The reason Konfabulator has gotten quite a buzz is that it's been the first major "widget engine" for OS X, and if I'm not missing anything it's also the first cross-platform one.
I wasn't aware that the new C-fonts will be available for free for everyone - despite looking I haven't found a place to download them (maybe they'll be released when Longhorn is). I applaud Microsoft for using OpenType, and I'm still wondering why OS X has its own dfont format for core fonts - just use.otf, I say.
I believe Apple should take this opportunity and run with it - Longhorn's not due for one and a half years, and Apple has ample time and media attention to be able to show people that they're ahead of Microsoft, most of the time, and most importantly that they're doing stuff that Microsoft would never even think of, such as Exposé. I don't approve of marketing going overboard or being arrogant, but I don't think the things you bring up are being arrogant (spare for filing fixes as features and splitting things up). They're touting Spotlight as the innovation, not improved RAID performance or AIM profiles.
How high is your annual antivirus, firewall and maintenance tax for XP? Microsoft has released two service packs for XP which was released mid-2001; Apple just released their ninth service pack for Panther, released in late 2003.
Detail some major parts Microsoft has added, upgraded or improved for free since XP was released. This should be interesting.
Most of these things have been around for years. Not much in Tiger is actually new technology, but most of it is refined technology, and it's right there in the OS when you boot it up for the first time. That's what the fuss is about. There are lots of minor fixes in those notes, but that's in the interest of disclosure and backing up their claim of 200+ new features, not in the interest of claiming everything groundbreaking.
Minor points: * "emulate Konfabulator" is a misnomer - widget environments have been around for ages, and a lot of them came *before* Konfabulator. * "Safari RSS" is a pen name from the hype machine and so's "iChat AV"; they're named Safari 2.0 and iChat 3.0. * Yes, everyone can obtain new fonts over the internet; big whoop. Why aren't you taking Microsoft to task for hyping their new fonts *more* than Apple's new fonts, for precisely the same reasons? I love new fonts, and I love the new Longhorn fonts in particular, but this reeks of hypocrisy.
(As far as the subject goes, a . release in OS X is much like a major release or at least 0.5 anywhere else - they just want to keep 10.n because OS X is supposed to mean OS 10.)
Nothing like Spotlight OR Dashboard OR Automator as far as order of magnitude goes got added to SP2. SP2 brought a better firewall - so does Tiger. SP2 brought vastly improved security - so does Tiger, to a certain degree (the reason SP2 could deliver vast improvements was because there was a lot of room for it - OS X may not be *all that*, but it's been more secure than XP from day one, for whatever reasons). SP2 brought better handling of wireless network - wireless networks have been way easier to handle on OS X overall.
We haven't even looked into the new stuff, like the new improvements in QuickTime and the addition of Core Image/Video which basically relayers the whole graphical layer part of the OS and allows for much better performance.
SP2 is an example of constantly improving the OS, yes, but so's Tiger, and to a much larger level of magnitude if you look at all the facts. I'm not exactly jumping with joy over having to pay Apple $129. And I'm not exactly the guy that'll take advantage of every single of those 200 features. But I'm liking it for what it is - steady improvement of the OS, so that people won't have to get used to ages of stagnation, be it the way it was with System 7 or the way it is with Windows currently, where security has developed into a feature.
(And yes, Linux is steadily developing too. This discussion is about SP2 vs Tiger.)
Hm, that part in my original post was vague - I meant "nowadays with stuff like Superdrives". I know with reasonable certainty that at least from the iMac and on they had suppliers, especially seeming as how the iMac was the first step in breaking with their own standards and joining the industry, but I'm not sure how it was before that.
The Superdrives nowadays aren't Apple's own brand - they're made by others, like Pioneer. I don't know how it used to be, but I wouldn't be surprised if they used pretty standard parts back then, too. I've never had any stationary optical drive fail on me either (one of the early combined CD walkmen/portable CD drive and another in a stereo set have failed on me, though) but attributing it solely to Apple - if that's what you're doing, it seems a bit unclear - is wrong. Good drives do fail less often, though, so an additional $10 can be well spent when buying parts separately.
