I think Apple has learned that if it announces too many things at once then the press tends to ignore well over half of it. Apple has begun holding more special events so it can release information in more press friendly amounts. I'd say a handheld touchscreen version of Mac OS X is a pretty freaking big OS X announcement though.
LOL... Microsoft shipped disabled indexed search as part of their operating system in 2000. Apple shipped enabled indexed search as part of their operating system in 1998. Those are the facts to get straight.
Vaporware bullshit that never shipped just doesn't count. Not Cairo or WinFS or Copeland or Pink or whatever. Vista did not beat MacOS to the market with indexed search. Microsoft will offer an enabled version of indexed search suitable for normal users next year in Windows Vista. Apple's been shipping it since 1998 as Sherlock and for the last couple of years as Spotlight.
Internet Information Server's Index Server was indeed the basis of indexed search in both Windows 2000 and Windows XP. You are right when you say that it was disabled by default. Search in Windows Vista was supposed to be based on WinFS but is in fact based on code from a company MSN bought.
Since Windows 2000's disabled version of indexed search shipped a couple of years after Mac OS 8.5, I'll stand by my assertion that indexed search of file contents and metadata was a feature that was a shipping part of Mac OS long before it was demoed as a vaporware feature of the WinFS in Longhorn.
I don't really see a whole lot of difference between the search features of Sherlock and the search features of Spotlight or Windows Search. What features are in Windows Vista's Windows Search that were not already shipped by Apple as part of MacOS 8.5 in 1998?
After some brainstorming I've come up with 'search as you type', but that has been a shipping feature of iTunes since it's first version in 2001. It's also been a shipping feature in Apple's spotlight for a couple of years now... hardly a Microsoft first.
Windows Search lets you search the contents of e-mail as does Spotlight, but Apple's Cyberdog also did full indexed searches on email back in 1996. A full two years before Sherlock shipped. (FYI - Cyberdog also used the Apple Advanced Technology Group's V-Twin indexing and search engine just as Sherlock did later.)
Here's an image of Sherlock getting ready to preform a custom search. Notice that it is set to search file metadata such as the contents of the 'comments' field of the files properties. So we have a full indexed search engine shipping as part of the OS and enabled. It searched files and file metadata. What am I missing?
Windows 95 could search the contents of documents, but not against an index. Each time you did a search it would slooooowly search the contents of documents one at a time. Indexed searching first appeared from Microsoft as part of Internet Information Server, not as part of the OS.
One thing I'm tired of in the Windows Vista/Mac OSX comparisons is the claim that indexed search was a Vista feature first. I'm afraid Mac OS has featured Indexed search since Mac OS 8.5 was released in 1998 with Sherlock. Sherlock was based on the Apple Advanced Technology Group's V-Twin search engine. Sherlock did a full index of text in documents on all hard drives and allowed users to search on document contents before Longhorn was even a code name.
Now, Microsoft did promise to have a database file system with search way back in the Cairo dark ages. Cairo never shipped. They promised it again for Windows Longhorn. But they never shipped WinFS did they? The search feature in the final version of Windows Vista is from a little company that Microsoft bought so they would have some kind of desktop search to compete with Google's. Well, actually MSN bought them.
Vista did not have full indexed search before MacOS since this has been a shipping feature for Apple since 1998!
Where is the drop they are talking about? Q3 of 2006 saw a 2 million unit rise over Q3 of 2005. If that's a horrible drop in sales, than every company will be wanting one. Every single quarter a version of the iPod has been on the market has shown higher sales than that same quarter in the previous year.
The very slight drop in units sold from the second quarter of 2006 versus the third quarter of 2006 is easily explained by people knowing the iPod is due for a product refresh and holding off on their purchase.
That sound lets you know your hardware has done the Mac equivilent of a POST. (Power On Self Test) PC Hardware beeps to let you know it has done it's POST too. Although you can set a start up sound in MacOS to let you know the OS has booted, one is definitely not forced upon you.
If by "But the account very much exists, and is used" you mean 'although nobody can log in as the root user by default, there are processes that have the same level of access a root user would have'...
Lord, no wonder people think all Mac users are pricks.
Mac OSX does not have a root account enabled by default. Mac OSX Server, on the other hand, does. The root account on non-server versions can be enabled by the user, but having it enabled reduces security and apple warns about this on the webpage that explains how to enable root.
About the root user
The user named "root" is a special user in UNIX-style operating systems that has read and write privileges to all areas of the file system.
The root user should only be used for specific administration or monitoring tasks. After completing a task as the root user, you should log out of Mac OS X and log back in using a normal or administrator account. You should disable root access if you do not use it often.
Warning
1. Only the owner of a computer or its designated administrator(s) should have an administrator account or the root password.
