I know this is hard for you to accept, but there's nothing wrong with these Dells. That's just how Windows performs.
There is (or it's the software, which is the more likely alternative). It is _not_ "just how Windows performs".
Mac OS X contains Front Row, which is Media Centre minus the TV stuff. Admittedly, that's a feature less, but at least Front Row isn't such a crappy piece of shit like Media Centre (I own a license to the NT Media Center Edition of Windows - I don't use it anymore, I've replaced it with Ubuntu running MythTV).
Front Row is a poor cousin to Media Centre. (Congratulations on getting MythTV up and running though, it's quite a struggle.)
And no, every copy of Mac OS X is not an upgrade. Yes, you do have to own a Mac to be able to run it, but after buying it, you own to licenses to Mac OS X. Legally, you can use your old copy on another Mac with an even older version of OS X. That's not an upgrade, that's an additional license.
It doesn't matter that you have two licenses. You still can't do anything with them without a machine that doesn't already have MacOS on it. In this, it is identical to a Windows updgrade version.
Well, since you now admit that Microsoft copied stuff from Apple before Vista, the discussion is moot.
Stop lying. I said Vista and OS X *and every other GUI on the planet* share common features.
That makes it obvious that Windows is a knockoff of Apple's system.
Sure. Just as obviously as OS X is a knockoff of Microsoft's system. I mean, they both have some similar high level functionality that looks and acts vaguely the same.
I mean, your argument is that Vista is not a Mac OS knockoff because the most recent version of Windows copied nothing from the most recent version of Mac OS X?
No, *your* argument (and the article's argument) is that Vista is a MacOS knockoff because it supposedly copied things from OS X.
*My* argument is that there's nothing in Vista that could qualify as a "knockoff" of OS X because it's all either a) shared amongst numerous GUIS or applications (menus, windows, search, etc), b) an obvious progression of technology (3D acceleration, live search) or c) only similar in a superficial and meaningless sense (Flip3D and Expose).
Even if it were true - which it is not - it's an absurd argument.
Indeed. The ideas that just because two systems have some vague similarities, one copied the other, and that two developers extremely active in the same field, striving for the same broad goal, could not independently come up with somewhat similar ideas, *are* absurd arguments.
Either way, I don't get the Smalltalk reference. Smalltalk is a programming language. The Alto had no overlapping windows.
You need to do some more research. Smalltalk isn't just a language spec.
And no, I'm not going to give you a detailed list of every feature in Vista which Microsoft took from Apple.
I don't want a detailed list. A few examples will suffice.
By the logic (and examples) presented thus far, OS X is *at least* as much a knockoff of Windows (and other Microsoft software).
(OMG !! They both have mouse pointers !!! And menus !!! And windows !!! And search !!!! THE HUMANITY !!!!)
Yeah, because one of them shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects, while the other one... shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects.
They are completely different task switching paradigms. Not to mention Flip3D is the same task-switching methodology that's been around since Windows 95 (or even 3.x, depending on your point of view), with somewhat updated visuals - hardly a "knockoff". About the only common
Try a PowerPC G5 which came out at the same time as your iMac, it's quite a lot faster despite both having G5 chips.
It certainly is, but that doesn't explain why Windows XP on, say, a ~1Ghz P3 (the computer the iMac replaced) runs noticably better than OS X does on the iMac in question (with 1.5GB RAM), under equivalent workloads.
I am not disputing a G5 PowerMac is faster, I'm pointing out that OS X shouldn't feel relatively sluggish on a 1.9Ghz G5 imac with a gig and a half of RAM.
(I should clarify here that I don't regret buying my mum the iMac in the slightest - it meets her needs quite adequately - but _I_ find it a bit frustrating when I'm visiting and have to use it (especially if I have to use it for remote work and multitask).)
Things beyond that should not be part of (or optional during) the installation of that operating system.
You appear to be advocating the academic definition of "operating system" should be the only one. Given that such a definition would preclude "operating systems" including such basic functionality as shells (GUI, CLI, or otherwise) out of the box, how much of a market do you think there's going to be for such "operating systems" ?
The term "operating system" hasn't meant what you want it to mean in the marketplace for decades (generously assuming it ever has). IE has as much justification for being in a default Windows install as bash does in a default Linux installation. The market has overwhelmingly indicated that it wants its operating systems to include more than a kernel and some hardware drivers as standard. Get over it.
Which may be fine in yor country but in the UK you can be jailed (and people have been) for using undue force in their own homes for attacking burglers.
I'm not suggesting you actually shoot someone. I'm pointing out - tongue in cheek - that if you say something like that, the place will be swarming with cops in minutes.
If that's the only thing you can come up with, I guess you're basically telling me that I'm right: the PC should be faster. The fact that it is not (and I'm not talking a small difference here, I mean that some actions take between 2 (compiling our app) and 10 times (searching through the project in IntelliJ) as long on the PC) pretty much shows that Windows is most definitely not a faster OS than Mac OS X.
If the difference is as significant as you say, clearly the PC is not functioning as it should. Were it mine, I"d try to figure out why.
OTOH, if you do that, you'll have one less thing to complain about...
And when you say "more featureful," you do of course mean "less featureful, and will stop working after being installed twice."
No, I mean more featureful. Media Centre, for example.
As for pricing: "Suggested retail price for full package product, $239.00 USD. Suggested upgrade retail price, $159.00 USD." Last time I checked, Mac OS X (full version) cost US$129.00, and there's even a family pack (5 licenses) for US$199.00. Not that the normal version actually checked for license violations and suddenly stopped working, like Windows is wont to do.
Every retail version of OS X is priced as an upgrade, because you can't legally install it on a machine that isn't already running some version of MacOS.
If Apple ever release a version of OS X for generic PCs, you can validly compare "full version" prices.
Incidentally, the reason Apple don't bother with serial numbers and the like is because their OS need a big Apple hardware dongle to run. Microsoft do not have that luxury.
All of them.
I didn't think you'd be able to come up with anything.