Tiger is a great solid update over the board, with lots of new smaller features everywhere, new technologies for developers to play with and a few, but not many, "end user" headline features.
Longhorn is a great solid update over the board, with lots of new smaller features everywhere, new technologies for developers to play with and a few, but not many, "end user" headline features.
Why is Tiger being reckoned a small update, a revision, when the guy spends half the site hyping how big of a release Longhorn will be? Do you have to break bonds with ten year old APIs to be a major new version?
From the article: "Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is, in fact, a minor upgrade to an already well-designed and rock-solid operating system. It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we've had since the first Mac debuted in 1984. That isn't a complaint about Tiger, per se: It's a high-quality release. But Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was arguably a bigger advance over the initial release of XP than Tiger is over Mac OS X 10.3. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality."
First, a sidebar, the "change the way we use computers" ditty has been used to contrast searching (with Spotlight) as opposed to digging through folders (with Finder) as a way to organize stuff. Thurrott seems to misattribute the quote. I can only recall two previous mentions of similar phrases by Jobs - "change the way we use computers" (again) when Exposé was introduced and "change the way we listen to music" about the Shuffle feature (which I'm the first to admit isn't unique to Apple at all), first in a magazine article and then in a keynote. These three things all do pretty much the same thing, in essence: bring order into chaos by taking away choice temporarily; rearranging your windows, files and songs for the moment, to make it easier to deal with.
Back to the quote... How many under-the-hood changes did SP2 have? How many reworkings of the whole how-drawing-works wiring did SP2 go through? SP2 was designed to improve on a few key points, such as the wireless network support, filling of some security holes and consolidating all bug fixes and patches (the last point is common to all SP releases). This is nowhere near Tiger, even if the effect it has on daily use might be more prominent for the user going from XP/XPSP1 to SP2 than the user going from Panther to Tiger. He had better not have any issues with reality, because it seems he's having trouble grasping bits of it in the first place.
It's great that you're so bigoted and insecure in yourself that you take up applying sexual labels and stereotypes to products you have a problem with, because it gives a clear signal to the rest of us that you're unable to review something based on its merits rather than the values you apply to it yourself and that we therefore can safely ignore your bullshit.
Steve Jobs coined the term at the keynote where it was introduced: he said that "The Mac mini is BYODKM; Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard and Mouse". So to start with, it's "DKM", and furthermore, "Bring your own keyboard, video, mouse" wouldn't have made a lot of sense. He didn't use it at all to refer to KVM switches, just to the fact that the Mac mini doesn't ship with display, keyboard nor mouse, and in fact the Mac mini accessory page includes a Belkin KVM switch, clearly using the correct term for the correct purpose.
The networks administrators are either (or many) of the following: just very lazy, unable to fix internal applications that would break, unable to upgrade to versions of boxed or otherwise external apps that would break, unwilling to spend time with this being busy with other stuff or just waiting for the perfect moment to upgrade (which in the vast majority of cases will *never* surface).
The rest of us who aren't network admins either have it installed already, can't install it because our network admin won't let us, won't install it because it'll break something and we can't spend five minutes looking for a patch because that's too much work, or we've never heard of it.
That may be true, but that doesn't mean it should be increasingly hard because of poor, underdeveloped or nonexistent user interfaces but because of a good, enforced security model.
Windows is most certainly more successful as far as creating a *platform* goes. On a plain Linux distro install you can fiddle with far more stuff than you can on a plain Windows install. This is undoubtably good, if fiddling is what you want to do.
But consider the average user, and consider a task as commonplace as installing a program. This can be a bit of a hurdle in Windows, but it's mostly clicking "Next", choosing paths and clicking "Finish" at the end (sometimes interrupted with entering a CD/serial key).
If you were to perform a similar installation on Linux, on the other hand, you'll run into problems, because the architecture and even the culture is so flexible in a lot of ways that it has a whole another set of problems, or problems that exist in Windows but are much worse in Linux. Dependency resolution. Compiling. Configuration for these individual dependencies. Just recently, in the past few years, have *graphical* tools that make this easy come into being.