2. Any user with an administrator account can become the root user or reset the root password.
3. A root password should be difficult to guess, containing both numbers and letters within the first eight characters.
4. A root user has the ability to read other users' files.
5. The root user has the ability to relocate or remove required system files and to introduce new files in locations that are protected from other users.
My 256 Kbit DSL connection is fifty bucks a month. That's certainly not cheap either! The phone company here rips you off, but they are the only game in town. There is no other local broadband choice (If 256 Kbits a second can even be considered broadband.) I could go with Hughes Net, but then I can't get my Warcraft fix.
As of the year 2000 census the city of San Francisco had 329,700 households. Let's take the worst case and say the wifi project costs eight million in initial costs. $8,000,000.00 divided by 329,700 households = 24.26 dollars per household.
Let's round it up to twenty five dollars and realize what a bargain price that is! For less than a household usually pays for one month of service it is possible to roll out the infrastructure to support all the households in the city. Of course, you have a reoccuring monthly cost after that for the bandwidth the households will be using.
Within ten years they expect an additional seven million dollars in costs, bringing the total to fifteen million. Gee, how horrible to have to pay another 25 bucks or so per household within ten years for this service. It's past time for the cities in America to start providing low or no cost bandwidth as a service just as we have low cost water and sewage service. The ISP's have overcharged for their services for long enough.
MS is definitely adopting Apple's mindset of "get it out the door and release a better version a year or so later".
Don't you have to manage to get Vista out the door first to accomplish this? How long did it take MS to even get SP2 for XP out the door? If there isn't a problem at MS why did they have to throw out years of code as unusable and start development over again?
Is there anyone left who does not think that Windows Vista is a big long drawn out trainwreck. A project that has to be delayed over and over and over and over. Compare this to the development of the OS they copy. Apple has shipped product over and over.
If you can't manage to ship one of the two products you make all your money on, what does that say about the management of Microsoft?
I'm not talking about buying a company. I'm talking about not allowing the company you bought to sell the other versions of the game they wrote. Bungie was producing Mac only games for quite a while before they went cross platform. Microsoft bought them for Halo and refused to let them release Halo for other platforms. That is manipulating the market.
Gee, I saw recently that Google's market share for search is up again and so is Apple's share in mp3 players. Firefox has a climbing share in the web browser market. Microsoft can't dominate every market it enters. As a matter of fact, here lately they've been getting their ass kicked a lot. Does anyone think the original xbox would have sold near that many units if MS hadn't bought Bungie and not allowed them to ship for Mac and PC at the same time as they had planned? Instead we had a very cool game that would only play on xbox. The only way MS wins is by manipulating the free and open markets.
It's off by default if your GPU can't cope, but you can edit a 'registry entry' (on a mac they are in text files) and turn it on. If changing a 'no' to a 'yes' in a text file turns it on, it shipped in the OS.
Running Windows programs on a Mac is already easy. Parallels makes a virtual machine that is winning praise while still in beta from publications like Businessweek and Computerworld. You can download it free while it's in beta, but the full retail version is only going to be fifty bucks. Definitely much more affordable than Connectix/Microsoft's VirtualPC. Since it takes advantage of Intel's Virtualization Technology, you can run your favorite 'other OS' inside MacOSX and not be grey before that other OS boots.
I doubt Apple is going to bother trying to reinvent Wine inside it's OS. There has been a plan to make a foreign set of API's a new part of an OS for many years, however.
Back in the days after Steve Job's Next bought Apple for -$400 million dollars, there was talk of Cocoa based programs running on top of Windows. Apple called this idea Yellow Box for Windows. Rumors have been spreading that Yellow Box for Windows is being discussed again.
"Apple's emphasis in the 10.5 era will be on resurrecting 'Yellow Box for Windows,' a set of Cocoa (and potentially also Carbon) API's for Windows that would allow Universal Binary applications to run on Windows with a mere 150MB software package installation. And best of all, there is no extra work to be done on the developer's part to get fully native, rock-solid stable performance from their Xcode-developed Universal applications on Windows!"
"Now perhaps with the next version of OS X, there will be feature parity, but as of yet nothing's been announced except "Quartz Extreme 2D" which turned out to be vaporware."
How is something that shipped in the last version of the OS vaporware?
Apple started indexing the hard drive and allowing search of document contents long before OSX shipped. Apple's V-Twin indexing and search engine was made a part of the OS back in 1998 as part of Mac OS 8.5. Since indexed searching has been a part of the shipping OS since 1998 I think it's safe to say Microsoft didn't invent it.
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I think Apple has learned that if it announces too many things at once then the press tends to ignore well over half of it. Apple has begun holding more special events so it can release information in more press friendly amounts. I'd say a handheld touchscreen version of Mac OS X is a pretty freaking big OS X announcement though.
