For comparison: I have an Apple iMac G3 400MHz with 768MB RAM and a 40GB disk happily running OS X 10.4. This machine also has a (nonupgradeable) 8MB ATI video card. Note that this computer, at this moment, is almost 8 years old, and runs Tiger like a champ.
No G4 runs OS X "like a champ". I have an iBook G4 that has probably 3 times the raw performance of your iMac and I'd describe 10.4 as "barely adequate" on it.
Sun itself sells a blade system that puts 20 servers in a single rack.
Sun's Blade system aren't particularly impressive from a density perspective - IBM's, with 14 blades per 7U (84 servers in a rack), are much more interesting.
When has Microsoft transitioned processor platforms?
Well, NT has been available for Alpha, PPC, MIPS, x86, x86-64 and Itanium. There have been additional (but unreleased) ports to SPARC and (I think) HP PA-RISC. Not a "transition", per se, but certainly a need to support a wide range of hardware platforms.
A PPC Mac can run applications that were originally written in the late 80s, and (for the most part) you can't say that about Windows apps.
Yes, you can. DOS and Windows applications dating from the early '80s will run on XP and Vista.
An Intel Mac can't go back quite that far, but can still run PPC binaries in transparent emulation.
Which, given there was clearly a 68k "emulator" that would run fine on PPC Macs - and hence could run under Rosetta, is rather disappointing.
It was meant as an example of OS arch or API. It was meant as an example of corporate dedication to developers and customers. Sure, Apple's had problems. Apple's still got problems. But at least they are working on them, very quickly, and are willing to make the efforts help their install base transition to newer technologies. The only reason we are still using Win32 is because Microsoft isn't willing to do that work.
No, the reason we are still using Win32 is because Microsoft have a slavish addiction to backwards compatibility and legacy support. It is a shining example of how much more developer and user friendly Microsoft is than Apple. Microsoft always have very long transition periods whenever they make major changes - often even longer than they had originally planned (Exhibit A: the move from Windows 9x to Windows NT). The downside of this, of course, is that with such exceptionally good legacy support, there's no motivation for developers to move away from it.
But hey, if we're gonna get into a pissing contest, is 2D accelerated in XP? That would be a fair comparison.
Uh, of course it does. Windows has had accelerated 2D graphics since at _least_ the days of Windows 3.0.
And in the time it took MS to write Vista, Apple has REPLACED it's whole OS and released several major upgrades, and ported it to a new platform (XP was released 10-25-2001, OS X 10.0 was released in March 2001). We can piss back and forth on things like this all night.
Apple didn't replace their whole OS. They bought NextSTEP, slapped on a new display system, ported over a couple of APIs, mutilated the GUIs of both NeXTSTEP and MacOS trying to merge them together and make it "lickable", then released the beta as OS X 10.0. A few hurried updates later and 10.2 was released as the product that OS X should have been originally.
That process started in about 1997. It finished in about 2002. The level of changes Apple did in that timeframe is on par with the level of changes that Microsoft did to Windows XP/2003 to create Vista.
Astounding ! It took them both roughly the same length of time to do roughly the same thing !
(In a manner of speaking Microsoft actually did it quicker, since they basically started again from scratch in mid-2003, but that would ignore the amount of work that was done in parallel to get from Windows XP to Windows 2003, from which Vista was then branched.)
Are you saying that Apple emulated the entire processor, memory, etc., of a computer ala VMWare and Win16 does not, or are you saying something else? What is the distinction between "emulation" and "subsystem" ?
Think of it as like the difference between WINE and DOSBox.
That is exactly the opposite of what I wrote. You apparently missed the phrase SAME hardware.
Not at all. Your statement was:
Each succeeding Windows generation always runs WORSE on the same hardware than the older one.
Which is incorrect. If you take a high end (or even just mid range) machine, newer versions of Windows will run better on it than older versions (up to a point). This is/was true of Windows, Linux, MacOS Classic - indeed, pretty much every OS that exists except OS X, which is only bucking the trend because it started a lap or two behind the race everyone else was running.
Of course will any OS be faster on a modern 8 core machine.
Not according to you. You say Windows 2000 will run better on an 8 core box than XP or Vista will.
One would hope that VISTA would be able to take advantage of newer hardware. I was talking about the old iron. All Macs that came out since 2000 have had exactly the same graphics look. They used plain quartz, without the "extreme" part which came later.
Ie: newer Macs which can use Quartz Extreme (and Core Image, etc) have somewhat different eyecandy. That "ripple" effect when you drop Dashboard widgets, for example.
Apple makes the entire computer, so they can ensure that things "just work". I have a 2001 laptop G4 running OSX10.8, the current version. It runs a LOT faster with 10.4 than it did with the 10.1 I first upgraded to from the OS9 it came with.
