that's exactly what they will try to do. The fact that they really can't
is a really nice "release valve" at this point. As an end user managing load on my
box I actually like it better when an app is limited to only 100% cpu.
(IOW, one core)

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[slimjim8094]

You ought to be able to set your program to only run on certain processors. I know Windows has this feature (set affinity in task manager) so I assume Linux/Mac does as well.

I'd recommend putting heavy tasks on your last core or two, and anything you particularly care about on the second core - leave the first for the kernel/etc.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[ducomputergeek]

One area: Graphics rendering. And I'm not talking about games, but Lightwave et al. especially when one is rendering a single very large image (say billboard). Currently most renders allow splitting of that frame across several machines/core where each one renders a smaller block and then reassembles the larger image. However, not all the rendering engines out there allow the splitting of a single frame. Also, if the render farm is currently being tasked for another project (animation) and you need to render, I could see where 4 cores acting at one using all the available RAM is going to be a tad bit faster than splitting into separate tasks and rendering on each core with limited RAM.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[DaleGlass]

That only works because you have few cores.

Once we get to the point where a consumer desktop has 32 cores, you're not going to be able to use even half of that CPU by running independent tasks simultaneously. You'll need to have apps that can take advantage of many cores. The more cores you have, the more power a single core application fails to take advantage of.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[solios]

Agreed.

There are a few applications I prefer either single-cored or with limited memory access. After Effects, for example, is so incredibly poorly behaved on the Mac that I'd rather use version 6 - which can only see around 1.5 gigs of ram - than 7 or higher, which can see much more. In my experience it's made almost no difference on rendering time - where it DOES make a difference is in wether or not I'm actually able to use my machine for anything else while the render is grinding.

Of course, you can tell 7+ how much ram to use (same as photoshop), but in my experience these applications willfully ignore user input and treat the machine they're running on as if it exists for that application and that application only.

I'm all for getting the most out of my hardware - but given the choice between an application being a dick about hogging the box and an earlier version that "knows how to share," I'm going to be running the version that gives me the most responsive machine. If that version is multithreaded, great! If it isn't.... well, more CPU for other apps.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[silent_artichoke]

In that case, there should be an easy toggle switch so that we all have a choice.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[sydbarrett74]

I start doing something heavy (...)

You just answered your own question.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[SparkEE]

Of course, you can tell 7+ how much ram to use (same as photoshop), but in my experience these applications willfully ignore user input and treat the machine they're running on as if it exists for that application and that application only.

But, that's supposed to be the entire point of the OS. It's fundamental job it to make the application think it's the only thing running on the machine. If the OS is letting an application use so many resources that other applications do not run correctly, then it's the OS that is to blame and not the application. Let's not go backwards by abandoning preemtive multitasking for cooperative multitasking, which is what you imply with "knows how to share".

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[iluvcapra]

Where can I by these Xserve blades? Sound really useful, I wish they'd market them more than their 1RU jobs without a replaceable power supply.

Pixar's operation uses mostly Intel Xeon/Linux rigs in the farm.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[guruevi]

Because you can only run so many apps at a time. I have a few 8-cores laying around (16 cores if you can make full use of SMT) and at no normal desktop use can you get more than 2 at full speed. Mail hardly uses any CPU so you don't need a full core for that. Web might be able to use a full core once in a while, media players might use up to 2 cores sometimes if you play full HD content.

There are apps (that we use) that could use more than one core at a time but they don't because they are single threaded but I believe certain loops can be threaded (if the overhead doesn't become too large). I think that's what this technology will do: unroll the loops on compile time and see whether you can run them on more than one CPU.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[jackbird]

I've noticed that some apps (like the mental ray 3D renderer) make windows horribly slow even with affinity set to a subset of the machine's cores, and task priority set to BelowNormal. To the extent of multi-second delays in registering keypresses in notepad.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[Just Some Guy]

I realize I can throttle the video encoding to a single core, but I'm just using that as an example... if all apps start using all cores, aren't we right back where we started, just going a little faster? I love being able to do so much at once...

"nice" (or the equivalent on your OS) is your friend. You paid for all of those cores, right? Might as well use them!

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[ion.simon.c]

Bash has a tool called ulimit that allows you to limit -among other things- how much CPU time and memory a process run from that shell can consume.

This sounds like maybe it might be a solution to your poorly behaved application.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[curunir]

Applications shouldn't be concerned with limiting themselves so that they cannot under any circumstances slow down other applications. It's the job of the OS to provide the tools to prioritize applications according to the desires of the user.

OS X, by virtue of its Unix underpinnings, should support nice/renice to alter the priorities of processes. One would hope that with additional support for developers to make use of multiple cores, Apple would also provide users with increased ability to easily alter the priorities of processes.

This should give the best of both worlds. You can prioritize your video encoding below your other activities and it will slowly prod along in the background without you noticing all that much. But if you get up to fix yourself a sandwich and pause your DOOM game and your HD video stream, your encoding would speed up to utilize the newly available cores. And once you've made your sandwich and are ready to resume your other activities, your encoding slows back down again.

The important part is to start learning how to write these kinds of parallelized applications now so that when we have 32+ cores, applications can benefit from the extra processing power. Sure, with 4 cores, there's a good chance that you're running at least as many applications as you have cores, but once the cores start to scale up, that will no longer be the case. And Apple is doing the right thing by encouraging this type of development now so that it enables either Apple (at the OS level) or the user control over how resources are shared. That's the only way that we'll ever get the most out these multi-core machines.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[StuartHankins]

Methinks you want the "taskset" command. Yes it works very well, at least on RHEL.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[jamesswift]

Use nice http://linux.die.net/man/1/nice
and/or taskset http://linux.die.net/man/1/taskset
I'm sure more desktop user friendly concepts or utilities will follow as soon as it becomes an issue for less technical users.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[slimjim8094]

Probably thrashing the disk. Or otherwise, I don't think the Windows kernel is intelligent about CPUs, and I don't think it will span them. You might have the affinity set to the one that the Windows kernel uses for things like graphics (GDI) and devices.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[Ihmhi]

kdawson is... doing... his Captain... Kirk... impression. Mr. Taco, Warp Factor... 10.

i don't know you but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always read it as "Slow Leopard"

Doom is a GBA game

[tepples]

One thing I love about my quad-core Q6600 is the fact that I can be doing so many things at once. I can be streaming HD video to my TV while simultaneously playing DOOM, for example.

Doom can run on a Game Boy Advance, rendering in software on a 16.8 MHz ARM7 CPU. You could emulate the game and your quad-core wouldn't break a sweat.

if all apps start using all cores, aren't we right back where we started, just going a little faster?

That's what developers want: the ability to use all the cores for a task where the user either isn't going to be doing something else (like on a server appliance) or has another device to pass the time (like a GBA to run Doom).

Re:Doom is a GBA game

[BlueScreenOfTOM]

Yeah, I was using playing Doom as an example. Replace Doom with just about any other application that isn't a total resource hog. The specific application I'm using for my example isn't part of the point.

I am a developer and I know what developers want. I'm not saying I don't see an advantage to using all cores some of the time, but what I took from the description (no, I didn't RTFA, this is /. after all) is that Apple is trying to make it easier for developers to do something that is typically considered difficult to "get right": multithreading. The point I'm trying to make is that I don't want everything to be multi-threaded. I see why this is useful for some applications, but I don't want this to be a widespread practice.

Let me go at this from two angles. First, as a developer, in my specific job, while I can write multithreaded apps, I typically don't for two reasons: first, it's more complex to write and to understand, not just for me but for anyone else maintaining my code, and second because we tend to write many small components that do little bits of work and run them on the same machine, so we're making good use of all of our processors/cores anyway. I'm not talking about GUIs (these apps are non-interactive services/daemons), and my apps tend to lend themselves to a single-threaded frame of mind anyway, but what I'm trying to say is that here is a case where I'm getting the most out of our hardware without unnecessarily complicating things. This leads me to my second angle, which is that of a user. I already covered this above... I like multi-tasking, and I generally prefer lots of tasks that only use a single thread to having a single process run a little bit faster.

So yes, sometimes developers want the ability to use all cores for a long-running non-interactive task, and that's fine and it does lend itself to some situations. But I don't know that I want this to become the standard, which is, perhaps, what Apple is trying to push towards.