Sorry, but wrong. "Overlapping windows" (to pick one) are not a "vague concept."
It most certainly *is* a vague concept, because it certainly isn't a specification or implementation. "Menus" are, similarly, a "vague concept".
It's something Apple introduced and Microsoft then copied.
Unfortunately for you, PARC beat them both to it by a decade with Smalltalk. Not that overlapping windows would classify as a particularly revolutionary _concept_ in the first place to anyone who had seen two sheets of paper on top of each other (although the implementations probably were).
I also find it rather hard to take anyone seriously who implies Vista is the first version of Windows with overlapping Windows. You *do* remember we're comparing Vista and MacOS _X_, right ?
Nothing wrong with that, it's better for all of us if good ideas are copied, but claiming that Windows isn't a knockoff of the Mac System is just wrong.
Yet you seem unable to come up with any concrete examples of Windows "knocking off" OS X. Curious.
As for "specific features," read Pogue's article.
I've read it. His examples are laughable - either for their own sake (eg: Flip3D and Expose, two utterly different task switching methodologies) - or because the entire technology world would have to consist of nothing except Apple and Microsoft - and you would have to subscribe to the ridiculous notion that two entities extremely active in the same field could not independently come up with the same idea - for them to be considered "knockoffs" of OS X (eg: buttons highlighting as the mouse cursor passes over them).
That's why I said "Mach and BSD".
Which most certainly *is* an immature combination, compared to Windows NT, given its only other notable outing has been NeXT, a platform for which the term "niche" is being generous.
Unfortunately, as we've already established, Windows pretty much destroys that advantage by being slow as a pig:-P
What's this "we" Kemo Sabe ?:)
Your comparisons between a PPC Mac running an old version of OS X continue to be pointless. My claim is that OS X 10.4 is at least as fast as Windows XP sp2 on comparable hardware, not that OS X 10.3 on an old portable G4 is at least as fast as Windows XP sp2 on an old portable X86. This is due to my own experience of having both of these running processor- and disk-intensive tasks right here on my desk. All day long.
I have no idea where you have gotten the impression I am talking about OS X 10.3 from. My iBook runs 10.4 and has since the day it was released (well, earlier than that actually...).
And yes, the G5 is a fast processor, but again, the iMac is hardly to computer to make proper use of it - especially when running poorly optimized software like Thunderbird or Word.
Ah, yes, the old "poorly optimised software" excuse. I was wondering when that would appear. Nevermind that Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app and co. are all just as bad.
I'm interested in why you think the iMac is responsible for slowing down OS X. A G5 iMac, in objective terms, is not a slow piece of hardware.
It's a Precision 670, it has some kind of dual-core Xeon processor. RAM is upgraded to 2 gigs.
As I suspected. We're talking about a Workstation class "PC" roughly equivalent to a Mac Pro. Hardly surprising it cost twice as much as your iMac (what's surprising is that it didn't cost more).
And no, it's not broken. It's a new computer, with a new OS. Everyone here has the same computer. Some have Dell's factory-installed Windows version, others have a shrink-wrap Windows version, and they all run at the same speed. The Dell isn't slow, it's just that the Mac is a lot faster. My guess is it's due to the file system.
My guess is it's due to your imagination.
Sure. Unfortunately, even when comparing upgrades, Mac OS X is cheaper, and since it's not technically an update, you then own two full copies of OS X.
4* US$129 = US$500.
Vista Home Premium (which is more featureful than OS X) upgrade will apparently retail for US$159.
That's just revisionist bullshit.
So which "stolen" features in Vista don't fit that definition ?
Way to disprove my points.
You didn't have any points to disprove. The comparison is specific features Vista "knocked off" from OS X. Not vague concepts that just happen to be similar between half a dozen different GUIs and Vista and have been around for twenty-odd years.
Suggesting Vista "knocked off" things like the desktop and menus from OS X doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Actually, from Unix is probably more likely to be true.
And equally stupid.
Switch arguments often?
No.
I thought we were talking Kernels here. So Windows runs on bigger hardware and for far longer than Mach and BSD?
No, longer than OS X (or NeXT). Do not conflate BSD and OS X. No matter how much Apple's propaganda might suggest otherwise, they are *not* synonymous.
I give you kernel locking: It's better in 10.4 than in previous versions, but still not perfect.
It's about on par with Windows NT4/Linux 2.2. I fully expect 10.5 to bump that up to about Windows 2000/Linux 2.4 levels and 10.6 to pretty much draw even with contemporary Windows and Linux.
Developing and tuning OSes for good scalability and concurrency is *hard*. There's very good reasons it typically takes a vendor 5 - 10 years to do it. Do not expect Apple to be much different in this respect, although they have the distinct advantage today that multiprocessor hardware that would have been considered extremely high-end a decade ago is now easily accessible to even casual consumers, so we should expect them to be on the quicker end of the scale.
However, ACLs are in OS X now.
ACLs aren't just a filesystem thing. (Not to mention NT has had them since 1993.)
Are you going to pretend that palm-tops are PCs (or in fact run "Windows" even if they try to call it that)?
No. In fact, I'm not claiming anything about "PCs" so long as you refuse to define what you mean by the term.
Are you going to pretend that at the time of the anti-trust case Microsoft had already stopped development for all other platforms, half-hearted as they were?
But the beef behind both of them came from outside, IBM and DEC/VMS (via Dave Cutler) respectively.
The "beef" for OS/2 most certainly came, at worst, in equal shares from Microsoft and IBM. Given IBM's general disinterest in the PC market in its early years, it's far more likely Microsoft were the ones doing the pushing. Note that IBM were still paying Microsoft loyalties for their OS/2 code as late as Warp 4.
Regarding NT, are you seriously suggesting that a vendor cannot claim credit for a product the developed, simply because some of their employees may have had prior experience elsewhere ? Because that would certainly mean - by your logic - Apple could not claim credit for OS X.
The mental gymnastics some people will impose on themselves to simply to avoid extending Microsoft even the smallest non-negative thought are truly amazing... I must admit I just can't grasp the mentality behind that sort of bias.