Well that's hardly surprising. Early versions of OS X were complete and utter dogs, even on cutting-edge hardware of the day (and years afterwards). This is not a problem that has similarly afflicted Windows.
I could and did put in more RAM and a bigger HD. How could a new video card be installed? Do PC laptops come with replaceable video subsystems? You could and did HAVE to upgrade your desktop video in order to take advantage of the new VISTA eye candy on that old computer. On an old iMac you'd see all the SAME eye candy as on the newer ones without *any* hardware changes. The new ones are of course much faster.
No, you won't. Older Macs don't have the video hardware to support Quartz Extreme and Core Image, etc, and the effects that come with them. Additionally, Macs older than about mid-2002 (probably much later for the low-end models like iMacs) don't have the GPU capabilities to accelerate Quartz *at all*, so all those fancy effects are loading up the main CPU, just to look mostly the same.
The difference is a) that Vista is doing vastly more with the video hardware than OS X, so it requires a higher baseline model (DirectX9 capable cards, so anything newer than about mid 2003); and b) Microsoft haven't implemented a software fallback mode that uses the system CPU to emulate the Aero look on inadequate hardware, as Apple have with OS X[0].
One way to compare OS is to find out how many lines of code there are within it.
Indeed. In the same way you can compare different foodstuffs by looking at how many calories they have. Doesn't really tell you much about, say, their nutritional value, but it tells you something.
OSX is by far more efficient than any of the MS bloatware.
Rubbish. Windows is much nicer to older hardware than OS X, which is annoyingly slow on anything less than a G5 based machine. This is *especially* true of the older versions of OS X, which were atrociously slow. (Added to which, Windows is doing more than OS X - for example, its more capable security model.)
With OSX there are also none of the burdensome "activation" hassles and DRM embedded deeply in the OS itself.
Of course Apple don't need "activation" - they have the advantage of a great big hardware dongle to verify that you're a paying customer.
As for the DRM, if you're not using DRM-encumbered media it's utterly irrelevant, and until Apple implement a similar DRM system in OS X, equivalent DRM-encumbered m
I think you have that wrong - OS/2 didn't suffer the problem.
OS/2 most certainly did suffer that problem and was quite infamous for it (30 seconds Googling for "Single Input Queue problem" should tell you that).
MS's OSes still suffer that problem, especially if you use some of the legacy APIs (ie, old apps).
No, they don't.
On OS/2, you're also not 100% correct. OS/2 1.x, which were released and in widespread usage in the banking industry, especially in ATMs, actually did have some common components with NT 3.1. NT 3.5 separated this some, and it was left as a user installed support module in NT 4.0 before disappearing in Win 2K.
No, it didn't. OS/2 and Windows NT came from _completely_ different code bases. They shared an API - you could run text mode OS/2 apps in early releases of NT - but that's the closest they came to having "common components"[0]. You are thinking of NT's "API personalities", which were designed in from that start as modular chunks that could be activated and deactivated at will (win32 is implemented the same way). They were a result of its microkernel-ish architecture, not of any "OS/2 heritage".
You're correct in that OS/2 2.x was radically different from NT (VMS) in design. It was far superior, and by 2.3 had a GUI and performance I have yet to see matched by anyone, including Mac OSX.
It was most certainly not superior (and OS X is hardly a performance benchmark to strive for, it's probably the slowest mainstream OS around). OS/2 had a monolithic kernel, wasn't portable, was single user (so nothing even as basic as filesystem permissions, let alone the pervasive security model of NT), didn't support multiple processors (although that was hacked into some specialised builds), still had significant subsystems that were still 16 bit, even into the mid-90s, had poor memory management (no dynamically-sizing disk cache, for example), etc, etc.
Windows NT was superior to OS/2 in pretty much every conceivable way. Which it should have been, given that - as the original poster noted - it was built to replace OS/2.
If you think OS/2 didn't perform, your hardware wasn't good enough, as it required the same hardware as NT 3.5 to run well.
It required less (OS/2 was tolerable on a machine with 6MB RAM, NT required at least 10MB) - but that's hardly surprising since it wasn't _doing_ anywhere near as much.
Your argument is atrocious. By your logic, DOS is better designed than Linux because it will run in a machine with under half a megabyte of RAM.
I used OS/2 quite extensively, for many years. While it was mostly better than DOS and Windows 3.x, NT absolutely blew it out of the water.
[0]And if you think that's an indicator of inheritance, I look forward to your argument that OS X came from MacOS Classic, as did FreeBSD from Linux.
Each succeeding Windows generation always runs WORSE on the same hardware than the older one.
Untrue. On higher-end hardware, new versions of Windows (along with other OSes) are usually faster because they are updated and tuned to make better use of that higher end hardware (which probably didn't even exist when the previous version was released).