Until each of these "this should be a platform; this should be easy" problems - of which installing programs is not the only one, but just a damn fine example - have been solved, Windows will remain better as a platform, even given the fact that Linux is arguably better at most things Windows does internally.
As someone that uses Cocoa, Windows XP would only equal NextSTEP '92 with a copy of Visual Studio.NET for a comparable framework.
The interesting thing with desktop OSes is that they have to run to stand still - people expect good, built-in support for the new industry standards that emerge (wireless networking, Bluetooth, USB2, DVD+-R(W)). It's the new features that you built upon them that matters.
Your $130 is going to buy you updates to a heap of the applications included with the OS, updates to the core of the OS (kernel and frameworks), and increased performance. I wouldn't call any of it useless, even if there's no immediate OMG factor here unless you're a developer or interested in search or interested in lots of improvements all over, even if they're minor, or own a Konfabulator license and don't mind performance.
However, if you decide to go nuts over how there's currently no real-world application using a technology that formally debuts in an OS that's only going to get released in 17 days and claim that as the penultimate piece of evidence that it's crap, you're downright ignorant or trying to be deliberately misleading.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/. Here you go. Let me know when you've gotten through all those links on the right side. I think there's something you're going to like, unless you're trying very hard not to. Wether it'll be worth $130 is of course up to you, but I don't think everything can be conveniently swept aside as "pointless eye candy".
Slashdot Mirror
What happened to the following?
Opera: Depend on Opera developers to put in the features you miss.
Firefox: Install it today, or code it yourself if you can.
That's one half of Firefox's success. The other half is being a simple, secure, pared-down, but still functional, browser.
I'm gonna build my own Bender PC case, with blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the PC case.
Great! Let's also withdraw Apache and firewalls. After all, these stupid users had it coming, right?
The reason Konfabulator has gotten quite a buzz is that it's been the first major "widget engine" for OS X, and if I'm not missing anything it's also the first cross-platform one.
.otf, I say.
I wasn't aware that the new C-fonts will be available for free for everyone - despite looking I haven't found a place to download them (maybe they'll be released when Longhorn is). I applaud Microsoft for using OpenType, and I'm still wondering why OS X has its own dfont format for core fonts - just use
I believe Apple should take this opportunity and run with it - Longhorn's not due for one and a half years, and Apple has ample time and media attention to be able to show people that they're ahead of Microsoft, most of the time, and most importantly that they're doing stuff that Microsoft would never even think of, such as Exposé. I don't approve of marketing going overboard or being arrogant, but I don't think the things you bring up are being arrogant (spare for filing fixes as features and splitting things up). They're touting Spotlight as the innovation, not improved RAID performance or AIM profiles.
How high is your annual antivirus, firewall and maintenance tax for XP? Microsoft has released two service packs for XP which was released mid-2001; Apple just released their ninth service pack for Panther, released in late 2003.
Detail some major parts Microsoft has added, upgraded or improved for free since XP was released. This should be interesting.
Agreed. 10.2 was the first half decent version.
Most of these things have been around for years. Not much in Tiger is actually new technology, but most of it is refined technology, and it's right there in the OS when you boot it up for the first time. That's what the fuss is about. There are lots of minor fixes in those notes, but that's in the interest of disclosure and backing up their claim of 200+ new features, not in the interest of claiming everything groundbreaking.
Minor points:
* "emulate Konfabulator" is a misnomer - widget environments have been around for ages, and a lot of them came *before* Konfabulator.
* "Safari RSS" is a pen name from the hype machine and so's "iChat AV"; they're named Safari 2.0 and iChat 3.0.
* Yes, everyone can obtain new fonts over the internet; big whoop. Why aren't you taking Microsoft to task for hyping their new fonts *more* than Apple's new fonts, for precisely the same reasons? I love new fonts, and I love the new Longhorn fonts in particular, but this reeks of hypocrisy.