Thanks for Playing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm one of the seed testers, and even posting anonymously, I am concerned not to violate Apple's NDA. So, I'll put it like this: I have 2 PPC machines and an Intel machine. I have only been able to get the SL builds to work on the Intel machine due, I'm pretty sure, to no fault of my own.

Re:Thanks for Playing

[hplus]

Mod parent up. All reports I've heard say that 10.6 is Intel only.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[MisterSquid]

There has been a slight shift in the adding of ellipses to passages to indicate omission. In a text that has ellipses in the text itself (for example, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), some scholars use square-bracketed ellipses to indicate omission. In general, the use of bracketed ellipses redundantly and unambiguously signals editorialization.

That is, until some clever writer begins including square-bracketed ellipses in his or her text [. . .].

Nice

[AlpineR]

On a UNIX system (like Mac OS X) you should be able to "nice" the low-priority processes to give them less attention. If I'm running a twelve-hour, max-the-CPU simulation and I want to play a game while I'm waiting, I nice the simulation to a low priority. That way it yields most of the CPU to the game while I'm playing, yet runs at full dual-core speed when I'm not.

I'm not sure this is actually working in Mac OS X 10.5, though. Since I got my dual-core system, the activity monitors don't seem to show that nice is having the expected effect. I'm not sure if that's a problem with the monitor or with the OS. Hopefully 10.6 will be nicer.

Re:Nice

[drizek]

but you can already nice processes on a single core system.

Re:Nice

[Per Cederberg]

In theory 'nice' or 'renice' would do the right thing. But in most OS:es it seems to only affect the CPU scheduling. The IO scheduling is often left unmodified, meaning that a single IO-bound application may effectively block the harddrive from access by other applications.

These days, the relatively lower memory and IO speeds are often the real performance bottlenecks for ordinary applications. So improved IO scheduling might do more than multiple cores for the perceived performance of a specific system or workload.

Since everyone is always referring to BeOS in these types of discussions, I guess the CPU and IO scheduling must have been one of the things that they got right.

Re:Nice

[ion.simon.c]

That's where ionice comes in to play.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/ionice

Available since 2.6.13.

Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Corrado]

My biggest problem with this upgrade is that it seems more like a Windows Service Pack than a true Mac OS X upgrade. Are we going to have to pay for "new APIs" and "multi-core processing"?

How does all this help the average user (i.e. my Mom)? WooHoo! They are building a YouTube app and you can record directly off the screen! Big whoop. You can do that today without too much trouble with third party applications. Is the Mac OS X user interface and built-in apps already so perfect that they can't find things to improve?

I'm usually a pretty big Mac fan-boy but I just can't seem to get excited about this one. Hell, I'm even thinking (seriously) about ditching my iPhone and getting a Palm Pre. sigh...how the world is changing. Has Apple lost it's Mojo?

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[HogGeek]

I doubt she will be motivated to...

I think some of the changes affect the corporate user more than they do the home user.

From what I've read, the mail, calendar and contacts apps now communicate with MS exchange (using the Active Sync technology Apple licensed from MS for use in the iPhone).

While I'm sure there are other changes, I think those are some of the "bigger" one that a lot of people have been waiting for, myself included...

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[dzfoo]

>> Is the Mac OS X user interface and built-in apps already so perfect that they can't find things to improve?

I thought that concentrating on performance optimizations and stability was an improvement to the current version.

      -dZ.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[PrescriptionWarning]

By marketing as a completely new version they're likely to make more sales of the expensive hardware they bundle with the OS to people who want to upgrade but think buying the $100 upgrade would be too difficult. Of course even paying for a $100 upgrade from Leopard doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Myself I'm still on Tiger with my Mini which means I can't even try to develop for the iPhone, so I may just end up jumping to Snow Leopard just because, that is unless I can nab a copy of Leopard for much cheaper than $100.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[xenolion]

From what your saying there it looks like the same thing PC and Microsoft does. New OS maybe hard for the regular user to install so they just buy a new machine increasing sales of new hardware and OS sales. I'm going to be truthful here I don't own a Mac, yet I'm waiting to see where this OS goes and how it turns out before I buy one new or even just a used one cause someone wants the new OS on the newest hardware.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[MightyYar]

My biggest problem with this upgrade is that it seems more like a Windows Service Pack than a true Mac OS X upgrade.

I much prefer frequent, incremental updates. The $100 that Apple charges for the OS is peanuts compared to the amount of use it gets.

Maybe you like the MS upgrade cycle, but look at all the bad press they get for it... you can hardly blame Apple for wishing to avoid that.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

Maybe you like the MS upgrade cycle, but look at all the bad press they get for it... you can hardly blame Apple for wishing to avoid that.

Erm, so what is this Windows XP installation that I have been using since XP Service Pack 1 that I have *incrementally upgraded* through to Service Pack 3 with all the additional Microsoft updates then?

I'm no MS fanboi by any means, I use mostly (incrementally upgradeable) Gentoo Linux - but I wish you Apple fanbois would occasionally go read a technical book or something so that you can at least have some degree of intelligent conversation with those of us who do.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[jcnnghm]

I think every major version is a service pack, except Apple charges $150 for it, and changes the API enough that you can't run new software. I wanted to run XCode on my 10.4 laptop, so I had to go buy a 10.5 upgrade, even though it didn't have any new features I actually cared about. I still think it should have been a $30 minor feature pack, not a whole OS.

I think it's the most annoying part about Apple. They definitely seem to nickel and dime you, especially by not shipping with a full-screen media player, just the crippled version of quicktime.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[MightyYar]

Erm, so what is this Windows XP installation that I have been using since XP Service Pack 1 that I have *incrementally upgraded* through to Service Pack 3 with all the additional Microsoft updates then?

Apple does "updates" as well.

You can't deny that the move from XP to Vista is a big one. SP1 to SP2 may have affected some business users or home power users, but most users didn't really notice a difference... the overall XP experience was mostly unchanged. SP3 was even more slight. Apple updates tend to add marketable features. For instance, Leopard added Time Machine and Spaces along with the service-pack style under-the-hood stuff.

but I wish you Apple fanbois would occasionally go read a technical book or something so that you can at least have some degree of intelligent conversation with those of us who do.

Considering that I run XP, Ubuntu, and Apple stuff I think you might be barking up the wrong tree. I suspect you don't know as much about Apple's stuff as you think you do, especially if you think that the changes from 10.0 to 10.5 are anything like the changes that happened in XP during the same period.

Ubuntu has a very aggressive update schedule, but the upgrades have not been as seamless for me as the Apple updates. In particular, every upgrade seems to step on my GRUB configuration. Otherwise I'm quite happy with the frequency of their updates.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[MightyYar]

Well, I think it does! ;p

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Corrado]

Well, with past major versions of Mac OS X we at least got some newfangled toys to play with (the Dock, Spotlight, Spaces, etc.) But with SL, we get APIs and back end stuff. That may be neat and all but it doesn't do much for me, immediately.

Now granted it will be faster and more stable, which is a good reason to upgrade, but I'm not sure its a good enough reason to pay $100. Even the "enterprise" features wont do much for the average person. I guess Apple is just using SL to get a foot into the corporate world, what with all the "enterprise" features and all. Oh well.

BTW: This "My Mom" argument may be moot after all if SL can't run on PowerPC machines. Her computer is only 2 years old and is probably one of the last PPC iMac they offered. It would suck royally if they left the PPC out in the cold so soon. :(

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

The discussion was about rolling updates, Gentoo is a distro that utilizes rolling updates, that's why I mentioned it.

If you don't like it, don't use it, it's absolutely no skin off my nose. For me, it does what I need an OS to do except for the bits that XP needs to do.

So please don't assume everybody who uses Linux, or Gentoo, to be an evangelist.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

Apple does "updates" as well.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. I've never found a reason to use or buy anything made by Apple in 30-odd years of using computers at home and work so I don't know, and care even less.

But read the original posting - the OP was implying that MS doesn't do rolling updates, where in fact it does.

You can't deny that the move from XP to Vista is a big one.

I can't deny that they're different OSes as well. Besides which, upgrades between XP and Vista affect very few people.

Home users don't buy boxed MS OSes, they use what their new PC comes with. Therefore it's more a case of them copying files and configuration between their old and new machines, not upgrading their existing one.

And corporate users just do what their IT people tell them to do.

So "upgrades" from XP to Vista are a moot point, I'm afraid - apart from very rare occasions.