Vista on, say, an 8-core machine will be substantially faster - especially under load - than XP or 2k on that same machine.
With OSX this is just the opposite. Each newer version runs faster on a vintage Mac of similar age, than the one before.
Well, when you start of with the abominably bad performance that OS X had on release, there's nowhere to go but up. Windows can't really follow that lead.
Don't expect this to conitnue, by the way - eventually (probably after 10.5) Apple are going to run out of those "easy" optimisations that Microsoft were doing to NT back in the early-mid '90s and those "free upgrades" you get with each release are going to stop.
Compare ebay prices of 7 year old Macs with similar aged Windows boxes.
But don't forget to compare the _new_ prices those computers were 7 years ago, and their relative performance.
The 400Mhz iMacs Apple first introduced in July of 2000, will run the current OSX10.4 faster than any earlier versions of OSX and in its FULL capability of eye candy.
No, it won't, because Macs that old don't have the video hardware to handle Quartz Extreme.
Try to get VISTA ultimate with Aero to run on any PC box of that age.
Done it. I've got an 800Mhz, 1GB RAM P3 running Vista just fine. Only upgrade was a $30 video card.
You may not change the computer in any way other than stuff it with as much RAM as it will take.
Ah, as is typical with Mac Zealots you apply a ludicriously arbitrary restriction so your "argument" works.
Macs may be a bit more expensive, but in the long term they are a much better buy. Kind of like our Hondas.
The thing to watch out for here... OS X Leopard Server. For a significant number of small businesses, this would mean a glitzy UI, ease of use, and a pretty good feature set as a server. Not to mention that apple doesn't hit you with much in the way of per-client licenses as they make their money selling hardware.
On the flipside, they do hit you pretty hard for the (very) limited amount of hardware they sell to run OS X Server on.
It always really shits me that you have to wait for Windows to realise an app "isn't responding" before you can actually kill it. Although, if you keep clicking the End Process button when Windows finally responds you get a crapload of "Would you like to kill this process?" dialogs. And closing dozens of dialogs is fun fun fun.
You seem to be getting "End Task" and "End Process" mixed up.
"End Task" (in the Applications tab of Task Manager) first tries to quit the app cleanly - think of it as the equivalent of a 'kill'. There will be a delay as the "clean quit" times out.
"End Process" (in the Processes tab of Task Manager) end processe immediately (or tries to, at least). It's similar to a 'kill -9'. There is no delay.
MacOS supported multi-button mice back in the 90s.
Which makes OS X's abysmal context menus even more damning. A decade, and they still haven't improved the functionality past the initial implementation that was available in MacOS 8.0.
Of course, given the UI "improvements" they came up with for OS X (primarily, the Dock), it might be better if Apple don't mess with something that at least works somewhat, even if it could be better.
Multi-button mice are, what, 10 bucks at Wal-mart? You're not stuck with a one-button mouse if you don't want it.
I'm not aware of anyone selling replacement "mice" for notebooks - which make up the majority of Apple's computer sales.
Right-click menus are a complete interface disaster that should be purged from all GUIs.
Rubbish. They're a perfectly valid UI feature.
People who obsess over right-mouse buttons are just used to decades of Windows hiding functionality in right-click menus and aren't accustomed to the way OS X presents all that functionality in toolbars and menus right in front of you.
Windows doesn't "hide" anything in context menus (its UI guidelines specifically say any functionality present in a context menu must also be in the main menus).
Perhaps you are thinking of the UI train wreck that is context menus in most Linux GUIs and applications ?
What's annoying about it is there are thousands of additional user interface advantages by having right click. Even more annoying is that NO Apple mouses are one button anymore, so why have an OS that is only one button by default?
The majority of Apple's computer sales are notebooks.
You're not serious? Read some History. Before the IBM/Microsoft breakup over OS/2, what became Windows NT 3.1 was supposed to be OS/2 3.0.......
Which is completely irrelevant to what _actually_ became OS/2 2.x (and subsequently 3.x and 4.x).
No released version of OS/2 bears any architectural resemblance to Windows NT. None. Five minutes listing the key features and looking at the block diagram of each should tell anyone with a passing acquaintance to OS design that.
In short, the poster I replied to is wrong - NT does not have the Single Input Queue problem that OS/2 did (and probably still does).
You see, I used to do OS/2 tech support back in the days. I got pretty familiar with the guts of OS/2 and Windows and OS/2 share a lot of early design.
No, they don't.
I'm pretty sure the only way that Microsoft could design an OS that didn't suck would be to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch, though.
Indeed. They could call it "Windows - New Technology" !
Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista.