The police for example. If you call 111 (our emergency number) when, for example, somebody has broken into your house, you'll be told that there aren't any officers available, but somebody will be there to see you as soon as possible. Nevermind the fact that your life may be in danger.
The proper response in this situation is say "fine then, I'll shoot him myself" and then hang up.
You'll have cops swarming all over the place quick smart.
The only difference SP2 made to the firewall was enabling it by default.
You seem to be grossly overstating the performance of Windows XP. You can strip a Windows 2K installation to make it run in 256 without major issues, but even 2K should be equipped with 512MB unless you like disk activity to be your constant musical accompaniment.
WTF ? A stripped Windows 2000 install will run happily in *64MB* of RAM and be absolutely flying in 256.
Of course, 512MB is where OS X gets real comfortable, too.
768MB - 1GB.
Many "slowdowns" in OS X are related to the foundations. When I run Linux, I don't expect applications to launch as quickly. And in general, they don't. But once open, the OS schedules things very nicely. The same holds true for OS X.
No they don't. The biggest problem with OS X is the sluggishness switching between, and interacting with, multiple tasks. Launching apps is fine. Copying data around is fine. Background processing of tasks is fine. It's interactive multitasking where OS X falls apart.
While tasks may not feel as initially responsive under OS X, the memory handling is much better, and you can leave lots of applications open without much of a performance penalty.
You seem to have this completely arse about face. OS X's VM has historically been awful, although it's improved in 10.4 at least to the point of acceptable.
Stability-wise, OS X wins hands down. Errant processes can take XP down in a heartbeat. And once the CPU is pegged, try even launching the Task Manager. Then when you get in there, discover that the errant process is registered as a service, and has to be stopped from services.msc. Then discover that services.msc becomes unresponsive when trying to stop the service(s). Now the question is, wait 10 minutes for the machine to respond enough to regain control, or take the chance on rebooting without shutting down properly, going into safe mode, and taking care of the problem. If that means uninstalling something, better hope the uninstaller will work in safe mode. Otherwise, you'd better launch the best available startup entry editor, and disable things from there or from services.
NTFS shares a lot of common structures with IBM's HPFS, from OS/2. This isn't very surprising, because Microsoft have full access to the HPFS source.
Of course they have "full access" to the HPFS source - they wrote it (heck, IBM were still paying Microsoft royalties for HPFS with Warp 4.0).
The similarities between HPFS and NTFS are superficial, at best.
The exact geneology of this misbegotten filesystem is murky, [...]
I suggest "Inside NTFS". It should help you out with that "murkiness" you think exists.
[...] but it would probably not be too inaccurate to say that it's HPFS, chewed a bit by the DEC crew, and then with ACL support crudely nailed to it.
It would be incredibly inaccurate. There's nothing "crude" about NTFS - it was designed from scratch for Windows NT (although late in the NT development cycle) and was extremely advanced for its day.
The earliest I can find of any discussion of Longhorn's "advanced user interface" as part of the roadmap appears to be about 2003 timeframe. Aqua was publicly revealed at Macworld 2000 San Francisco.
The more correct comparison is to Quartz Extreme, which first appeared in 10.2, in mid 2002.
Gee, you have a hard time understanding that Windows is only available for "Intel compatible PCs".
Windows is available for "non-x86 compatible" computers (and was even more so at the time of the antitrust case).
Whether or not you consider these "PCs", I can't say - and given your reluctnace to engage in any meaningful dialogue in this thread, I'm not particularly interested in guessing about it.
My point refers to the statements Microsoft had made during the antitrust hearings regarding the fact that IE was an integral component of Windows and could not be removed.
This is a wholly separate issue from IE being modular from a software engineering perspective.
They've added this kludge because they think one, possibly two of two things...
No, they've added it because it improves performance in all scenarios (although, obviously, lower-end machines will benefit more).
You choose. Either way it's a kludge which just doesn't make any sense any other way.
If ReadyBoost is a "kludge", then so is every other form of caching. You choose.
Your probably is that you continue to work from the incorrect assumption the objective of ReadyBoost is to substitute as system RAM. It is not. ReadyBoost is a way for people to get similar benefits to the new hard disks that incorporate flash, without having to buy them.
So what these gentlemen at Microsoft have is some data on disk that by having just been read or any other reason is deemed as desirable to be cached for faster access. In any sane architecture, you cache to RAM because that's where the orders-of-magnitude-benefit is to be found.
Which is what Windows does.
But when you run out of ram you have to dump data to a storage device, like this USB solution. That is swapping, and these gentleman are swapping their disk cache to disk, which is telling.
No, they're not. You need to do more reading. This rough outline of data flow might help you understand.
With ReadyBoost:
CPU <-> RAM <-> flash disk <-> hard disk
Without ReadyBoost:
CPU <-> RAM <-> hard disk
This design assumes that a multi-gigabyte RAM system is trashing and:
No, it doesn't (and the correct terminology is "thrashing"). It assumes that a USB flash drive provides better performance for small random reads than a hard disk does, and that better performance can be used to speed the overall system.
What these gentlemen at Redmond wished they had written was a performance-aware multi-device swap system.
ReadyBoost is not swapping, nor is its primary purpose to be used in leiu of real RAM. So long as you labour under that incorrect assumption, your conclusions will be similarly incorrect.
Which would have been somewhat praise-worthy, if you ignore the fact that a single dedicated kernel hacker could probably do the same in Linux in a long afternoon.
Well, maybe one of them will be encouraged to spend that afternoon copying ReadyBoost in the near future, then, so Linux can benefit from this as well (which is about the time Slashdotters will start calling it a "cool idea" rather than a "kludge").
Interesting. So do I. In addition to that, I have a very recent 64-Bit Dell under my work desk, and a very recent dual-core iMac (which, by the way, cost half as much as the Dell).
Which would make the Dell roughly twice as fast. Please list the specs to confirm.