(As far as the subject goes, a . release in OS X is much like a major release or at least 0.5 anywhere else - they just want to keep 10.n because OS X is supposed to mean OS 10.)
Nothing like Spotlight OR Dashboard OR Automator as far as order of magnitude goes got added to SP2. SP2 brought a better firewall - so does Tiger. SP2 brought vastly improved security - so does Tiger, to a certain degree (the reason SP2 could deliver vast improvements was because there was a lot of room for it - OS X may not be *all that*, but it's been more secure than XP from day one, for whatever reasons). SP2 brought better handling of wireless network - wireless networks have been way easier to handle on OS X overall.
We haven't even looked into the new stuff, like the new improvements in QuickTime and the addition of Core Image/Video which basically relayers the whole graphical layer part of the OS and allows for much better performance.
SP2 is an example of constantly improving the OS, yes, but so's Tiger, and to a much larger level of magnitude if you look at all the facts. I'm not exactly jumping with joy over having to pay Apple $129. And I'm not exactly the guy that'll take advantage of every single of those 200 features. But I'm liking it for what it is - steady improvement of the OS, so that people won't have to get used to ages of stagnation, be it the way it was with System 7 or the way it is with Windows currently, where security has developed into a feature.
(And yes, Linux is steadily developing too. This discussion is about SP2 vs Tiger.)
Hm, that part in my original post was vague - I meant "nowadays with stuff like Superdrives". I know with reasonable certainty that at least from the iMac and on they had suppliers, especially seeming as how the iMac was the first step in breaking with their own standards and joining the industry, but I'm not sure how it was before that.
The Superdrives nowadays aren't Apple's own brand - they're made by others, like Pioneer. I don't know how it used to be, but I wouldn't be surprised if they used pretty standard parts back then, too. I've never had any stationary optical drive fail on me either (one of the early combined CD walkmen/portable CD drive and another in a stereo set have failed on me, though) but attributing it solely to Apple - if that's what you're doing, it seems a bit unclear - is wrong. Good drives do fail less often, though, so an additional $10 can be well spent when buying parts separately.
There's your answer, fishbulb.
Depends on what problem you're trying to solve.
Tiger is a great solid update over the board, with lots of new smaller features everywhere, new technologies for developers to play with and a few, but not many, "end user" headline features.
Longhorn is a great solid update over the board, with lots of new smaller features everywhere, new technologies for developers to play with and a few, but not many, "end user" headline features.
Why is Tiger being reckoned a small update, a revision, when the guy spends half the site hyping how big of a release Longhorn will be? Do you have to break bonds with ten year old APIs to be a major new version?
From the article: "Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is, in fact, a minor upgrade to an already well-designed and rock-solid operating system. It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we've had since the first Mac debuted in 1984. That isn't a complaint about Tiger, per se: It's a high-quality release. But Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was arguably a bigger advance over the initial release of XP than Tiger is over Mac OS X 10.3. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality."
First, a sidebar, the "change the way we use computers" ditty has been used to contrast searching (with Spotlight) as opposed to digging through folders (with Finder) as a way to organize stuff. Thurrott seems to misattribute the quote. I can only recall two previous mentions of similar phrases by Jobs - "change the way we use computers" (again) when Exposé was introduced and "change the way we listen to music" about the Shuffle feature (which I'm the first to admit isn't unique to Apple at all), first in a magazine article and then in a keynote. These three things all do pretty much the same thing, in essence: bring order into chaos by taking away choice temporarily; rearranging your windows, files and songs for the moment, to make it easier to deal with.
Back to the quote... How many under-the-hood changes did SP2 have? How many reworkings of the whole how-drawing-works wiring did SP2 go through? SP2 was designed to improve on a few key points, such as the wireless network support, filling of some security holes and consolidating all bug fixes and patches (the last point is common to all SP releases). This is nowhere near Tiger, even if the effect it has on daily use might be more prominent for the user going from XP/XPSP1 to SP2 than the user going from Panther to Tiger. He had better not have any issues with reality, because it seems he's having trouble grasping bits of it in the first place.