...What the comments here would be like if the criticism from the "Windows camp" about the latest release of Ubuntu or OS X was as shrill, biased and ill-informed as the daily "zOMG ! Vista is t3h suxx0rs, LOL !!11!"-style blog/article/review/journal making the front page of Slashdot.
...As the lower-privileged user and graphical sudo equivalents in OS X and some Linux distributions. It allows the user to run at a lower level of privileges by default and elevate when necessary, limiting the amount of damage malicious code can do on its own.
Similarly, it suffers exactly the same weakness - the user can inadvertently raise the privilege level of malicious code.
Hopefully more developers will write their code properly and the number of spurious UAC prompts will drop over time. Given that most developers haven't made any effort to make their applications LUA-friendly in the preceding decade, however, I'm not holding out much hope Vista making it _easier_ for them to get away with it will create any more inventive.
Sadly there is trouble with Dell hardware/software even in their 'big business' server sales. We recently bought $60,000 worth of hardware from them - first time our group bought from Dell, and got machines with closed source, YOU CAN'T RELOAD THE OS WITHOUT OUR PROPRIETARY BINARIES software.
I don't let "experts" into my house. I do the jobs that need to be done myself, unless the government mandates otherwise. Any time I've let "experts" come in to "fix" something, I've ended up having to spend twice as much to fix what they left.
I bet you buy off the shelf hardware designed by "experts" instead of making it yourself, however.
These ships will be in operation for decades. Major overhauls are spaced far apart. When Windows 2000 leaves extended support and goes end-of-life, what's the Royal Navy going to do? Ask politely for the source code? And for a few hundred Microsoft engineers to understand it?
They'd already have the source code and a team of engineers before any implementation took place, along with license to maintain it themselves.
Just because you can't download the Windows source from www.microsoft.com, doesn't mean it's not accessible to people prepared to pay for it.
Example 1: WinCE vs. PalmOS
Example 2: Xbox 360 vs. Playstation 3
Example 3: Internet Explorer vs. Netscape
Example 4: Doubledisk/doublespace vs. Stacker
Example 5: Windows vs. OS/2
Example 6: Microsoft Money vs Quicken.
Er, wait...
Certainly your last 3 examples (and probably the first two, but since I don't travel in the console or PDA markets, I couldn't say) are just as easily explained by standard market forces.
The enormous suckitude of Navigator 4 and clear superiority of IE4 killed Netscape.
Plummeting hard disk prices and dodgy reliability (and I say that as an ex-Stac customer - hell, I even have an old compression coprocessor 16-bit ISA card around here somewhere) killed Stacker (and similar technologies).
Lack of native software, high hardware requirements, lack of clear and obvious advantages (especially once Windows 95 was out), weird software compatibility problems with games (especially in the 1992 - 1995 timeframe when DOS extenders were common) and, if anything, an "anti-marketing" strategy from IBM killed OS/2 (and I say _that_ as an ex-OS/2 user).
If VMWare have a clear advantage over Microsoft - and they certainly do at the moment - they won't have any trouble staying in business. Moreover, if Microsoft never develop any clear advantage over them, their existing customers will stay with them (inertia is a massive force in the enterprise and a non-trivial one even in the home user market) and new customers will prefer them because of their "experience" and "high profile". VMWare only really have something to worry about if they fuck it up, like Netscape did.
I can't see the ambiguity. Believe me, I've been trying to think of one
Vista Home:
You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.
Ie: it is written to indicate that if you have an existing Vista license that has been assigned to a piece of hardware, you can't reuse that Vista license to install it in a VM (running on the same hardware). But what if you have a Vista license that *isn't* assigned to a piece of hardware ?
Compared to Vista Ultimate and Business:
You may use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system on the licensed device.
In other words, with Vista Ultimate and Business, you *can* reuse your Vista license to run more copies of Vista on the same hardware.
The ambiguity comes from the additional legalese and additional functionality apparently offered in the higher-end licenses. Why is the additional wording there if the objective is to simply deny the running on VMs completely ? There is no reason to specify "installed on the licensed device" when a simple "You may not use the software in a Virtualised Environment" would do. Why does Vista Ultimate and Business apparently give you free reign to reuse your license in VMs ?
My (and many others') interpretation is that Vista Business and Ultimate give you "free licenses" to install multiple copies of Vista running in VMs, as long as they're running in VMs on the same hardware your "real" copy of Vista is on. Vista Home says you can only run Vista either on bare metal, or a single VM instance on a single piece of physical hardware.
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For comparison: I have an Apple iMac G3 400MHz with 768MB RAM and a 40GB disk happily running OS X 10.4. This machine also has a (nonupgradeable) 8MB ATI video card. Note that this computer, at this moment, is almost 8 years old, and runs Tiger like a champ.