The iMac smokes the Dell in just about anything. The most astonishing difference, however, is disk speed. The iMac has a very slow disk, compared to the Dell, but searching through the whole project in IntelliJ takes about a tenth of the time on the iMac. The iMac is faster in pretty much everything: compiling, starting up, Java... Admittedly, the Dell is faster while accessing our SMB network drives.
Sounds like your Dell is broken.
Okay, now that's precious. First, the price of the OS is irrelevant when comparing prices.
No, a comparison of the full retail price of Vista is irrelevant when I'm comparing how much it would cost to buy (or upgrade) an entire computer (actually scratch that, it's flat out wrong). Especially since every retail version of OS X is inherently an upgrade, from a pricing perspective.
Second, not having an upgrade in half a decade is suddenly a feature, since if you don't have upgrades, there's nothing to buy? Are you for real?
if you're trying to compare costs - even pointlessly - they must be compared fairly to be valid. So the Vista cost to compare is an upgrade version, to the sum of the OS X upgrades released since 2001.
So Windows is not a knockoff because it has features which OS X does not have? Does not compute.
If Windows has features OS X does not, how could they have been "knocked off" from OS X ?
Windows is not a "knock off" because all of the things it and OS X has in common are either superficial, common to a whole range of platforms, or blindingly obvious natural progressions of technology.
Yeah, because the whole Desktop ideas, overlapping windows, the menu bar, the whole graphic style and all that recent junk, that's all not meaningful.
1984 called and wants its strawman back.
While I haven't looked into Vista's new graphics layers (and I do welcome Microsoft for finally having copied that, since it'll probably make my job easier eventually), [...]
Saying Microsoft copied its new display system from Apple is like saying Apple copied pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection and SMP support from Microsoft.
Also, if you really think the Vista kernel is more mature than Mach and BSD, you're delusional.
Given that Windows runs on bigger hardware, and has been doing so for far longer, than any version of OS X, provides prima facie evidence of the Windows kernel being both more capable and more mature. This is before even getting into actually comparing things like kernel locking (still very coarse in OS X), async IO (extensively used in NT since day dot), ACLs, etc.
My girlfriend and I both just got new computers. Mine is a 2.0 GHz Core 2 iMac, and hers is a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Dell. Both have 2 GB of RAM. For what it's worth, the Dell (not including its monitor) cost slightly under twice the price of my new Mac.
And it's substantially more powerful, as well.
It's funny that the parent poster brought up his 1 GHz iBook G4, as I own one of those as well. It's a solid machine (and it's treated me exceptionally well, considering how much I beat it up on a daily basis), but keep in mind that those G4s were famously hobbled by an abysmal 133 MHz FSB. (No, a 1 GHz G4 with a 133 MHz FSB is emphatically not twice as fast as a 500 MHz P3, generally speaking).
Yes, it is - probably closer to 2.5x than 2x (the Armada only has a 100Mhz FSB), but I was being generous. (Indeed, if you believe Apple, it would be "up to" 4x as fast.)
A G4 is, clock for clock, about 10% faster than an equivalent P3 in the general case. The G4 in the iBook has twice the L2 cache and 33% higher FSB. I would expect it to be closer to 15% - 20% faster, clock for clock, than the P3 in the Armada. (The iBook has probably also got lower latency SDRAM as well, but I couldn't say for sure.) Saying the iBook is 2x as fast in terms of raw power is actually being conservative (especially if you start taking into account their IO and video subsystems).
I use this comparison because a) it's fresh in my mind as I did it quite recently, b) it's *really* easy to sit the machines next to each other and fire up equivalent tasks on each to compare and c) these sorts of threads are (as this one is) full of people saying how well OS X runs on their 500Mhz G3 iMacs while Windows is t3h suck on their 2Ghz P4.
The parent poster cites the poor performance of OS X on his old iBook G4 as evidence of OS X's general "slowness", but I wonder whether, in reality, the poor performance of some of those PowerPC processors was what forced Apple to fine-tune OS X into the relatively quick system it is today.
This would be a reasonable conclusion if OS X was "relatively quick today". It isn't. Which only exacerbates the relative slowness of older Mac hardware. Any G5 Mac, for example, is an extremely powerful machine in terms of raw power - Windows absolutely flies on comparable PCs - but OS X on, say, my mum's 1.9Ghz G5 iMac as soon as I load it up with a couple of half-dozen-tabbed Safari windows, some Terminals, Thunderbird and some Word docs, starts showing the beachball frequently and is extremely sluggish switching between tasks, or even accessing UI elements (eg: menus, tabs) in the foreground app. Trying to kick off a game without closing most of the other stuff first is an exercise in frustration.
OS X has been "tuned" over the years because it was so abysmally slow to start with. It's improved in leaps and bounds since the 10.0 days, but it's still _relatively_ sluggish.
Looking ahead, OS X 10.5 will include native support for 32-bit applications under the 64-bit operating system. OS X users can avoid the performance hit incurred by the WOW64 emulation layer, needed to run Win32 applications under 64-bit XP or Vista. Perhaps once people start to compare 64-bit Windows with 64-bit Leopard, this old myth about OS X's performance will finally be killed off.
It's not a myth, and the only thing that's going to "kill it off" is if Leopard actually delivers decent performance (I am optimistic that it will, as Apple are hitting about the same relative point of maturity in OS X's development lifecycle Microsoft were at when they released Windows 2000 - I fully expect it to be massively improved internally in terms of scalability and performance, as Windows 2000 was).
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is hard for you to accept, but there's nothing wrong with these Dells. That's just how Windows performs.
There is (or it's the software, which is the more likely alternative). It is _not_ "just how Windows performs".
Mac OS X contains Front Row, which is Media Centre minus the TV stuff. Admittedly, that's a feature less, but at least Front Row isn't such a crappy piece of shit like Media Centre (I own a license to the NT Media Center Edition of Windows - I don't use it anymore, I've replaced it with Ubuntu running MythTV).
Front Row is a poor cousin to Media Centre. (Congratulations on getting MythTV up and running though, it's quite a struggle.)