Have we forgotten that it is now legal in the US to unlock cellphones for use with any carrier?
LOL... Microsoft shipped disabled indexed search as part of their operating system in 2000. Apple shipped enabled indexed search as part of their operating system in 1998. Those are the facts to get straight.
Vaporware bullshit that never shipped just doesn't count. Not Cairo or WinFS or Copeland or Pink or whatever. Vista did not beat MacOS to the market with indexed search. Microsoft will offer an enabled version of indexed search suitable for normal users next year in Windows Vista. Apple's been shipping it since 1998 as Sherlock and for the last couple of years as Spotlight.
Internet Information Server's Index Server was indeed the basis of indexed search in both Windows 2000 and Windows XP. You are right when you say that it was disabled by default. Search in Windows Vista was supposed to be based on WinFS but is in fact based on code from a company MSN bought.
Since Windows 2000's disabled version of indexed search shipped a couple of years after Mac OS 8.5, I'll stand by my assertion that indexed search of file contents and metadata was a feature that was a shipping part of Mac OS long before it was demoed as a vaporware feature of the WinFS in Longhorn.
I don't really see a whole lot of difference between the search features of Sherlock and the search features of Spotlight or Windows Search. What features are in Windows Vista's Windows Search that were not already shipped by Apple as part of MacOS 8.5 in 1998?
After some brainstorming I've come up with 'search as you type', but that has been a shipping feature of iTunes since it's first version in 2001. It's also been a shipping feature in Apple's spotlight for a couple of years now... hardly a Microsoft first.
Windows Search lets you search the contents of e-mail as does Spotlight, but Apple's Cyberdog also did full indexed searches on email back in 1996. A full two years before Sherlock shipped. (FYI - Cyberdog also used the Apple Advanced Technology Group's V-Twin indexing and search engine just as Sherlock did later.)
Here's an image of Sherlock getting ready to preform a custom search. Notice that it is set to search file metadata such as the contents of the 'comments' field of the files properties. So we have a full indexed search engine shipping as part of the OS and enabled. It searched files and file metadata. What am I missing?
Windows 95 could search the contents of documents, but not against an index. Each time you did a search it would slooooowly search the contents of documents one at a time. Indexed searching first appeared from Microsoft as part of Internet Information Server, not as part of the OS.
One thing I'm tired of in the Windows Vista/Mac OSX comparisons is the claim that indexed search was a Vista feature first. I'm afraid Mac OS has featured Indexed search since Mac OS 8.5 was released in 1998 with Sherlock. Sherlock was based on the Apple Advanced Technology Group's V-Twin search engine. Sherlock did a full index of text in documents on all hard drives and allowed users to search on document contents before Longhorn was even a code name.
Now, Microsoft did promise to have a database file system with search way back in the Cairo dark ages. Cairo never shipped. They promised it again for Windows Longhorn. But they never shipped WinFS did they? The search feature in the final version of Windows Vista is from a little company that Microsoft bought so they would have some kind of desktop search to compete with Google's. Well, actually MSN bought them.
Vista did not have full indexed search before MacOS since this has been a shipping feature for Apple since 1998!
Mac OS 8.5 with Sherlock
You've seen the bullshit FUD, now lets look at the actual sales numbers.
Q4 03: 336,000
Q1 04: 733,000 (holiday quarter)
Q2 04: 807,000
Q3 04: 860,000
Q4 04: 2,016,000
Q1 05: 4,580,000 (holiday quarter)
Q2 05: 5,311,000
Q3 05: 6,155,000
Q4 05: 6,451,000
Q1 06: 14,043,000 (holiday quarter)
Q2 06: 8,526,000
Q3 06: 8,111,000
Where is the drop they are talking about? Q3 of 2006 saw a 2 million unit rise over Q3 of 2005. If that's a horrible drop in sales, than every company will be wanting one. Every single quarter a version of the iPod has been on the market has shown higher sales than that same quarter in the previous year.
The very slight drop in units sold from the second quarter of 2006 versus the third quarter of 2006 is easily explained by people knowing the iPod is due for a product refresh and holding off on their purchase.
You can get a case to hold the mobo and a flat panel screen with a built in webcam for 200 bucks?? Where?
You know you seriously love a keyboard when you start trying to figure out how to hook it up to Macs that don't even have Apple Desktop Bus ports...
That sound lets you know your hardware has done the Mac equivilent of a POST. (Power On Self Test) PC Hardware beeps to let you know it has done it's POST too. Although you can set a start up sound in MacOS to let you know the OS has booted, one is definitely not forced upon you.
Why is it that so much of Microsoft's 'innovation' seems to involve removing customer choice?
If by "But the account very much exists, and is used" you mean 'although nobody can log in as the root user by default, there are processes that have the same level of access a root user would have'...