Considering that I run XP, Ubuntu, and Apple stuff I think you might be barking up the wrong tree.

My experiences of upgrading Ubuntu machines is that it works okay between releases. However, I use mainly Gentoo Linux which has a completely different rolling upgrade process, rather than wiping the old distro and installing the new.

I suspect you don't know as much about Apple's stuff as you think you do, especially if you think that the changes from 10.0 to 10.5 are anything like the changes that happened in XP during the same period.

As I said earlier, I know nothing about OSX as I've never had a need to use it. But read my original comment again because I made no statements about OSX - instead, I corrected the OP's comments about Windows.

Ubuntu has a very aggressive update schedule, but the upgrades have not been as seamless for me as the Apple updates.

Nobody should upgrade just because an update becomes available - sure, security updates are a must but Microsoft, Ubuntu, Red Hat and (I assume) Apple supply those for their OSes for some years after they're released.

Most people (even myself sometimes) upgrade just for the sake of it without really asking themselves whether or not the upgrade is necessary or not.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[mdarksbane]

Of course, a decent copy of XP Pro costs as much as two of those Mac OS X upgrades combined, and a copy of Vista Ultimate would pay for pretty much every OS X update that has been released.

Not to mention the fact that in terms of features, the jump from XP to SP3 has been smaller than any of the OS X upgrades.

XCode never stopped working on an upgrade, you just can't necessarily run the new XCode because of the new API's that are part of the new Operating system... sounds kind of normal to me. Stuff that they can backport reasonably they do, something that is core to the new functionality they don't.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[niteice]

Snow Leopard is Intel-only, and apparently even encourages developers to target 64-bit primarily (thus leaving out the pre-Core 2 machines).

To be pedantic, the PPC iMac was discontinued in January of 2006. If the machine is really two years old it will run Snow Leopard fine.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Uberbah]

$117.49 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116515) for XP Pro SP3 is less than the $129 (http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC094) for the Leopard upgrade.

And what is the price of rice in China this morning?

Blind adoration won't get you anywhere.

As opposed to non sequiturs, which get you anywhere fast.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Uberbah]

Erm, so what is this Windows XP installation that I have been using since XP Service Pack 1 that I have *incrementally upgraded* through to Service Pack 3 with all the additional Microsoft updates then?

That Windows XP installation you've been running is Windows NT 5.1, and the updates you've been downloading for it are free...just as Apple's updates for Leopard are free, just as Tiger before it, and Panther before that, and so on.

I'm no MS fanboi by any means, I use mostly (incrementally upgradeable) Gentoo Linux - but I wish you Apple fanbois would occasionally go read a technical book or something so that you can at least have some degree of intelligent conversation with those of us who do.

That's so funny, since you have no idea what you're talking about.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. I've never found a reason to use or buy anything made by Apple in 30-odd years of using computers at home and work so I don't know, and care even less.

Then don't frikkin buy one. No skin off either of your noses.

But read the original posting - the OP was implying that MS doesn't do rolling updates, where in fact it does.

Look at the timeline for Windows releases. You're comparing major releases (10.X) to point releases (5.1.x)...Apples to oranges.

Besides which, upgrades between XP and Vista affect very few people.

Riiiight.

As I said earlier, I know nothing about OSX

You don't say.

So please don't assume everybody who uses Linux, or Gentoo, to be an evangelist.

As opposed to users of Apple's products, eh?

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[yabos]

Your mom will upgrade when new software requires Snow Leopard. Mac developers are pretty quick to adopt new APIs since they are usually making things really easy to do compared to the previous OS(such as Core Animation, Core Audio/Video etc.)

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[644bd346996]

You're complaining because the changes aren't superficial?

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[UnknowingFool]

I'm usually a pretty big Mac fan-boy but I just can't seem to get excited about this one. Hell, I'm even thinking (seriously) about ditching my iPhone and getting a Palm Pre. sigh...how the world is changing. Has Apple lost it's Mojo?

I don't know about upgrading to Snow Leopard over Leopard or Palm Pre over iPhone but I would seriously wait until both have actually been released before making up my mind. It is apparent that Snow Leopard will be shown at WWDC this June and Pre will be released in June. In both cases, they may or may not live up to their hype or buzz or rumor.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Homer1946]

My impression of most Apple users is that they want not to use Microsoft products and do hide inside an elitist little club where there is no need for most of them to be concerned about technical issues. That's fine if that is what they want but those same people should not try to argue with people who do know what they are talking about when it comes to OSes - at least, in my case, when it comes to UNIX, Linux or Windows.

Most Apple people I know are very knowledgeable about other operating systems and make informed choices to use Macs. What does drive us nuts are those who criticize our choices but also freely admit...

I don't use Apple.

and

I know nothing about OSX.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[mdarksbane]

That is for an XP Pro OEM license, which cannot be transferred. A leopard license can be installed on any mac you want.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16837116195

XP Pro retail license: $264.99.

Comparing what the license costs on a new system is pointless, because the price of your copy of OS X is rolled in with the hardware just like when you buy a prebuilt PC.

You could make the point that you *can* get an OEM copy of XP and run it on whatever you want, but then you are paying $120 to be no more legal than if you just pirated the software to begin with.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[bonch]

My biggest problem with this upgrade is that it seems more like a Windows Service Pack than a true Mac OS X upgrade. Are we going to have to pay for "new APIs" and "multi-core processing"?

To be honest, we don't know everything that's going to be included in Snow Leopard. As for being like a service pack, Apple said this is what Snow Leopard was going to be. They're improving on the foundations to better support their future platforms, such as introducing a new version of Quicktime that's more efficient to help with battery life.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[mdarksbane]

Blind adoration won't get you anywhere.

By the way, I don't even own a mac any more, I build my own PC and pirate windows on it like most people I know. I'm just ticked off at how much getting an actually legit copy of windows can cost. Spending $287 on a copy of vista that I can transfer to my next PC is about 50% of what I spend on hardware.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116473

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Corrado]

What!? You suggest waiting until they are actual products before committing to them?!

What are you doing on Slashdot? You should be out selling insurance or something. :)

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[MightyYar]

But read the original posting - the OP was implying that MS doesn't do rolling updates, where in fact it does.

No, I meant that their OS cycle (at least for XP->Vista) is measured in years rather than months, and they seemed to be going for the quantum leap rather than the incremental improvements that marked the Windows 95->98->98SE->ME days. That is much closer to what Apple does.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Uberbah]

I can't comment, I don't use Apple. Read my original post, I was correcting the incorrect comments about rolling updates for XP.

Dude, when you're in a hole, stop digging. The parent was talking about

I much prefer frequent, incremental updates. The $100 that Apple charges for the OS is peanuts compared to the amount of use it gets.

Maybe you like the MS upgrade cycle, but look at all the bad press they get for it... you can hardly blame Apple for wishing to avoid that.

...upgrades, not updates. Win2k to WinXP is an "upgrade". WinXP to Vista is an "upgrade". WinXP to Service Pack 1/2/3 is an update.

I work on OS security on mostly Linux and UNIX, and some Windows. I also use both at home, computing is my main hobby. I know plenty about all of them.

But not anything about OS X, obviously. So why are you qualified to comment in Apple stories or on alleged fanboys, exactly?

Again, read my original post rather than falling prey to your emotions.

Who's getting emotional? Is this some sort of attempt to deflect from the fact that you got called on your ignorant, incorrect snobbery?

I believe security updates are released for XP just about every Thursday - or something like that.

You do "some" Windows security professionally and "know plenty about" Windows but don't know when Microsoft releases their patches? Hmmm.

My impression of most Apple users is that they want not to use Microsoft products and do hide inside an elitist little club

Question: do you use a cannon or artillery for your projection? Inquiring minds want to know...

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Just Some Guy]

I think every major version is a service pack, except Apple charges $150 for it, and changes the API enough that you can't run new software. I wanted to run XCode on my 10.4 laptop, so I had to go buy a 10.5 upgrade, even though it didn't have any new features I actually cared about.

You made that up. First, Leopard was $129 - not $150 - from launch day. Second, 10.4 shipped with Xcode. Either you don't really own a Mac, you chose to upgrade to the 10.5 version of Xcode for a specific reason and got what you paid for, or you're seriously confused.

Typed on Kubuntu, so don't try the "fanboy" card.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Lars T.]