And no, every copy of Mac OS X is not an upgrade. Yes, you do have to own a Mac to be able to run it, but after buying it, you own to licenses to Mac OS X. Legally, you can use your old copy on another Mac with an even older version of OS X. That's not an upgrade, that's an additional license.
It doesn't matter that you have two licenses. You still can't do anything with them without a machine that doesn't already have MacOS on it. In this, it is identical to a Windows updgrade version.
Well, since you now admit that Microsoft copied stuff from Apple before Vista, the discussion is moot.
Stop lying. I said Vista and OS X *and every other GUI on the planet* share common features.
That makes it obvious that Windows is a knockoff of Apple's system.
Sure. Just as obviously as OS X is a knockoff of Microsoft's system. I mean, they both have some similar high level functionality that looks and acts vaguely the same.
I mean, your argument is that Vista is not a Mac OS knockoff because the most recent version of Windows copied nothing from the most recent version of Mac OS X?
No, *your* argument (and the article's argument) is that Vista is a MacOS knockoff because it supposedly copied things from OS X.
*My* argument is that there's nothing in Vista that could qualify as a "knockoff" of OS X because it's all either a) shared amongst numerous GUIS or applications (menus, windows, search, etc), b) an obvious progression of technology (3D acceleration, live search) or c) only similar in a superficial and meaningless sense (Flip3D and Expose).
Even if it were true - which it is not - it's an absurd argument.
Indeed. The ideas that just because two systems have some vague similarities, one copied the other, and that two developers extremely active in the same field, striving for the same broad goal, could not independently come up with somewhat similar ideas, *are* absurd arguments.
Either way, I don't get the Smalltalk reference. Smalltalk is a programming language. The Alto had no overlapping windows.
You need to do some more research. Smalltalk isn't just a language spec.
And no, I'm not going to give you a detailed list of every feature in Vista which Microsoft took from Apple.
I don't want a detailed list. A few examples will suffice.
By the logic (and examples) presented thus far, OS X is *at least* as much a knockoff of Windows (and other Microsoft software).
(OMG !! They both have mouse pointers !!! And menus !!! And windows !!! And search !!!! THE HUMANITY !!!!)
Yeah, because one of them shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects, while the other one... shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects.
They are completely different task switching paradigms. Not to mention Flip3D is the same task-switching methodology that's been around since Windows 95 (or even 3.x, depending on your point of view), with somewhat updated visuals - hardly a "knockoff". About the only common
Try a PowerPC G5 which came out at the same time as your iMac, it's quite a lot faster despite both having G5 chips.
It certainly is, but that doesn't explain why Windows XP on, say, a ~1Ghz P3 (the computer the iMac replaced) runs noticably better than OS X does on the iMac in question (with 1.5GB RAM), under equivalent workloads.
I am not disputing a G5 PowerMac is faster, I'm pointing out that OS X shouldn't feel relatively sluggish on a 1.9Ghz G5 imac with a gig and a half of RAM.
(I should clarify here that I don't regret buying my mum the iMac in the slightest - it meets her needs quite adequately - but _I_ find it a bit frustrating when I'm visiting and have to use it (especially if I have to use it for remote work and multitask).)
Yeah, because you are an mindless Microsoft fanboy and Troll.
Just like you're a mindless Apple fanboy and Troll ?
Do I have that right? MS do nothing, get slated, do something, get slated from the other direction?
Yes.
"Welcome to Slashdot, you must be new here."
While I understand the basic concept- the frivolous litigation wouldn't be anything like what it is if businesses operated morally to begin with.
Of course it would. Frivolous lawsuits have zero to do with how businesses operate and everything to do with individuals' greed.
Things beyond that should not be part of (or optional during) the installation of that operating system.
You appear to be advocating the academic definition of "operating system" should be the only one. Given that such a definition would preclude "operating systems" including such basic functionality as shells (GUI, CLI, or otherwise) out of the box, how much of a market do you think there's going to be for such "operating systems" ?
The term "operating system" hasn't meant what you want it to mean in the marketplace for decades (generously assuming it ever has). IE has as much justification for being in a default Windows install as bash does in a default Linux installation. The market has overwhelmingly indicated that it wants its operating systems to include more than a kernel and some hardware drivers as standard. Get over it.
Which may be fine in yor country but in the UK you can be jailed (and people have been) for using undue force in their own homes for attacking burglers.
I'm not suggesting you actually shoot someone. I'm pointing out - tongue in cheek - that if you say something like that, the place will be swarming with cops in minutes.
If that's the only thing you can come up with, I guess you're basically telling me that I'm right: the PC should be faster. The fact that it is not (and I'm not talking a small difference here, I mean that some actions take between 2 (compiling our app) and 10 times (searching through the project in IntelliJ) as long on the PC) pretty much shows that Windows is most definitely not a faster OS than Mac OS X.
If the difference is as significant as you say, clearly the PC is not functioning as it should. Were it mine, I"d try to figure out why.
OTOH, if you do that, you'll have one less thing to complain about...
And when you say "more featureful," you do of course mean "less featureful, and will stop working after being installed twice."
No, I mean more featureful. Media Centre, for example.
As for pricing: "Suggested retail price for full package product, $239.00 USD. Suggested upgrade retail price, $159.00 USD." Last time I checked, Mac OS X (full version) cost US$129.00, and there's even a family pack (5 licenses) for US$199.00. Not that the normal version actually checked for license violations and suddenly stopped working, like Windows is wont to do.
Every retail version of OS X is priced as an upgrade, because you can't legally install it on a machine that isn't already running some version of MacOS.
If Apple ever release a version of OS X for generic PCs, you can validly compare "full version" prices.
Incidentally, the reason Apple don't bother with serial numbers and the like is because their OS need a big Apple hardware dongle to run. Microsoft do not have that luxury.
All of them.
I didn't think you'd be able to come up with anything.
Sorry, but wrong. "Overlapping windows" (to pick one) are not a "vague concept."
It most certainly *is* a vague concept, because it certainly isn't a specification or implementation. "Menus" are, similarly, a "vague concept".
It's something Apple introduced and Microsoft then copied.