No G4 runs OS X "like a champ". I have an iBook G4 that has probably 3 times the raw performance of your iMac and I'd describe 10.4 as "barely adequate" on it.
Sun itself sells a blade system that puts 20 servers in a single rack.
Sun's Blade system aren't particularly impressive from a density perspective - IBM's, with 14 blades per 7U (84 servers in a rack), are much more interesting.
When has Microsoft transitioned processor platforms?
Well, NT has been available for Alpha, PPC, MIPS, x86, x86-64 and Itanium. There have been additional (but unreleased) ports to SPARC and (I think) HP PA-RISC. Not a "transition", per se, but certainly a need to support a wide range of hardware platforms.
A PPC Mac can run applications that were originally written in the late 80s, and (for the most part) you can't say that about Windows apps.
Yes, you can. DOS and Windows applications dating from the early '80s will run on XP and Vista.
An Intel Mac can't go back quite that far, but can still run PPC binaries in transparent emulation.
Which, given there was clearly a 68k "emulator" that would run fine on PPC Macs - and hence could run under Rosetta, is rather disappointing.
It was meant as an example of OS arch or API. It was meant as an example of corporate dedication to developers and customers. Sure, Apple's had problems. Apple's still got problems. But at least they are working on them, very quickly, and are willing to make the efforts help their install base transition to newer technologies. The only reason we are still using Win32 is because Microsoft isn't willing to do that work.
No, the reason we are still using Win32 is because Microsoft have a slavish addiction to backwards compatibility and legacy support. It is a shining example of how much more developer and user friendly Microsoft is than Apple. Microsoft always have very long transition periods whenever they make major changes - often even longer than they had originally planned (Exhibit A: the move from Windows 9x to Windows NT). The downside of this, of course, is that with such exceptionally good legacy support, there's no motivation for developers to move away from it.
But hey, if we're gonna get into a pissing contest, is 2D accelerated in XP? That would be a fair comparison.
Uh, of course it does. Windows has had accelerated 2D graphics since at _least_ the days of Windows 3.0.
And in the time it took MS to write Vista, Apple has REPLACED it's whole OS and released several major upgrades, and ported it to a new platform (XP was released 10-25-2001, OS X 10.0 was released in March 2001). We can piss back and forth on things like this all night.
Apple didn't replace their whole OS. They bought NextSTEP, slapped on a new display system, ported over a couple of APIs, mutilated the GUIs of both NeXTSTEP and MacOS trying to merge them together and make it "lickable", then released the beta as OS X 10.0. A few hurried updates later and 10.2 was released as the product that OS X should have been originally.
That process started in about 1997. It finished in about 2002. The level of changes Apple did in that timeframe is on par with the level of changes that Microsoft did to Windows XP/2003 to create Vista.
Astounding ! It took them both roughly the same length of time to do roughly the same thing !
(In a manner of speaking Microsoft actually did it quicker, since they basically started again from scratch in mid-2003, but that would ignore the amount of work that was done in parallel to get from Windows XP to Windows 2003, from which Vista was then branched.)
Therefore, my current OS is superior to Vista, because I can safely rely on it.
Please explain how Vista's DRM stops you doing anything you can do on your "DRM free" OS.
Are you saying that Apple emulated the entire processor, memory, etc., of a computer ala VMWare and Win16 does not, or are you saying something else? What is the distinction between "emulation" and "subsystem" ?
Think of it as like the difference between WINE and DOSBox.
That is exactly the opposite of what I wrote. You apparently missed the phrase SAME hardware.
Not at all. Your statement was:
Which is incorrect. If you take a high end (or even just mid range) machine, newer versions of Windows will run better on it than older versions (up to a point). This is/was true of Windows, Linux, MacOS Classic - indeed, pretty much every OS that exists except OS X, which is only bucking the trend because it started a lap or two behind the race everyone else was running.
Of course will any OS be faster on a modern 8 core machine.
Not according to you. You say Windows 2000 will run better on an 8 core box than XP or Vista will.
One would hope that VISTA would be able to take advantage of newer hardware. I was talking about the old iron. All Macs that came out since 2000 have had exactly the same graphics look. They used plain quartz, without the "extreme" part which came later.
Ie: newer Macs which can use Quartz Extreme (and Core Image, etc) have somewhat different eyecandy. That "ripple" effect when you drop Dashboard widgets, for example.
Apple makes the entire computer, so they can ensure that things "just work". I have a 2001 laptop G4 running OSX10.8, the current version. It runs a LOT faster with 10.4 than it did with the 10.1 I first upgraded to from the OS9 it came with.
Well that's hardly surprising. Early versions of OS X were complete and utter dogs, even on cutting-edge hardware of the day (and years afterwards). This is not a problem that has similarly afflicted Windows.