I think every major version is a service pack, except Apple charges $150 for it

So you think they are a combination of 100+ previous bugfixes and a much-needed improvement to the failing security model that kills tons of apps?

especially by not shipping with a full-screen media player, just the crippled version of quicktime.

Errm, what? How long didn't you update Quicktime? Heck, version 7.2 comes with 10.5 - didn't you claim you used that?

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[EastCoastSurfer]

What counts as a new 'whole OS?' If Apple changed the version to 11 or 12 would that be enough? How about if they just threw a new skin on? Leopard was a pretty big change from Tiger in interface and under the hood. Plus it added a lot of new features. Snow Leopard seems to focus more under the hood, but still seems to be adding a lot of new functionality.

The question is at what point do YOU think it's a major version? Do they need to re-write the entire kernel every time? That doesn't seem very prudent.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[jcnnghm]

Errm, what? How long didn't you update Quicktime? Heck, version 7.2 comes with 10.5 - didn't you claim you used that?

The version of Quicktime that ships with OS X 10.5 does allow full screen playback, but the version that came with 10.4 did not. I wasn't aware of that until I just fired it up to take a screenshot. In any case, I count 27 different PRO only menu options which are disabled in the version that ships with OS X 10.5.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

I was not criticizing your right to choose.

I was making a statement that choosing Apple is an easy way to make a political anti-Microsoft statement without the need to read manuals and bone up on other alternatives - like, say, Linux or BSD.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Homer1946]

Although I don't agree with your conclusion (in a global sense), I do however I stand corrected as to your point.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

Dude, when you're in a hole, stop digging. The parent was talking about

Please stop with the "California Surf Speak" - it lessens the intelligence in your argument. ...upgrades, not updates. Win2k to WinXP is an "upgrade". WinXP to Vista is an "upgrade". WinXP to Service Pack 1/2/3 is an update.

Then, by the same argument, the OP was talking about two completely unrelated issues ("incremental updates" then "MS upgrade cycle") - in which case his argument is also nullified since he is not comparing like for like.

But not anything about OS X, obviously. So why are you qualified to comment in Apple stories or on alleged fanboys, exactly?

I am qualified to make observations based on what I see in day-to-day life. I am not qualified to discuss technical issues about OSX because I don't use it. You, of course, have every right to comment on my opinions.

Who's getting emotional? Is this some sort of attempt to deflect from the fact that you got called on your ignorant, incorrect snobbery?

I would argue that since having proven the OP's original comparison was invalid, that he did not make that comparison on technical grounds but with the usual snobbery one comes to expect from many of the elitist Apple fanbois on Slashdot.

You do "some" Windows security professionally and "know plenty about" Windows but don't know when Microsoft releases their patches? Hmmm.

I based that comment merely on the fact that as I run XP (and Linux) at home, the MS updates usually happen on a Thursday. Otherwise, knowing when an update came out is not particularly relevant to being a good OS security person - one merely needs to know *if* an update exists and to install it as appropriate. If you yourself were more well-versed in security, you would actually understand that OS updates generally happen because an organisation like CERT has reported the vulnerability which is subsequently fixed by the appropriate OS or application vendor.

Also, please realise that running a home desktop system is far different to running a corporate server - a home desktop might well use automatic updates but updates to a major server need to be tested and approved before being installed - so, once again, when in an update is released is less important than determining what the update fixes and what impacts it has once it is installed.

Question: do you use a cannon or artillery for your projection? Inquiring minds want to know...

Neither, I'd rather nuke the lot of them from orbit.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[DECS]

Since it shipped in 2001- 8 FREAKING YEARS AGO - WinXP has gotten three SP releases. Microsoft's SPs don't often add significant new features, they fix broken things. Although sometimes, things are so broken (such as USB, or Firewall/security, that an SP appears to "add new features").

Apple doesn't call it a service pack when they release a minor update to Mac OS X, but they deliver these far more often than Microsoft. Apple is gearing up to deliver its *seventh* significant free update to Leopard!

Ten Myths of Leopard: 2 It's Only a Service Pack!

Since 2001, Apple has shipped 40 free updates to Mac OS X at regular intervals, compared to the three SPs you outlined for XP.

There's no way to dance your way out of that corner. Apple has consistently out-delivered Microsoft across the board in both paid upgrades with major new features (six major reference releases this decade, compared to Microsoft's 3 desktop OS releases- Win 5.1 (XP), 6 (Vista), and 6.1 ("7")) and 40 minor free releases compared to Microsoft's 5 SPs.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[DECS]

This is wrong:

"encourages developers to target 64-bit primarily (thus leaving out the pre-Core 2 machines)"

On Windows, targeting 64-bit might leave out 32-bit PCs, but Apple's Universal Binary architecture makes it easy to compile applications that support both 32/64-bit hardware in the same application package. And 64-bit Macs running OS X can run both natively. Windows requires a WOW emulation level to run 32-bit EXEs on the separate 64-bit version of XP/Vista. Which is part of the reason only a minority of Windows users have moved to 64-bits.

Road to Mac OS X Snow Leopard: the future of 64-bit apps

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[phreakhead]

Seriously! When are they going to change the Finder into an ACTUAL WORKING FILE MANAGER? Right now I can manage my files better with a twig and some duct tape.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[DECS]

Perhaps while you were on Newegg you could have searched for Mac OS X Leopard and discovered that its available for $102.99.

Or you could ask Microsoft how much they want for the eight year old XP ($264.99) directly? Of course, MS really wants you to buy Vista and then Windows 7, neither of which do much beyond copying Apple's looks and compositing graphics engine.

Why Windows 7 is Microsoft's next Zune

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

It could be argued that if an OS ships with more updates then maybe it was a bit lacking when it was first released - just an observation but, by your argument, that automatically makes Fallout 3 a great game because there have been 5 or 6 update patches in the year since it was released. (It is actually a great game, BTW.)

Also, your analogy to Service Packs is wrong. The main purpose of an MS Service Pack is to give base benchmark minimum specification from a particular point onwards - that's why you won't ever be able to buy a new XP machine with anything less than XP SP 2 now, possibly even SP 3. But the fact is that an SP contains all the fixes up to that point as well as some additional features that may well become part of the next Windows iteration.

Otherwise, MS releases updates on a regular basis - sure, not always in a timely fashion but then Apple can hardly be called "speed demons" when it comes to fixing some glaring security holes in Safari.

I'm afraid that your understanding of what a constructive argument is is wrong - you have decided that Apple *IS* better than Microsoft already and are just picking the justifications you want to support that result out of thin air.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

I disagree.

If you want to discuss semantics then I could use the classic argument that is used for Linux in that it is just the *kernel* that is considered to be the operating system since that is the central piece of software that allows control of the hardware in that computer - everything else in Windows, Linux, OSX, etc. is just an application that has some communication with that kernel.

Therefore, if a particular OS update significantly changes that kernel then it could be considered to be a new OS - a case in point being the Windows 9x kernels that had much poorer memory management than in Windows 2000/XP.

I don't know or use Vista but I suspect that is, yet again, a different kernel to XP - so, again, you could not consider changing from XP to Vista as being an update (cue the jokes!) but the installation of a completely new OS.

As for the desktop GUI side of things, that's just an application that, if it's coded and compiled properly, can run on any kernel - that's why, for example, you can run a KDE desktop on a 2.4 or 2.6 Linux kernel or even run it on Windows if you want.

I don't know OSX at all but I would be very surprised if there wasn't a major kernel change between the various OSX releases - in which case it could be argued that you are installing a new OS, rather than just an update.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Lars T.]

Version 7.2 - download it, it's free from evil Apple, and even works with 10.4 - and it's been available for almost 2 years now

Oh, and it looks like PRO is gone with Snow Leopard - more for you to whine about.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

Are you trying to say XP was so good that it didn't need more than 3 SP updates in the last 8 years? Because that's a ridiculous thing to say.

Please indicate where I said that because I will happily retract it if I did. Read my comment properly.

It also sounds like you're tying to spin SPs as a collection of fixes that come down the pipe at regular intervals.

No, I stated that the purpose of an SP is to provide a new base benchmark load that incorporates all fixes up to a particular point in time. Again, please read my comment properly.

Sure, Apple issues regular security patch updates outside of its minor updates; these are also rolled up into its minor releases, which serve as a the "benchmark minimum specification" for new Macs being sold. So I'm at a loss to see your point.

My point was to define the purpose of a service pack - I don't see how I could restate that any clearer for you.