Unfortunately for you, PARC beat them both to it by a decade with Smalltalk. Not that overlapping windows would classify as a particularly revolutionary _concept_ in the first place to anyone who had seen two sheets of paper on top of each other (although the implementations probably were).
I also find it rather hard to take anyone seriously who implies Vista is the first version of Windows with overlapping Windows. You *do* remember we're comparing Vista and MacOS _X_, right ?
Nothing wrong with that, it's better for all of us if good ideas are copied, but claiming that Windows isn't a knockoff of the Mac System is just wrong.
Yet you seem unable to come up with any concrete examples of Windows "knocking off" OS X. Curious.
As for "specific features," read Pogue's article.
I've read it. His examples are laughable - either for their own sake (eg: Flip3D and Expose, two utterly different task switching methodologies) - or because the entire technology world would have to consist of nothing except Apple and Microsoft - and you would have to subscribe to the ridiculous notion that two entities extremely active in the same field could not independently come up with the same idea - for them to be considered "knockoffs" of OS X (eg: buttons highlighting as the mouse cursor passes over them).
That's why I said "Mach and BSD".
Which most certainly *is* an immature combination, compared to Windows NT, given its only other notable outing has been NeXT, a platform for which the term "niche" is being generous.
Unfortunately, as we've already established, Windows pretty much destroys that advantage by being slow as a pig :-P
What's this "we" Kemo Sabe ? :)
Your comparisons between a PPC Mac running an old version of OS X continue to be pointless. My claim is that OS X 10.4 is at least as fast as Windows XP sp2 on comparable hardware, not that OS X 10.3 on an old portable G4 is at least as fast as Windows XP sp2 on an old portable X86. This is due to my own experience of having both of these running processor- and disk-intensive tasks right here on my desk. All day long.
I have no idea where you have gotten the impression I am talking about OS X 10.3 from. My iBook runs 10.4 and has since the day it was released (well, earlier than that actually...).
And yes, the G5 is a fast processor, but again, the iMac is hardly to computer to make proper use of it - especially when running poorly optimized software like Thunderbird or Word.
Ah, yes, the old "poorly optimised software" excuse. I was wondering when that would appear. Nevermind that Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app and co. are all just as bad.
I'm interested in why you think the iMac is responsible for slowing down OS X. A G5 iMac, in objective terms, is not a slow piece of hardware.
It's a Precision 670, it has some kind of dual-core Xeon processor. RAM is upgraded to 2 gigs.
As I suspected. We're talking about a Workstation class "PC" roughly equivalent to a Mac Pro. Hardly surprising it cost twice as much as your iMac (what's surprising is that it didn't cost more).
And no, it's not broken. It's a new computer, with a new OS. Everyone here has the same computer. Some have Dell's factory-installed Windows version, others have a shrink-wrap Windows version, and they all run at the same speed. The Dell isn't slow, it's just that the Mac is a lot faster. My guess is it's due to the file system.
My guess is it's due to your imagination.
Sure. Unfortunately, even when comparing upgrades, Mac OS X is cheaper, and since it's not technically an update, you then own two full copies of OS X.
4* US$129 = US$500.
Vista Home Premium (which is more featureful than OS X) upgrade will apparently retail for US$159.
That's just revisionist bullshit.
So which "stolen" features in Vista don't fit that definition ?
Way to disprove my points.
You didn't have any points to disprove. The comparison is specific features Vista "knocked off" from OS X. Not vague concepts that just happen to be similar between half a dozen different GUIs and Vista and have been around for twenty-odd years.
Suggesting Vista "knocked off" things like the desktop and menus from OS X doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Actually, from Unix is probably more likely to be true.
And equally stupid.
Switch arguments often?
No.
I thought we were talking Kernels here. So Windows runs on bigger hardware and for far longer than Mach and BSD?
No, longer than OS X (or NeXT). Do not conflate BSD and OS X. No matter how much Apple's propaganda might suggest otherwise, they are *not* synonymous.
I give you kernel locking: It's better in 10.4 than in previous versions, but still not perfect.
It's about on par with Windows NT4/Linux 2.2. I fully expect 10.5 to bump that up to about Windows 2000/Linux 2.4 levels and 10.6 to pretty much draw even with contemporary Windows and Linux.
Developing and tuning OSes for good scalability and concurrency is *hard*. There's very good reasons it typically takes a vendor 5 - 10 years to do it. Do not expect Apple to be much different in this respect, although they have the distinct advantage today that multiprocessor hardware that would have been considered extremely high-end a decade ago is now easily accessible to even casual consumers, so we should expect them to be on the quicker end of the scale.
However, ACLs are in OS X now.
ACLs aren't just a filesystem thing. (Not to mention NT has had them since 1993.)
Are you going to pretend that palm-tops are PCs (or in fact run "Windows" even if they try to call it that)?
No. In fact, I'm not claiming anything about "PCs" so long as you refuse to define what you mean by the term.
Are you going to pretend that at the time of the anti-trust case Microsoft had already stopped development for all other platforms, half-hearted as they were?
You seem to be the only person suggesting that.
But the beef behind both of them came from outside, IBM and DEC/VMS (via Dave Cutler) respectively.
The "beef" for OS/2 most certainly came, at worst, in equal shares from Microsoft and IBM. Given IBM's general disinterest in the PC market in its early years, it's far more likely Microsoft were the ones doing the pushing. Note that IBM were still paying Microsoft loyalties for their OS/2 code as late as Warp 4.
Regarding NT, are you seriously suggesting that a vendor cannot claim credit for a product the developed, simply because some of their employees may have had prior experience elsewhere ? Because that would certainly mean - by your logic - Apple could not claim credit for OS X.
The mental gymnastics some people will impose on themselves to simply to avoid extending Microsoft even the smallest non-negative thought are truly amazing... I must admit I just can't grasp the mentality behind that sort of bias.
The police for example. If you call 111 (our emergency number) when, for example, somebody has broken into your house, you'll be told that there aren't any officers available, but somebody will be there to see you as soon as possible. Nevermind the fact that your life may be in danger.