I personally NEVER make generalisations, and I'm convinced everyone else here doesn't either.
Good point, although I've personally have fixed all computers where I've installed SP2 for other people and not wrecked them - but that's just me.
It's great that you're so bigoted and insecure in yourself that you take up applying sexual labels and stereotypes to products you have a problem with, because it gives a clear signal to the rest of us that you're unable to review something based on its merits rather than the values you apply to it yourself and that we therefore can safely ignore your bullshit.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
Steve Jobs coined the term at the keynote where it was introduced: he said that "The Mac mini is BYODKM; Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard and Mouse". So to start with, it's "DKM", and furthermore, "Bring your own keyboard, video, mouse" wouldn't have made a lot of sense. He didn't use it at all to refer to KVM switches, just to the fact that the Mac mini doesn't ship with display, keyboard nor mouse, and in fact the Mac mini accessory page includes a Belkin KVM switch, clearly using the correct term for the correct purpose.
The networks administrators are either (or many) of the following: just very lazy, unable to fix internal applications that would break, unable to upgrade to versions of boxed or otherwise external apps that would break, unwilling to spend time with this being busy with other stuff or just waiting for the perfect moment to upgrade (which in the vast majority of cases will *never* surface).
The rest of us who aren't network admins either have it installed already, can't install it because our network admin won't let us, won't install it because it'll break something and we can't spend five minutes looking for a patch because that's too much work, or we've never heard of it.
It's a great way to ensure that IE will never support playing DVDs, for one thing.
That may be true, but that doesn't mean it should be increasingly hard because of poor, underdeveloped or nonexistent user interfaces but because of a good, enforced security model.
Windows is most certainly more successful as far as creating a *platform* goes. On a plain Linux distro install you can fiddle with far more stuff than you can on a plain Windows install. This is undoubtably good, if fiddling is what you want to do.
But consider the average user, and consider a task as commonplace as installing a program. This can be a bit of a hurdle in Windows, but it's mostly clicking "Next", choosing paths and clicking "Finish" at the end (sometimes interrupted with entering a CD/serial key).
If you were to perform a similar installation on Linux, on the other hand, you'll run into problems, because the architecture and even the culture is so flexible in a lot of ways that it has a whole another set of problems, or problems that exist in Windows but are much worse in Linux. Dependency resolution. Compiling. Configuration for these individual dependencies. Just recently, in the past few years, have *graphical* tools that make this easy come into being.
Until each of these "this should be a platform; this should be easy" problems - of which installing programs is not the only one, but just a damn fine example - have been solved, Windows will remain better as a platform, even given the fact that Linux is arguably better at most things Windows does internally.
As someone that uses Cocoa, Windows XP would only equal NextSTEP '92 with a copy of Visual Studio .NET for a comparable framework.
The interesting thing with desktop OSes is that they have to run to stand still - people expect good, built-in support for the new industry standards that emerge (wireless networking, Bluetooth, USB2, DVD+-R(W)). It's the new features that you built upon them that matters.
Your $130 is going to buy you updates to a heap of the applications included with the OS, updates to the core of the OS (kernel and frameworks), and increased performance. I wouldn't call any of it useless, even if there's no immediate OMG factor here unless you're a developer or interested in search or interested in lots of improvements all over, even if they're minor, or own a Konfabulator license and don't mind performance.
However, if you decide to go nuts over how there's currently no real-world application using a technology that formally debuts in an OS that's only going to get released in 17 days and claim that as the penultimate piece of evidence that it's crap, you're downright ignorant or trying to be deliberately misleading.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/. Here you go. Let me know when you've gotten through all those links on the right side. I think there's something you're going to like, unless you're trying very hard not to. Wether it'll be worth $130 is of course up to you, but I don't think everything can be conveniently swept aside as "pointless eye candy".
Maybe people figure that they, for one, would welcome their new robotic jockey overlords.
I think it's the Mon Calamari dance. :P