As as far as attacking my constructive arguemnt on the grounds that I've "already decided that Apple is better than Microsoft" in this regard, well yes, I've know this over the last eight years of experiencing the facts as both a Windows admin and a Mac user. But no, I didn't construct this argument out of "thin air" to support my bias, they're both based on my experiences.

But then this lack of bias is not clear in your argument. Yes, the MS track record for updates has not been good sometimes but then neither has Apple's - particularly in fixing the well-published security holes in Safari. The point I am making here is that the very criticisms you level at Microsoft can be levelled equally at Apple.

See, some people construct opinions based on observable facts and research and then relate them with the supporting facts to bolster their assertions.

This is precisely what I have done. I have stated from the outset my lack of knowledge with OSX but my postings here began with a response to the OP who made some wrong assumptions about Microsoft updates. And please be aware that I am mostly a Linux user so I am not arguing this from the point of being an MS fan particularly.

Apple certainly can improve, but if you want to talk about "glaring holes in Safari," perhaps you should take off your advocacy/imagination hat and look at the actual facts. Safari isn't the browser related to 99% of the world's spyware and adware infestations. That would be Internet Explorer.

Agreed. But the reason behind that is not because Safari is more secure than IE, it is because a malware author can gain a lot more personal satisfaction that if he/she writes a bad app for IE, it will affect a lot more people than if he/she writes it for Safari.

And correct me if I'm wrong but a common statement made by Apple users here is that they chose Mac and OSX because it is easier to use and maintain than Windows (or indeed Linux). Therefore, by implication, Apple users do not need to be the technically adept to use Macs and would therefore be just as prone to malware as is the average Windows users by virtue of their lack of knowledge - the reason they don't suffer from malware is because very little of it has been created for the Mac yet.

Apple certainly can improve, but if you want to talk about "glaring holes in Safari," perhaps you should take off your advocacy/imagination hat and look at the actual facts. Safari isn't the browser related to 99% of the world's spyware and adware infestations. That would be Internet Explorer.

Safari was first released as beta in 2003. Mosaic (which became Netscape Navigator) was released ten years earlier and touted as standards compliant even then. Please research your facts.

I don't dislike Microsoft for its success, I have contempt for the company for using its success to spread failure.

Again, I speak as primarily a Linux user but even I could not contemplate calling having your products on 95% of the world's desktops a failure.

It was UNIX that first incorporated TCP/IP

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[slyn]

I was not criticizing your right to choose.

I was making a statement that choosing Apple is an easy way to make a political anti-Microsoft statement without the need to read manuals and bone up on other alternatives - like, say, Linux or BSD.

Maybe that says something about the platforms that you cite, rather than that the users need to be part of an elitist club. People use Mac because its fast, easy to use, the hardware is nice, and it doesn't get shitty over time unlike windows, AND I don't need to know how to sudo apt-get an old graphics driver because of all the regressions in my new one like ubuntu.

It just works. I know how to manage a windows computer without it getting all virus ridden and slow over time, and I know how to keep wifi/audio/video running on linux through updates and upgrades. I just don't want to. That's why I use a mac.

Let me also add that mac's aren't perfect, and probably no system ever was (in b4 beos/amiga) or will be. Its just currently better than all the alternatives at what I use my computer for.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

Maybe that says something about the platforms that you cite, rather than that the users need to be part of an elitist club. People use Mac because its fast, easy to use, the hardware is nice, and it doesn't get shitty over time unlike windows, AND I don't need to know how to sudo apt-get an old graphics driver because of all the regressions in my new one like ubuntu.

Let me correct that above statement for you.

1. Having discovered a few simple free tools like CCleaner and JKDefrag that I run on a regular basis, I have Windows XP machines that were built by me more than 18 months ago that I use daily, install and deinstall games and software on but have not suffered any noticeable slowdown. Yes, I prefer Linux but I must say that for an inherently flawed OS by design, XP has finally dispelled the "rebuild every 6 months" Windows myth for me.

2. I use "emerge" not "sudo apt-get" as a Gentoo, not Ubuntu, user. However, just like Apple designs its Macs with great care and attention, using only specific manufacturers of chipsets for graphics, network cards, etc., I too select my PC hardware for Linux machines with equal care. Ultimately, what that means is that every Linux box I build has kernel support for all of the hardware without any need to download or install external drivers - the only exception to that is if I'm building a Linux desktop machine, in which case I will "emerge nvidia-drivers" or "emerge ati-drivers" to support 3D acceleration on the appropriate graphics card inside the machine. Incidentally, the only reason I need to do that is because the graphics cards manufacturers refuse to publish their specifications openly meaning that an accelerated driver cannot be directly incorporated directly into the Linux kernel.

It just works. I know how to manage a windows computer without it getting all virus ridden and slow over time, and I know how to keep wifi/audio/video running on linux through updates and upgrades. I just don't want to. That's why I use a mac.

In that case, you have just confirmed my suspicions - namely that some Apple users are stupid enough to believe that they don't need to perform basic security & administration tasks on their machines, meaning that if and when Mac malware starts appearing in any great volume, they will almost certainly get it on their machines.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

The problem isn't that you could have been more clear" or that I should have "read your reply properly," but that you are simply and quite obviously wrong. ...although I should have properly noted that you were moderated as flamebait before falling into your trap of illogical, circular nonsense peddling.

Erm, this is Slashdot. People use negative moderation just because they don't agree with what the poster is saying - it really has no relevance to content, particularly in Apple discussion topics.

There is an obvious corollary to "It could be argued that if an OS ships with more updates then maybe it was a bit lacking when it was first released" when defending Microsoft release schedule.

Sorry, but you need to read the thread again. The poster I responded to made the statement about the number of updates relating to the OS quality, not myself. I gave examples that disproved that statement (e.g. Fallout 3 is not a good game just because it has had 5 or 6 updates since release.)

No, no they can't. Unless you also equate stubbing your toe on your bed with running over your foot with an improperly designed lawn mower. I presented you with some relevant facts to bring realism into to world view, clearly these pearls were unwelcome to your trough-rooting snout.

In other words, you lack the knowledge to respond intelligently to my comment, instead resorting to insult. Let's see if you get modded "Flamebait" - oh, of course you won't because you're defending Apple...

I made the statement that Apple has also been slack on fixing security updates as has Microsoft. That statement is rooted in fact, if you choose to deny it then so be it.

Mosaic was based on initial web standards in the late 90s, but since then both Netscape (built on Mosaic by its founder) and Microsoft (IE was based on Spyglass, the commercial offshoot of NCSA's Mosaic) worked very hard to pervert the web into a series of browser-specific proprietary conventions.

Your statement is correct in as much as both Netscape Navigator and IE introduced their own HTML extensions. However, you did not read my comment properly again because had you done so, you would have seen I was talking about Mosaic, not Navigator (which succeeded Mosaic).

If you are not aware of the gross lack of standardization in the web browser field, welcome back from your decade long coma.

I fail to see how you can draw that analogy based on my factual statement that Mosaic was a standards compliant browser in 1993. If anything, based on the fact that I made that statement, it might cause a logical-minded person to assume that actually I *do* know a thing or two about standards compliance and browsers because I clearly know about the history of browsers.

Or perhaps two decades: Apple supported TCP/IP on Macs starting in (!) 1988 with MacTCP, and delivered its second TCP/IP networking architecture in 1995 as OpenTransport. Macs were TCP/IP capable before anyone used Windows, let alone TCP/IP on Windows. Apple continued to support AppleTalk, but Microsoft continued to support NetBEUI, too, so the idea that you couldn't configure your Macs really has no bearing on the fact that Microsoft has only ever followed in the tech industry, despite its leadership position and its vast resources.

I am fully aware of the development of NetBEUI and it being pretty-much dropped by MS - but I stand corrected regarding TCP/IP support on Macs. You can have that one as a win.

Perhaps it's better to know what you're talking about before you repeat distant memories colored by decades of propaganda about how wonderful its been to have the tech industry locked up under the talons of a criminal monopolist gang of tasteless snake oil salesmen like Ballmer and Gates.

With the exception of my error above regarding TCP/IP support in Macs (I recall saying "correct me if I'm wrong" in my original posting though), I do know what I am talking about with more than a quarter century

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[slyn]

Maybe that says something about the platforms that you cite, rather than that the users need to be part of an elitist club. People use Mac because its fast, easy to use, the hardware is nice, and it doesn't get shitty over time unlike windows, AND I don't need to know how to sudo apt-get an old graphics driver because of all the regressions in my new one like ubuntu.