The proper response in this situation is say "fine then, I'll shoot him myself" and then hang up.
You'll have cops swarming all over the place quick smart.
Let's not forget a decent firewall pre-SP2.
The only difference SP2 made to the firewall was enabling it by default.
You seem to be grossly overstating the performance of Windows XP. You can strip a Windows 2K installation to make it run in 256 without major issues, but even 2K should be equipped with 512MB unless you like disk activity to be your constant musical accompaniment.
WTF ? A stripped Windows 2000 install will run happily in *64MB* of RAM and be absolutely flying in 256.
Of course, 512MB is where OS X gets real comfortable, too.
768MB - 1GB.
Many "slowdowns" in OS X are related to the foundations. When I run Linux, I don't expect applications to launch as quickly. And in general, they don't. But once open, the OS schedules things very nicely. The same holds true for OS X.
No they don't. The biggest problem with OS X is the sluggishness switching between, and interacting with, multiple tasks. Launching apps is fine. Copying data around is fine. Background processing of tasks is fine. It's interactive multitasking where OS X falls apart.
While tasks may not feel as initially responsive under OS X, the memory handling is much better, and you can leave lots of applications open without much of a performance penalty.
You seem to have this completely arse about face. OS X's VM has historically been awful, although it's improved in 10.4 at least to the point of acceptable.
Stability-wise, OS X wins hands down. Errant processes can take XP down in a heartbeat. And once the CPU is pegged, try even launching the Task Manager. Then when you get in there, discover that the errant process is registered as a service, and has to be stopped from services.msc. Then discover that services.msc becomes unresponsive when trying to stop the service(s). Now the question is, wait 10 minutes for the machine to respond enough to regain control, or take the chance on rebooting without shutting down properly, going into safe mode, and taking care of the problem. If that means uninstalling something, better hope the uninstaller will work in safe mode. Otherwise, you'd better launch the best available startup entry editor, and disable things from there or from services.
Pure, unalduterated FUD.
NTFS shares a lot of common structures with IBM's HPFS, from OS/2. This isn't very surprising, because Microsoft have full access to the HPFS source.
Of course they have "full access" to the HPFS source - they wrote it (heck, IBM were still paying Microsoft royalties for HPFS with Warp 4.0).
The similarities between HPFS and NTFS are superficial, at best.
The exact geneology of this misbegotten filesystem is murky, [...]
I suggest "Inside NTFS". It should help you out with that "murkiness" you think exists.
[...] but it would probably not be too inaccurate to say that it's HPFS, chewed a bit by the DEC crew, and then with ACL support crudely nailed to it.
It would be incredibly inaccurate. There's nothing "crude" about NTFS - it was designed from scratch for Windows NT (although late in the NT development cycle) and was extremely advanced for its day.
I can't think of something allowed under NTFS permissions NOT allowed by the chmod range 0000 thru 1777.
Deny (or grant) access to arbitrary users.
Make a distinction between "write" and "delete".
The earliest I can find of any discussion of Longhorn's "advanced user interface" as part of the roadmap appears to be about 2003 timeframe. Aqua was publicly revealed at Macworld 2000 San Francisco.
The more correct comparison is to Quartz Extreme, which first appeared in 10.2, in mid 2002.
I burst out into laughter in the middle of my office. This OS is the most blatant rip-off from Apple that MS has done in years.
Can you think of a way to implement a search functionality well that you *wouoldn't* consider a "blatant rip-off from Apple" ?
OS/2 was an IBM / MS joint venture until MS bailed and used it to form the base for NT.
OS/2 and NT share no code. Heck, they don't even share any basic architectural similarities.
To put it another way, OS/2 was in no way the "base" for NT.
You think it is a coincidence that NT could run OS/2 1.1 software?
It's not a coincidence, but it's going nothing to do with the reasons you think it does.
Gee, you have a hard time understanding that Windows is only available for "Intel compatible PCs".
Windows is available for "non-x86 compatible" computers (and was even more so at the time of the antitrust case).
Whether or not you consider these "PCs", I can't say - and given your reluctnace to engage in any meaningful dialogue in this thread, I'm not particularly interested in guessing about it.
My point refers to the statements Microsoft had made during the antitrust hearings regarding the fact that IE was an integral component of Windows and could not be removed.
This is a wholly separate issue from IE being modular from a software engineering perspective.
They've added this kludge because they think one, possibly two of two things...
No, they've added it because it improves performance in all scenarios (although, obviously, lower-end machines will benefit more).
You choose. Either way it's a kludge which just doesn't make any sense any other way.
If ReadyBoost is a "kludge", then so is every other form of caching. You choose.
Your probably is that you continue to work from the incorrect assumption the objective of ReadyBoost is to substitute as system RAM. It is not. ReadyBoost is a way for people to get similar benefits to the new hard disks that incorporate flash, without having to buy them.
So what these gentlemen at Microsoft have is some data on disk that by having just been read or any other reason is deemed as desirable to be cached for faster access. In any sane architecture, you cache to RAM because that's where the orders-of-magnitude-benefit is to be found.
Which is what Windows does.
But when you run out of ram you have to dump data to a storage device, like this USB solution. That is swapping, and these gentleman are swapping their disk cache to disk, which is telling.
No, they're not. You need to do more reading. This rough outline of data flow might help you understand.
With ReadyBoost:
CPU <-> RAM <-> flash disk <-> hard disk
Without ReadyBoost:
CPU <-> RAM <-> hard disk
This design assumes that a multi-gigabyte RAM system is trashing and:
No, it doesn't (and the correct terminology is "thrashing"). It assumes that a USB flash drive provides better performance for small random reads than a hard disk does, and that better performance can be used to speed the overall system.
What these gentlemen at Redmond wished they had written was a performance-aware multi-device swap system.
ReadyBoost is not swapping, nor is its primary purpose to be used in leiu of real RAM. So long as you labour under that incorrect assumption, your conclusions will be similarly incorrect.