I could and did put in more RAM and a bigger HD. How could a new video card be installed? Do PC laptops come with replaceable video subsystems? You could and did HAVE to upgrade your desktop video in order to take advantage of the new VISTA eye candy on that old computer. On an old iMac you'd see all the SAME eye candy as on the newer ones without *any* hardware changes. The new ones are of course much faster.
No, you won't. Older Macs don't have the video hardware to support Quartz Extreme and Core Image, etc, and the effects that come with them. Additionally, Macs older than about mid-2002 (probably much later for the low-end models like iMacs) don't have the GPU capabilities to accelerate Quartz *at all*, so all those fancy effects are loading up the main CPU, just to look mostly the same.
The difference is a) that Vista is doing vastly more with the video hardware than OS X, so it requires a higher baseline model (DirectX9 capable cards, so anything newer than about mid 2003); and b) Microsoft haven't implemented a software fallback mode that uses the system CPU to emulate the Aero look on inadequate hardware, as Apple have with OS X[0].
One way to compare OS is to find out how many lines of code there are within it.
Indeed. In the same way you can compare different foodstuffs by looking at how many calories they have. Doesn't really tell you much about, say, their nutritional value, but it tells you something.
OSX is by far more efficient than any of the MS bloatware.
Rubbish. Windows is much nicer to older hardware than OS X, which is annoyingly slow on anything less than a G5 based machine. This is *especially* true of the older versions of OS X, which were atrociously slow. (Added to which, Windows is doing more than OS X - for example, its more capable security model.)
With OSX there are also none of the burdensome "activation" hassles and DRM embedded deeply in the OS itself.
Of course Apple don't need "activation" - they have the advantage of a great big hardware dongle to verify that you're a paying customer.
As for the DRM, if you're not using DRM-encumbered media it's utterly irrelevant, and until Apple implement a similar DRM system in OS X, equivalent DRM-encumbered m
I think you have that wrong - OS/2 didn't suffer the problem.
OS/2 most certainly did suffer that problem and was quite infamous for it (30 seconds Googling for "Single Input Queue problem" should tell you that).
MS's OSes still suffer that problem, especially if you use some of the legacy APIs (ie, old apps).
No, they don't.
On OS/2, you're also not 100% correct. OS/2 1.x, which were released and in widespread usage in the banking industry, especially in ATMs, actually did have some common components with NT 3.1. NT 3.5 separated this some, and it was left as a user installed support module in NT 4.0 before disappearing in Win 2K.
No, it didn't. OS/2 and Windows NT came from _completely_ different code bases. They shared an API - you could run text mode OS/2 apps in early releases of NT - but that's the closest they came to having "common components"[0]. You are thinking of NT's "API personalities", which were designed in from that start as modular chunks that could be activated and deactivated at will (win32 is implemented the same way). They were a result of its microkernel-ish architecture, not of any "OS/2 heritage".
You're correct in that OS/2 2.x was radically different from NT (VMS) in design. It was far superior, and by 2.3 had a GUI and performance I have yet to see matched by anyone, including Mac OSX.
It was most certainly not superior (and OS X is hardly a performance benchmark to strive for, it's probably the slowest mainstream OS around). OS/2 had a monolithic kernel, wasn't portable, was single user (so nothing even as basic as filesystem permissions, let alone the pervasive security model of NT), didn't support multiple processors (although that was hacked into some specialised builds), still had significant subsystems that were still 16 bit, even into the mid-90s, had poor memory management (no dynamically-sizing disk cache, for example), etc, etc.
Windows NT was superior to OS/2 in pretty much every conceivable way. Which it should have been, given that - as the original poster noted - it was built to replace OS/2.
If you think OS/2 didn't perform, your hardware wasn't good enough, as it required the same hardware as NT 3.5 to run well.
It required less (OS/2 was tolerable on a machine with 6MB RAM, NT required at least 10MB) - but that's hardly surprising since it wasn't _doing_ anywhere near as much.
Your argument is atrocious. By your logic, DOS is better designed than Linux because it will run in a machine with under half a megabyte of RAM.
I used OS/2 quite extensively, for many years. While it was mostly better than DOS and Windows 3.x, NT absolutely blew it out of the water.
[0]And if you think that's an indicator of inheritance, I look forward to your argument that OS X came from MacOS Classic, as did FreeBSD from Linux.
You are high. My Macbook has right click functionality.
You are stupid. "Right click functionality" != two buttons.
Each succeeding Windows generation always runs WORSE on the same hardware than the older one.
Untrue. On higher-end hardware, new versions of Windows (along with other OSes) are usually faster because they are updated and tuned to make better use of that higher end hardware (which probably didn't even exist when the previous version was released).