Let me correct that above statement for you.

1. Having discovered a few simple free tools like CCleaner and JKDefrag that I run on a regular basis, I have Windows XP machines that were built by me more than 18 months ago that I use daily, install and deinstall games and software on but have not suffered any noticeable slowdown. Yes, I prefer Linux but I must say that for an inherently flawed OS by design, XP has finally dispelled the "rebuild every 6 months" Windows myth for me.

2. I use "emerge" not "sudo apt-get" as a Gentoo, not Ubuntu, user. However, just like Apple designs its Macs with great care and attention, using only specific manufacturers of chipsets for graphics, network cards, etc., I too select my PC hardware for Linux machines with equal care. Ultimately, what that means is that every Linux box I build has kernel support for all of the hardware without any need to download or install external drivers - the only exception to that is if I'm building a Linux desktop machine, in which case I will "emerge nvidia-drivers" or "emerge ati-drivers" to support 3D acceleration on the appropriate graphics card inside the machine. Incidentally, the only reason I need to do that is because the graphics cards manufacturers refuse to publish their specifications openly meaning that an accelerated driver cannot be directly incorporated directly into the Linux kernel.

@1: I don't care what extra steps you have to take to keep whatever OS you use working properly. The fact is, I don't have to take them. It doesn't matter if they are free or easy or FOSS, its time I don't have to waste, period.

@2: I apologize if I have insulted your delicate sensibilities by implying you apt-get. But the point stands, as emerge is effectively the same as apt-get, which is effectively the same as rpm, which is effectively the same as yum, which is effectively the same as pacman, ad infinitum. A package manager by any other name is still a package manager. And frankly, time spent checking to make sure a potential GPU, CPU, mobo, monitor, printer, wifi chipset, or whatever works with my particular kernel/xorg configuration does not appeal to me. I would rather buy a computer that doesn't require any finagling just to make sure it works.

Also, since you don't seem to get the reference:

- http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_904_intel&num=1
- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4

It just works. I know how to manage a windows computer without it getting all virus ridden and slow over time, and I know how to keep wifi/audio/video running on linux through updates and upgrades. I just don't want to. That's why I use a mac.

In that case, you have just confirmed my suspicions - namely that some Apple users are stupid enough to believe that they don't need to perform basic security & administration tasks on their machines, meaning that if and when Mac malware starts appearing in any great volume, they will almost certainly get it on their machines.

I actually laughed at this. Just as you really don't need to do any basic security and administration tasks on a Linux machine because there is no malware for the platform besides the ever so rare trojan, you really don't need to do any basic security and administration

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

A theoretical flaw in Safari, no matter how urgently the pundits bark about it, is not the "same problem" as active exploits that are actually occurring to Windows users. You equate them falsely. Your comparison is not relevant to reality.

Well, you've beaten me. That's it, discussion over.

If you believe the exploits in Safari to be "theoretical" then there you are quite clearly beyond help. I work in OS security and if you believe that nobody will every exploit those holes in Safari then I shall leave you to it.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[pandrijeczko]

@1: I don't care what extra steps you have to take to keep whatever OS you use working properly. The fact is, I don't have to take them. It doesn't matter if they are free or easy or FOSS, its time I don't have to waste, period.

So you have the incorrect belief that your system requires zero administration - so be it, it's your system.

@2: I apologize if I have insulted your delicate sensibilities by implying you apt-get. But the point stands, as emerge is effectively the same as apt-get, which is effectively the same as rpm, which is effectively the same as yum, which is effectively the same as pacman, ad infinitum. A package manager by any other name is still a package manager. And frankly, time spent checking to make sure a potential GPU, CPU, mobo, monitor, printer, wifi chipset, or whatever works with my particular kernel/xorg configuration does not appeal to me. I would rather buy a computer that doesn't require any finagling just to make sure it works.

As I stated, my Linux systems "just work" also - yes I spend time carefully selecting hardware, and you don't wish to do that. No problem, your choice - just don't make incorrect statements about the lack of hardware support in Linux.

I actually laughed at this. Just as you really don't need to do any basic security and administration tasks on a Linux machine because there is no malware for the platform besides the ever so rare trojan, you really don't need to do any basic security and administration tasks on an OS X machine because there is no malware for the platform besides the ever so rare trojan.

I feel you are clutching at straws because you feel yourself losing this discussion. I do not once recall saying that Linux machines need no admistration - in fact they do, just like every other computer system.

Like I said, I work in OS security, I'm constantly monitoring sites like CERT, Bugtraq, Red Hat, Microsoft, etc. for new vulnerability reports. If and when a trojan appears on Linux, I will be ready to deal with it.

However, it appears your not insulting the platform itself, but rather the "stupid mac users" who believe their immune. Well, I suppose the ever so popular fall-back argument of "when Mac malware starts appearing in any great volume" actually happens, I'll still be safe. Just like I can keep a windows box locked down from malware and linux boxes running despite the rough edges concerning hardware support, I won't be downloading the "XXX MOV1E PARIS HILTON BRITNEY SPEERS CODEC", nor will I be visitng bank0fam3rica.com, nor will I be running version 10.6.1 instead of todays update 10.6.7.

Well, "bully for you", your first demonstration that you have any inkling about computer security. Well done.

Of course though, until that day I still don't need to worry about my computer needing defragging every 6 months and keeping my AVG up to date, nor do I need to keep track of whatever various bugs/regressions are affecting my newly "emerged" bleeding edge 2.29.3 kernel. You can have fun with that though. I'll stick with my "just works".

Just to correct you - my Windows PCs defrag daily with JKDefrag. It takes several hours to run the first time but then only a couple of minutes each day afterwards - if you don't believe it then so be it.

As for your kernel comment, you demonstrate a complete lack of understanding about controlling software releases. There is no obligation, in Linux, to automatically update to a new kernel - about the only reason to do it is if you need better support for a piece of hardware in the machine that the kernel provides. Otherwise, just leave it alone.

In my home environment and work lab, I each have a Linux machine for testing that I can afford to lose for a while if a new kernel or other software causes a problem - it's just standard pre-production testing.

If you don't want to spend time administering a computer then that's your choice and good luck to you. But please don't make statements that have no foundation in fact, otherwise I may feel the need to put you straight again.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[MightyYar]

If you want to discuss semantics then I could use the classic argument that is used for Linux in that it is just the *kernel* that is considered to be the operating system since that is the central piece of software that allows control of the hardware in that computer - everything else in Windows, Linux, OSX, etc. is just an application that has some communication with that kernel.

In that case, Windows isn't an OS - it's an application suite packaged with a kernel. Doesn't change my argument, or my desire to have more frequent updates than XP->Vista.

I don't know or use Vista but I suspect that is, yet again, a different kernel to XP

It's just a different rev of the old NT kernel. Like moving from 2.4 to 2.6 on Linux.

I don't know OSX at all but I would be very surprised if there wasn't a major kernel change between the various OSX releases - in which case it could be argued that you are installing a new OS, rather than just an update.

I don't want to get too tied up with semantics... all I know is that the thing packaged as "OSX" went through at least as much change as the thing packaged as "Windows" in the same amount of time. The way Apple accomplished this was to release a new package every 12-18 months. The way MS accomplished this was to develop Vista for about 6 years. I contend that the reason everyone complains about Vista is that they changed too much too quickly, and they would be better off following the Apple release schedule.

The folks at MS seem to agree, by the way :)

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Just Some Guy]

My impression of most Apple users is that they want not to use Microsoft products and do hide inside an elitist little club where there is no need for most of them to be concerned about technical issues.

I'm typing this on a Mac that was practically given to me. I like it at home because I come back from work worn out from wrangling Unix servers all day. I use my EeePC with Ubuntu more, honestly, but this is a nice desktop when the occasion calls for one.

My wife has an iMac because she thinks it's cute and easy to use.

I just gave my mom an older iMac because she didn't have a computer and I don't want to deal with the support hassles of a PC.

So, from my immediate circle of Mac users, I find a Unix sysadmin and two computer neophytes who couldn't care less about impressing anyone else. It sounds like your real issue is with vocal advocates, and you just don't notice the ones speaking in favor of your chosen platforms.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Uberbah]

Please stop with the "California Surf Speak" - it lessens the intelligence in your argument.