Which would have been somewhat praise-worthy, if you ignore the fact that a single dedicated kernel hacker could probably do the same in Linux in a long afternoon.
Well, maybe one of them will be encouraged to spend that afternoon copying ReadyBoost in the near future, then, so Linux can benefit from this as well (which is about the time Slashdotters will start calling it a "cool idea" rather than a "kludge").
Interesting. So do I. In addition to that, I have a very recent 64-Bit Dell under my work desk, and a very recent dual-core iMac (which, by the way, cost half as much as the Dell).
Which would make the Dell roughly twice as fast. Please list the specs to confirm.
The iMac smokes the Dell in just about anything. The most astonishing difference, however, is disk speed. The iMac has a very slow disk, compared to the Dell, but searching through the whole project in IntelliJ takes about a tenth of the time on the iMac. The iMac is faster in pretty much everything: compiling, starting up, Java... Admittedly, the Dell is faster while accessing our SMB network drives.
Sounds like your Dell is broken.
Okay, now that's precious. First, the price of the OS is irrelevant when comparing prices.
No, a comparison of the full retail price of Vista is irrelevant when I'm comparing how much it would cost to buy (or upgrade) an entire computer (actually scratch that, it's flat out wrong). Especially since every retail version of OS X is inherently an upgrade, from a pricing perspective.
Second, not having an upgrade in half a decade is suddenly a feature, since if you don't have upgrades, there's nothing to buy? Are you for real?
if you're trying to compare costs - even pointlessly - they must be compared fairly to be valid. So the Vista cost to compare is an upgrade version, to the sum of the OS X upgrades released since 2001.
So Windows is not a knockoff because it has features which OS X does not have? Does not compute.
If Windows has features OS X does not, how could they have been "knocked off" from OS X ?
Windows is not a "knock off" because all of the things it and OS X has in common are either superficial, common to a whole range of platforms, or blindingly obvious natural progressions of technology.
Yeah, because the whole Desktop ideas, overlapping windows, the menu bar, the whole graphic style and all that recent junk, that's all not meaningful.
1984 called and wants its strawman back.
While I haven't looked into Vista's new graphics layers (and I do welcome Microsoft for finally having copied that, since it'll probably make my job easier eventually), [...]
Saying Microsoft copied its new display system from Apple is like saying Apple copied pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection and SMP support from Microsoft.
Also, if you really think the Vista kernel is more mature than Mach and BSD, you're delusional.
Given that Windows runs on bigger hardware, and has been doing so for far longer, than any version of OS X, provides prima facie evidence of the Windows kernel being both more capable and more mature. This is before even getting into actually comparing things like kernel locking (still very coarse in OS X), async IO (extensively used in NT since day dot), ACLs, etc.
My girlfriend and I both just got new computers. Mine is a 2.0 GHz Core 2 iMac, and hers is a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Dell. Both have 2 GB of RAM. For what it's worth, the Dell (not including its monitor) cost slightly under twice the price of my new Mac.
And it's substantially more powerful, as well.
It's funny that the parent poster brought up his 1 GHz iBook G4, as I own one of those as well. It's a solid machine (and it's treated me exceptionally well, considering how much I beat it up on a daily basis), but keep in mind that those G4s were famously hobbled by an abysmal 133 MHz FSB. (No, a 1 GHz G4 with a 133 MHz FSB is emphatically not twice as fast as a 500 MHz P3, generally speaking).
Yes, it is - probably closer to 2.5x than 2x (the Armada only has a 100Mhz FSB), but I was being generous. (Indeed, if you believe Apple, it would be "up to" 4x as fast.)
A G4 is, clock for clock, about 10% faster than an equivalent P3 in the general case. The G4 in the iBook has twice the L2 cache and 33% higher FSB. I would expect it to be closer to 15% - 20% faster, clock for clock, than the P3 in the Armada. (The iBook has probably also got lower latency SDRAM as well, but I couldn't say for sure.) Saying the iBook is 2x as fast in terms of raw power is actually being conservative (especially if you start taking into account their IO and video subsystems).
I use this comparison because a) it's fresh in my mind as I did it quite recently, b) it's *really* easy to sit the machines next to each other and fire up equivalent tasks on each to compare and c) these sorts of threads are (as this one is) full of people saying how well OS X runs on their 500Mhz G3 iMacs while Windows is t3h suck on their 2Ghz P4.
The parent poster cites the poor performance of OS X on his old iBook G4 as evidence of OS X's general "slowness", but I wonder whether, in reality, the poor performance of some of those PowerPC processors was what forced Apple to fine-tune OS X into the relatively quick system it is today.
This would be a reasonable conclusion if OS X was "relatively quick today". It isn't. Which only exacerbates the relative slowness of older Mac hardware. Any G5 Mac, for example, is an extremely powerful machine in terms of raw power - Windows absolutely flies on comparable PCs - but OS X on, say, my mum's 1.9Ghz G5 iMac as soon as I load it up with a couple of half-dozen-tabbed Safari windows, some Terminals, Thunderbird and some Word docs, starts showing the beachball frequently and is extremely sluggish switching between tasks, or even accessing UI elements (eg: menus, tabs) in the foreground app. Trying to kick off a game without closing most of the other stuff first is an exercise in frustration.
OS X has been "tuned" over the years because it was so abysmally slow to start with. It's improved in leaps and bounds since the 10.0 days, but it's still _relatively_ sluggish.
Looking ahead, OS X 10.5 will include native support for 32-bit applications under the 64-bit operating system. OS X users can avoid the performance hit incurred by the WOW64 emulation layer, needed to run Win32 applications under 64-bit XP or Vista. Perhaps once people start to compare 64-bit Windows with 64-bit Leopard, this old myth about OS X's performance will finally be killed off.
It's not a myth, and the only thing that's going to "kill it off" is if Leopard actually delivers decent performance (I am optimistic that it will, as Apple are hitting about the same relative point of maturity in OS X's development lifecycle Microsoft were at when they released Windows 2000 - I fully expect it to be massively improved internally in terms of scalability and performance, as Windows 2000 was).