Lord, no wonder people think all Mac users are pricks.
Mac OSX does not have a root account enabled by default. Mac OSX Server, on the other hand, does. The root account on non-server versions can be enabled by the user, but having it enabled reduces security and apple warns about this on the webpage that explains how to enable root.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=10
My 256 Kbit DSL connection is fifty bucks a month. That's certainly not cheap either! The phone company here rips you off, but they are the only game in town. There is no other local broadband choice (If 256 Kbits a second can even be considered broadband.) I could go with Hughes Net, but then I can't get my Warcraft fix.
As of the year 2000 census the city of San Francisco had 329,700 households. Let's take the worst case and say the wifi project costs eight million in initial costs. $8,000,000.00 divided by 329,700 households = 24.26 dollars per household.
Let's round it up to twenty five dollars and realize what a bargain price that is! For less than a household usually pays for one month of service it is possible to roll out the infrastructure to support all the households in the city. Of course, you have a reoccuring monthly cost after that for the bandwidth the households will be using.
Within ten years they expect an additional seven million dollars in costs, bringing the total to fifteen million. Gee, how horrible to have to pay another 25 bucks or so per household within ten years for this service. It's past time for the cities in America to start providing low or no cost bandwidth as a service just as we have low cost water and sewage service. The ISP's have overcharged for their services for long enough.
MS is definitely adopting Apple's mindset of "get it out the door and release a better version a year or so later".
Don't you have to manage to get Vista out the door first to accomplish this? How long did it take MS to even get SP2 for XP out the door? If there isn't a problem at MS why did they have to throw out years of code as unusable and start development over again?
Is there anyone left who does not think that Windows Vista is a big long drawn out trainwreck. A project that has to be delayed over and over and over and over. Compare this to the development of the OS they copy. Apple has shipped product over and over.
If you can't manage to ship one of the two products you make all your money on, what does that say about the management of Microsoft?
I'm not talking about buying a company. I'm talking about not allowing the company you bought to sell the other versions of the game they wrote. Bungie was producing Mac only games for quite a while before they went cross platform. Microsoft bought them for Halo and refused to let them release Halo for other platforms. That is manipulating the market.
Gee, I saw recently that Google's market share for search is up again and so is Apple's share in mp3 players. Firefox has a climbing share in the web browser market. Microsoft can't dominate every market it enters. As a matter of fact, here lately they've been getting their ass kicked a lot. Does anyone think the original xbox would have sold near that many units if MS hadn't bought Bungie and not allowed them to ship for Mac and PC at the same time as they had planned? Instead we had a very cool game that would only play on xbox. The only way MS wins is by manipulating the free and open markets.
Enjoy your wait for Vista. Noob.
It's off if your GPU doesn't support it. Not vapor.
It's off by default if your GPU can't cope, but you can edit a 'registry entry' (on a mac they are in text files) and turn it on. If changing a 'no' to a 'yes' in a text file turns it on, it shipped in the OS.
Running Windows programs on a Mac is already easy. Parallels makes a virtual machine that is winning praise while still in beta from publications like Businessweek and Computerworld. You can download it free while it's in beta, but the full retail version is only going to be fifty bucks. Definitely much more affordable than Connectix/Microsoft's VirtualPC. Since it takes advantage of Intel's Virtualization Technology, you can run your favorite 'other OS' inside MacOSX and not be grey before that other OS boots.
I doubt Apple is going to bother trying to reinvent Wine inside it's OS. There has been a plan to make a foreign set of API's a new part of an OS for many years, however.
Back in the days after Steve Job's Next bought Apple for -$400 million dollars, there was talk of Cocoa based programs running on top of Windows. Apple called this idea Yellow Box for Windows. Rumors have been spreading that Yellow Box for Windows is being discussed again.
"Apple's emphasis in the 10.5 era will be on resurrecting 'Yellow Box for Windows,' a set of Cocoa (and potentially also Carbon) API's for Windows that would allow Universal Binary applications to run on Windows with a mere 150MB software package installation. And best of all, there is no extra work to be done on the developer's part to get fully native, rock-solid stable performance from their Xcode-developed Universal applications on Windows!"
What is Cocoa?
What is Carbon?
"Now perhaps with the next version of OS X, there will be feature parity, but as of yet nothing's been announced except "Quartz Extreme 2D" which turned out to be vaporware."
/ 14
How is something that shipped in the last version of the OS vaporware?
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
Apple started indexing the hard drive and allowing search of document contents long before OSX shipped. Apple's V-Twin indexing and search engine was made a part of the OS back in 1998 as part of Mac OS 8.5. Since indexed searching has been a part of the shipping OS since 1998 I think it's safe to say Microsoft didn't invent it.