Engage in as much rhetorical masturbation as you want, but it wont make you any less wrong, it'll just make your more and more harry. And judging by your other stubbornly anal retentive posts in this thread, you must look like Chewbaca by now.

Then, by the same argument, the OP was talking about two completely unrelated issues ("incremental updates" then "MS upgrade cycle") - in which case his argument is also nullified since he is not comparing like for like.

And if there was any contradiction between liking Apple's "incremental updates" and criticizing Microsoft's "upgrade cycle", you'd have a great point. But there isn't so you don't - but don't let that stop you from dailing the pedantic nitpicking to 11.

I am not qualified to discuss technical issues about OSX because I don't use it.

Then you aren't qualified to speculate on "fanboys" if you know nothing of the underlying issues or technology.

I based that comment merely on the fact that as I run XP (and Linux) at home, the MS updates usually happen on a Thursday.

Tuesday. Tuesday. Tuesday. It's called Patch Tuesday for a reason.

Neither, I'd rather nuke the lot of them from orbit.

In your case, it really IS the only way to be sure.

Heard of a webcam?

[tepples]

I didn't specify live video encoding.

Your wording gave off the subtext that you thought live video encoding was commercially unimportant. I was just trying to warn you against being so dismissive.

Live video encoding is not often encountered in a desktop PC environment

Citation needed.

I would go so far as to say that the majority of video broadcasts are not live.

And you'd be right, but tell that to my sports fan grandfather or my MSNBC-loving grandmother.

Most PCs have VGA or DVI-I output abilities, and the conversion to the RCA connectors requires no special electronics.

Most PCs won't go lower than 480p[1] at 31 kHz horizontal scan rate, and they output RGB component video. SDTVs need the video downsampled to 240p or 480i at 15.7 kHz, and most also need red, green, and blue signals to be multiplexed into composite video (or S-Video if you're lucky). Every game console since the Atari 2600 can reduce its scan rate to match that of an SDTV; most desktop PCs cannot, at least without an external adapter or an aftermarket video card.

[1] In the "DOS style" text mode, the PC goes down to 400p, but that's it.

Re:Heard of a webcam?

[NoStarchPlox]

And you'd be right, but tell that to my sports fan grandfather or my MSNBC-loving grandmother.

Hate to break it to you but even "live" sports has a delay between the video being captured and it being broadcast out.

Re:Heard of a webcam?

[tepples]

Hate to break it to you but even "live" sports has a delay between the video being captured and it being broadcast out.

True, live stuff is on a seven second delay so that the censors can see things that might offend right-wing parents and block it before it hits the airwaves. In fact, the censors are probably close enough to the production facility that they can watch a a lightly compressed (e.g. Motion JPEG) feed several Groups Of Pictures ahead of the public. But the use case for DVD transcoding (which operates a chapter or a whole title at a time) is as if one would buffer a whole half of a football game (either kind), 2-pass encode that, and send that out. It's doable for movie channels but not for sports channels, except possibly in limited cases on the west coast of a wide country like the USA.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[MightyYar]

That is, until some clever writer begins including square-bracketed ellipses in his or her text \[. . .\].

We just need escape codes :)

Just nice it.

[tepples]

The point I'm trying to make is that I don't want everything to be multi-threaded.

Then use your operating system's process manager to "nice" (deprioritize) the apps that you don't want to be multithreaded.

Re:Any details on Grand Central?

[Raffaello]

double bind here. those who speak do not know. those who know do not speak - they're under NDA.

What PC can't boot from USB MSC?

[tepples]

How is an average user without a DVD/CD drive going to install an OS? (Booting from an USB stick never quite worked.)

On which hardware did booting from USB mass storage fail? I used UNetbootin on a desktop computer to turn an Ubuntu 8.04 ISO into a bootable copy on an SD card. I booted from the SD card on my Eee PC and replaced the included Xandros on the internal SSD with Ubuntu. Everything worked fine once I applied the published fixes for Hardy on Eee PC 900 (except for sound after resume). Or are you talking about PCs made before USB 2.0 was common?

Also I already need the one that I have, as a keyfile storage.

My Eee PC has three USB ports and one SD card slot.

Re:What PC can't boot from USB MSC?

[Hurricane78]

On every single one I ever owned and still own. Oh, and on the two my brothers own.

Yes, I tried pretty much everything, because I thought they were not bootable. But I seems I have done everything right.

How to break the 0.05 Mbps barrier in rural areas?

[tepples]

The same thing that happened to audio cds is going to happen to dvd. They will become obsolete as long as bandwidth keeps increasing.

A lot of people still can't get more than 0.05 Mbps dial-up. What, apart from a government-sponsored program analogous to rural electrification (started 1936 in the United States), is going to increase bandwidth to bufftuck nowhere?

Re:How to break the 0.05 Mbps barrier in rural are

[alexandre_ganso]

I don't know. You should try to look to broadband efforts in other countries, such as rural areas of spain, france, or brazil. I mean, america is the richest place in the world, isn't it? I'm quite sure someone can find a viable business model to those places.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[jbolden]

Good solution. Might make it in.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[jbolden]

Interesting I hadn't thought about how to quote text with ellipses.

Cleanup

[copponex]

From what I've read, they are cleaning up the code and optimizing it for the Intel platform. Supposedly it will take up less hard drive space and memory, but I'll believe that when I see it. Even if they fail, I'm glad they attempted this cleanup, even if it just inspires Microsoft to do some similar scrubbing with Windows 8. It's about time someone stopped and said, "Hey, instead of shiny feature 837, can we make sure that our web browser isn't leaking memory like a paper boat?"

It's not really for your mom - it's so she doesn't call you as often.

I'm usually a pretty big Mac fan-boy but I just can't seem to get excited about this one. Hell, I'm even thinking (seriously) about ditching my iPhone and getting a Palm Pre. sigh...how the world is changing. Has Apple lost it's Mojo?

I had the same thought. Apple is getting too greedy with their hardware prices, and they continue to screw customers over with their overpriced parts for repair. Plus, the computer world is changing, and they don't seem to understand what's happening.

Try remotely controlling a Mac with VNC over a cellular broadband connection. It's like sucking a watermelon through a straw. Try creating a virtual network of virtual machines for testing before deployment, which is illegal under Apple's TOS except for their server software. You'll be dragging your toaster into the bathtub by the end of the day.

Netbooks are evidence that people want computers for convenient access to information, usually located on the internet, and to have something to sync their iPod to. I'm not sure how much longer Apple can charge twice what their competitors are charging and get away with it. And they still have no chance of entering the enterprise market with their hardware costs and licensing restrictions.

I'm due for a laptop upgrade, and given the choice of a Dell Precision, RGBLED screen, and a dock that supports legacy ports and dual 30" displays, or a slower MacBook Pro with a crappier display for the same price, they're really making the decision for me. I'll continue recommending Macs for friends and family that may call me with technical questions, but if Windows 7 offers the same kind of robustness for half the price, what's the point?

Re:Cleanup

[iluvcapra]

Try remotely controlling a Mac with VNC over a cellular broadband connection. It's like sucking a watermelon through a straw. Try creating a virtual network of virtual machines for testing before deployment...

Is this really what the future of the computer industry is going to look like?

Macs are lifestyle machines mainly for the home, with a certain legacy installed base in certain high-end markets, and they really don't make any bones about that. There's a lot more money to be made in the consumer market, particularly the margins can be a lot higher. Apple's last quarter was the best non-Xmas quarter they ever had, even in the mini depression, so clearly they aren't charging too much.

To the contrary, I think Apple's calling the medium-term outlook pretty well, in that they're banking on home/casual computing products, and writing of corporate customers for the time being. Let Dell and HP and Lenovo fight for the scraps of what's left of the US corporate IT budget, while Apple rakes in entertainment/content dollars and the profits off the expansion of the consumer market for casual computing devices and the networks that bind them.

Re:Cleanup

[MojoStan]

Supposedly it will take up less hard drive space and memory, but I'll believe that when I see it.

I think it's safe to believe the part about less hard drive space, because Apple will save a lot of space with a very simple method. According to AppleInsider, Snow Leopard will trim the standard install size by "several gigabytes" (4GB according to Ars Technica) by only installing printer drivers for currently connected printers. Drivers for newly attached printers will install over the network and Software Update, so this works best with an always-on connection.