Vista on, say, an 8-core machine will be substantially faster - especially under load - than XP or 2k on that same machine.
With OSX this is just the opposite. Each newer version runs faster on a vintage Mac of similar age, than the one before.
Well, when you start of with the abominably bad performance that OS X had on release, there's nowhere to go but up. Windows can't really follow that lead.
Don't expect this to conitnue, by the way - eventually (probably after 10.5) Apple are going to run out of those "easy" optimisations that Microsoft were doing to NT back in the early-mid '90s and those "free upgrades" you get with each release are going to stop.
Compare ebay prices of 7 year old Macs with similar aged Windows boxes.
But don't forget to compare the _new_ prices those computers were 7 years ago, and their relative performance.
The 400Mhz iMacs Apple first introduced in July of 2000, will run the current OSX10.4 faster than any earlier versions of OSX and in its FULL capability of eye candy.
No, it won't, because Macs that old don't have the video hardware to handle Quartz Extreme.
Try to get VISTA ultimate with Aero to run on any PC box of that age.
Done it. I've got an 800Mhz, 1GB RAM P3 running Vista just fine. Only upgrade was a $30 video card.
You may not change the computer in any way other than stuff it with as much RAM as it will take.
Ah, as is typical with Mac Zealots you apply a ludicriously arbitrary restriction so your "argument" works.
Macs may be a bit more expensive, but in the long term they are a much better buy. Kind of like our Hondas.
No, they're not.
The thing to watch out for here... OS X Leopard Server. For a significant number of small businesses, this would mean a glitzy UI, ease of use, and a pretty good feature set as a server. Not to mention that apple doesn't hit you with much in the way of per-client licenses as they make their money selling hardware.
On the flipside, they do hit you pretty hard for the (very) limited amount of hardware they sell to run OS X Server on.
It always really shits me that you have to wait for Windows to realise an app "isn't responding" before you can actually kill it. Although, if you keep clicking the End Process button when Windows finally responds you get a crapload of "Would you like to kill this process?" dialogs. And closing dozens of dialogs is fun fun fun.
You seem to be getting "End Task" and "End Process" mixed up.
"End Task" (in the Applications tab of Task Manager) first tries to quit the app cleanly - think of it as the equivalent of a 'kill'. There will be a delay as the "clean quit" times out.
"End Process" (in the Processes tab of Task Manager) end processe immediately (or tries to, at least). It's similar to a 'kill -9'. There is no delay.
MacOS supported multi-button mice back in the 90s.
Which makes OS X's abysmal context menus even more damning. A decade, and they still haven't improved the functionality past the initial implementation that was available in MacOS 8.0.
Of course, given the UI "improvements" they came up with for OS X (primarily, the Dock), it might be better if Apple don't mess with something that at least works somewhat, even if it could be better.
Multi-button mice are, what, 10 bucks at Wal-mart? You're not stuck with a one-button mouse if you don't want it.
I'm not aware of anyone selling replacement "mice" for notebooks - which make up the majority of Apple's computer sales.
Right-click menus are a complete interface disaster that should be purged from all GUIs.
Rubbish. They're a perfectly valid UI feature.
People who obsess over right-mouse buttons are just used to decades of Windows hiding functionality in right-click menus and aren't accustomed to the way OS X presents all that functionality in toolbars and menus right in front of you.
Windows doesn't "hide" anything in context menus (its UI guidelines specifically say any functionality present in a context menu must also be in the main menus).
Perhaps you are thinking of the UI train wreck that is context menus in most Linux GUIs and applications ?
What's annoying about it is there are thousands of additional user interface advantages by having right click. Even more annoying is that NO Apple mouses are one button anymore, so why have an OS that is only one button by default?
The majority of Apple's computer sales are notebooks.
No Apple notebook has a multibutton mouse.
You're not serious? Read some History. Before the IBM/Microsoft breakup over OS/2, what became Windows NT 3.1 was supposed to be OS/2 3.0.......
Which is completely irrelevant to what _actually_ became OS/2 2.x (and subsequently 3.x and 4.x).
No released version of OS/2 bears any architectural resemblance to Windows NT. None. Five minutes listing the key features and looking at the block diagram of each should tell anyone with a passing acquaintance to OS design that.
In short, the poster I replied to is wrong - NT does not have the Single Input Queue problem that OS/2 did (and probably still does).
You see, I used to do OS/2 tech support back in the days. I got pretty familiar with the guts of OS/2 and Windows and OS/2 share a lot of early design.
No, they don't.
I'm pretty sure the only way that Microsoft could design an OS that didn't suck would be to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch, though.
Indeed. They could call it "Windows - New Technology" !
The Aristocrats !
...What the comments here would be like if the criticism from the "Windows camp" about the latest release of Ubuntu or OS X was as shrill, biased and ill-informed as the daily "zOMG ! Vista is t3h suxx0rs, LOL !!11!"-style blog/article/review/journal making the front page of Slashdot.
...As the lower-privileged user and graphical sudo equivalents in OS X and some Linux distributions. It allows the user to run at a lower level of privileges by default and elevate when necessary, limiting the amount of damage malicious code can do on its own.
Similarly, it suffers exactly the same weakness - the user can inadvertently raise the privilege level of malicious code.
Hopefully more developers will write their code properly and the number of spurious UAC prompts will drop over time. Given that most developers haven't made any effort to make their applications LUA-friendly in the preceding decade, however, I'm not holding out much hope Vista making it _easier_ for them to get away with it will create any more inventive.
Sadly there is trouble with Dell hardware/software even in their 'big business' server sales. We recently bought $60,000 worth of hardware from them - first time our group bought from Dell, and got machines with closed source, YOU CAN'T RELOAD THE OS WITHOUT OUR PROPRIETARY BINARIES software.
Which server model(s) ?
I don't let "experts" into my house. I do the jobs that need to be done myself, unless the government mandates otherwise. Any time I've let "experts" come in to "fix" something, I've ended up having to spend twice as much to fix what they left.
I bet you buy off the shelf hardware designed by "experts" instead of making it yourself, however.
Kids have ALWAYS been good at 'multitasking' while adults are (generally) better at pursuing singular tasks to much greater depth.
Also expressed as the "oooh ! Shiny !" and "finish the job, even the shitty boring parts" attitudes.
These ships will be in operation for decades. Major overhauls are spaced far apart. When Windows 2000 leaves extended support and goes end-of-life, what's the Royal Navy going to do? Ask politely for the source code? And for a few hundred Microsoft engineers to understand it?
They'd already have the source code and a team of engineers before any implementation took place, along with license to maintain it themselves.
Just because you can't download the Windows source from www.microsoft.com, doesn't mean it's not accessible to people prepared to pay for it.
As you said though, when the application you are running is the nuclear launch sequence initializer application this can be a fairly serious problem.
An application crash has zero to do with the OS it's running on.
Example 1: WinCE vs. PalmOS
Example 2: Xbox 360 vs. Playstation 3
Example 3: Internet Explorer vs. Netscape
Example 4: Doubledisk/doublespace vs. Stacker
Example 5: Windows vs. OS/2
Example 6: Microsoft Money vs Quicken.
Er, wait...
Certainly your last 3 examples (and probably the first two, but since I don't travel in the console or PDA markets, I couldn't say) are just as easily explained by standard market forces.
The enormous suckitude of Navigator 4 and clear superiority of IE4 killed Netscape.
Plummeting hard disk prices and dodgy reliability (and I say that as an ex-Stac customer - hell, I even have an old compression coprocessor 16-bit ISA card around here somewhere) killed Stacker (and similar technologies).
Lack of native software, high hardware requirements, lack of clear and obvious advantages (especially once Windows 95 was out), weird software compatibility problems with games (especially in the 1992 - 1995 timeframe when DOS extenders were common) and, if anything, an "anti-marketing" strategy from IBM killed OS/2 (and I say _that_ as an ex-OS/2 user).
If VMWare have a clear advantage over Microsoft - and they certainly do at the moment - they won't have any trouble staying in business. Moreover, if Microsoft never develop any clear advantage over them, their existing customers will stay with them (inertia is a massive force in the enterprise and a non-trivial one even in the home user market) and new customers will prefer them because of their "experience" and "high profile". VMWare only really have something to worry about if they fuck it up, like Netscape did.
I can't see the ambiguity. Believe me, I've been trying to think of one
Vista Home:
Ie: it is written to indicate that if you have an existing Vista license that has been assigned to a piece of hardware, you can't reuse that Vista license to install it in a VM (running on the same hardware). But what if you have a Vista license that *isn't* assigned to a piece of hardware ?
Compared to Vista Ultimate and Business:
In other words, with Vista Ultimate and Business, you *can* reuse your Vista license to run more copies of Vista on the same hardware.
The ambiguity comes from the additional legalese and additional functionality apparently offered in the higher-end licenses. Why is the additional wording there if the objective is to simply deny the running on VMs completely ? There is no reason to specify "installed on the licensed device" when a simple "You may not use the software in a Virtualised Environment" would do. Why does Vista Ultimate and Business apparently give you free reign to reuse your license in VMs ?
My (and many others') interpretation is that Vista Business and Ultimate give you "free licenses" to install multiple copies of Vista running in VMs, as long as they're running in VMs on the same hardware your "real" copy of Vista is on. Vista Home says you can only run Vista either on bare metal, or a single VM instance on a single piece of physical hardware.