Personally, I'm blown away by the fact that printer drivers alone take up anything close a one gigabyte, let alone 4GB.

Even if they fail, I'm glad they attempted this cleanup, even if it just inspires Microsoft to do some similar scrubbing with Windows 8.

I think netbooks have done enough to "inspire" MS (I prefer the word "panic") to scrub their OS.

Re:Cleanup

[StuartHankins]

An easy way to trim much additional space -- at least from 10.4.x -- is by using Monolingual to strip out other languages and support for other architectures. You can save many many GB this way.

I'd be a bit careful about stripping the architectures unless you're sure you know what you're doing though.

Re:Cleanup

[MemoryDragon]

The cleanup to some degree can be done with a plain osx install nowadays, throw away not needed printer drivers throw away not needed languages, unused power pc code, garage band loops etc... and you have reduced your install literally by several gigabytes!

Re:Higher Standards

[Phroggy]

I'm sure it won't.

I tried upgrading to Leopard on my G4 iBook. Tried it for a couple months, then downgraded back to Tiger.

Some of the UI decisions they made in Leopard, like folders in the Dock that display as all of their contents stacked in a pile instead of a folder icon, were completely brain-dead. There was enough public outcry (and third-party workarounds) that Apple added options to fix the behavior in newer versions, but they still go with the stupid options by default. Did they forget to do usability testing, or did they simply ignore the results? Did it not occur to them that when you've got four dozen items in your Applications folder, making the folder look almost like the Address Book is confusing? Or that a distant star shining through a transparent menubar looks like something's wrong with your screen?

Other problems I noticed:

• CUPS browsing is disabled by default
• Editing multiple items in iCal is more awkward; they fixed part of it, but the details appear in a popup instead of a sidebar so they're always in a different part of the screen depending on what you're editing
• Spotlight's "Show All" function doesn't group the results by categories
• The selected tab in an application like X-Chat turns gray whenever another window has focus, so you can't see which tab was selected

Also, I think getting rid of the rounded corners was a terrible choice. I found a hack that brings them back if you want.

I also ran into driver issues - I couldn't get my Canon scanner to work, and couldn't communicate with my Nokia phone over Bluetooth. It reminded me of Vista users complaining about their driver woes.

Then there are UI problems with Tiger that Leopard simply left unchanged:

• FTP still doesn't work (try ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/ for example)
• Windows like Spotlight's "Show All" search results window aren't associated with any application, so Cmd-Tab won't switch to them; in Leopard the "Add Printer" window has this problem too

I don't see how Snow Leopard could be worse.

Re:All hail Apple! For.. uh. inventing the task qu

[david_thornley]

I don't know what Grand Central is exactly, or how it does what it does, but I do know a bit about parallel programming.

It ain't easy.

There's all sorts of pitfalls, and doing some sort of QA to make sure there are no race conditions is a real pain.

So, if Apple has come up with some way to make parallel processing easier, in some useful cases, this is a Good Thing, and will help developers write better applications for Mac OSX, and therefore sell more Macs. Making difficult things easier is usually looked on favorably; I assume you didn't take up this newfangled FORTRAN thing because you could already do everything in assembly and Autocoder?

I do understand your dislike of Apple's plain ordinary project names. I'm running Jaunty Jackalope on my laptop right now, and will upgrade to Karmic Koala late this year, and then doubtless Leprous Larva or whatever. Clearly, all other codenames pale before Ubuntu.

Re:Higher Standards

[BrokenHalo]

Not sure about some of your points, but now that Apple has hijacked CUPS, I have encountered problems with getting network printers to work between Mac and Linux hosts. In many ways, I have belatedly become something of a fan of Macs, but dealing with shared printers on a *nix network is not something Apple does well. Fortunately, I've been able to come up with my own cookbook solutions for this, but it really shouldn't be so hard.

Re:How to break the 0.05 Mbps barrier in rural are

[mini me]

I live in "bufftuck nowhere" in Canada and have had high speed DSL out to the farm for nine years now. The only thing really holding back some parts of this country has been the result of copper ownership.

What America (and Canada, for that matter) needs to do is take the lines away from the companies who refuse to provide upgrades to rural customers. As observed in my area, smaller, independent phone comapnies/ISPs can be quite profitable with a focus on providing telecommunication services for rural customers. They just need the ability to provide upgrades to the existing infrastructure.

Mom doesn't want cutting edge

[AlpineR]

I left my mom on Tiger because that's the version she learned on and any changes would just confuse her. I'll probably still leave her there when I move to Snow Leopard, because Grand Central and OpenCL are exciting to me as a scientific programmer but there's not much benefit for her tasks on an older Mac Mini.

But in five years, if she wants a new computer for high definition iChat and mastering Blu-ray discs of home movies, then the new stuff in Snow Leopard will be essential. So I see Snow Leopard as exciting for nerds today and exciting for the masses in the future.

Core Duo

[madsenj37]

I assume that Apple is only dropping PPC support, but I have seen no evidence to support or deny core duo support. First generation Macbook owners, iMac Core Duo and many Intel Mac Mini owners do not have 64 bit chips. Can anyone provide legitimate links to Snow Leopard support?

Re:Core Duo

[StuartHankins]

Aren't the MacBook Pro's core duos? I know mine is and it's approx 2 years old (15" 2.4). I wouldn't think they would deny an upgrade for such a recent machine.

Incidentally, I skipped 10.5 but plan to go with 10.6 after several months of public exposure unless feedback shows it's not worth the upgrade. Like any major upgrade there will be bugs and I'm all too happy to let others sort them out first. Although I'm happy with 10.4, I'm looking forward to a few tweaks from Snow Leopard. There just wasn't enough for me in 10.5 to justify the upgrade.

speaking of booting and floppies...

[gintoki]

This reminds me of when i thought i broke my dad's computer. This was 11 years ago. I was 8 at the time. There was a blank floppy in the drive and I tried to turn on the computer. I was really surpried when windows didn't start. Surprise turned to dread after about 15 minutes of constantly turning the computer on and off with no success. Then i started crying as i thought I broke the computer. Then my dad came home from work and I told him I broke the computer. He had a look at it, smiled and then took out the floppy. Much to my relief the computer worked again. Stupid computer tried to boot from a blank floppy. Since that day I have developed a hatred of floppies.

More like a Linux Kernel release

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Apple is making under-the hood changes, not userland changes. No flash, no sizzle, no fancy demos. Just nuts-and-bolts technical changes.

It's much like a new kernel release. The Average Joe won't notice it the way he would a new Gnome release: there's no new eye candy. But it makes important architectural changes that will enable applications (and future versions of userland tools) to work better.

Re:Higher Standards

[c_forq]

Windows like Spotlight's "Show All" search results window aren't associated with any application

Just checked this because I thought it was wrong, and it is wrong. The "Show All" option opens a finder smart search, so the application you are looking for is finder.

Re:Higher Standards

[Phroggy]

Ah, well good, that's something they fixed then. My mistake. What about adding a printer, though?

Multi-multi tasking?

[manoftin]

I'm already utilising my MacBook's multi-cores... by bouncing stuff in Logic at the same time as streaming BBC radio and doing LAMP dev. I don't necessarily want FF or whatever chewing up all available resource on all processors. My point is that outside of academia where the whole of a machine is dedicated to a single cause there is little need to introduce this complexity at a sub-application level.

Re:Higher Standards

[c_forq]

No idea, I don't have a printer.

Nitpicking alert! whooop, whooop!

[Hucko]

A quantum leap in software would be incremental as it would be the smallest alteration possible...

Yes, I know you don't care; I was compelled by a vision from on high

Re:Nitpicking alert! whooop, whooop!

[MightyYar]

I was using the term "quantum" to describe the sudden, distinct jump rather than the scale of the change... though that's what I get when I use a scientific term used on the sub-atomic scale for something big :)

Re:Nitpicking alert! whooop, whooop!

[Hucko]

I did realise it wasn't truly an ignorant misuse, but... I've been bashed enough for misusing it from ignorance and I wished to get my own back. Vindictive, see.

more simpler cores is the solution

[cheekyboy]

Rather than having the main code go multi core, its probably better to have specialized long duration tasks to happen virtually in an instant. And for that to happen we need 100,000 simple cores on one die, each even at 300mhz or so but quite simple, the biggest issue is data io

Re:Running away from a simple question still?

[SSCGWLB]

So, I got to know, at the conclusion of your ePenis measuring session who was larger?