A Look at WWDC 2009 Build of Snow Leopard

[madmaxmedia]

At the end of the day it's all semantics anyway. What matter is what you're actually getting for your money, not what it's called.

I think both Windows and Mac users will with with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, respectively. They are both good updates, and have good pricing. I hate using Vista but was impressed by Windows 7 for the month or so I was using it. But I still prefer OS X in the end and am looking forward to Snow Leopard...

Oh boy, check this Cnet story. I wonder how Apple will respond...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10272259-56.html?tag=mncol

 

[AidenShaw]

At the end of the day it's all semantics anyway. What matter is what you're actually getting for your money, not what it's called.

I agree, but you need tell that to the people who wrote the WWDC keynote with all the potshots at Windows 7.

You reap what you sow....

 

[jegbook]

Are you serious?? The list is huge, i feel as if you are trying to make me write an essay, the list is that big.
Lets get some things clear, the left side of the finder window is complete genius in it's simplicity and elegance. The right side of the window leaves much to be desired.

Widows has a clear address bar in a very intuitive position, where you would expect it consistent to the browser. Minor issue but still worth mentioning.

Windows has space available on drive in a clear graphical and easy to read written size of drive and free space.

Windows shows the how many files are selected and dinamically updates the size of the selected items in a neat little description down at the bottom. Finder only shows how many items are selected and how much space is available. If you select 6 folders in finder, and you get info wanting to find out if they all will fit on your usb pen drive, 6 info windows clutter your screen and you have to manually calculate and add the size of all the folders. Seriously, that is total BS.

...

Intel, don't know if anyone else has mentioned this, but if you Command-Option-i on a selection of items you can get a multiple item Get Info that shows the total size and number of items. This is the Finder's Inspector, which does dynamically update as you select and deselect items throughout a Finder window. My beef with Inspector is that its window does not belong to an application, so Command-w closes your Finder window not the Inspector window and with Expose Inspector completely disappears.

I agree, that Windows Explorer is very nice to navigate having the folder tree on the left and folder items on the right -- and details view is great for seeing pertinent information for all folder contents at the same time. How I wish Finder had a similar view. I do also enjoy the Finder Sidebar and find it interesting that Vista and W7 have incorporated the Sidebar into Windows Explorer, virtually giving the best of both worlds.

Cheers.

 

[krzyglue]

Well if you cut a file, and something happens before you paste it...like Windows crashes, you lose that file. Or, human error - one time I cut a movie file from a folder and before I pasted it, I forgot I had cut it. Then in an e-mail I copied some text and I just realized I lost the movie because I had copied text from the e-mail.

Yeah, maybe it is a pain to copy a file, paste it to another then go back to delete the original - but I'd rather have that, then lose the file in an accident.

That's NOT how it works at all. Windows does NOT delete the original file you cut, until you actually PASTE it. However, once this paste process begins, then I believe data lost can occur. Your movie MUST still be there, unless your HD has issues. I just tested it...

 

[krzyglue]

That is NOT what I said! Please try to read and then re-read my post, then reply. I did not say that - I said it is POSSIBLE that two companies can develop the same idea concurrently - period. And do I think Apple and MS stole the finder option from each other? NO! THAT was what I said.

Please - do not put words in my mouth. Do I think MS stole anything from Apple for W7? Possibly - but it is more likely that they were developing the same or similar technologies concurrently. THAT is what I said. So what if they 'borrow' an idea - that is NOT theft - especially given the different spin each take on the 'borrowed' technology. As was said in the movie 'Pump Up the Volume' - "all the good ideas has been thought-up - so what is the world left with?". The same holds true in the computer and software business as it is a giant incestuous pool of shared genetic material - all the same basic ideas modified and updated with new features here and there - nothing more, nothing less. When is the last time you have actually seen a REVOLUTIONARY computer advancement? Not EVOLUTIONARY advancement but REVOLUTIONARY...

OS X is nothing but a fancy GUI over BSD - although a very, very good GUI with many great advancement and updates - but it is at the core BSD. What is Windows? It still uses technology based on Windows 2.X and 3.X. It still uses arcane DOS commands and overlays - although with many more refinements and updates.

Anyway - please do not put words in my mouth - I can do that quite well for myself - along with all the associated problems that occur when I speak!

D

I will have to respectfully disagree with you here. I think that OSX is much more than a GUI on top of BSD as you have described. Now, I'm no expert at this, but I believe that the everything has changed so much it really isn't recognizable as BSD anymore.

And while for Windows, many of the commands might be similar to DOS, the kernel is completely different. Microsoft has had different kernels: they had the DOS based OSes with 3.1>95>98>ME, with it being stopped at ME. Then there was the NT kernel with NT>2000>XP. Finally, we have the "server" kernel, which is based off NT, but still different with Server 2003>Vista>7.

Yes it is complicated, but this Wiki chart is nice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_Family_Tree.svg

 

[krzyglue]

I think that your argument is silly.

You realize that you're discussing the difference between 0.9999999980 TB and 0.9999999980 TB, right? (In other words, the numbers are the same even when you use 10 decimal places of precision.)

Similarly, one allocation unit is about 0.01% of the size of a 5 MB music file. Again, you'll need lots of decimal places to tell the difference.

And what about file-related meta-data? Currently that overhead is hidden by most systems. If you look at the total size of the files, you'll see that they're smaller than the total space used on the disk. This means that the current listings are already quite inaccurate.

And, to make your case even weaker, isn't the size reported today in binary the actual length of the data in the file, not the allocated size of the file? If any file is shown as anything but even multiples of the 4KiB default allocation block, then it is the actual (decimal) length that's being reported (albeit divided by some power of two to be mis-represented as Kilo or Mega or Giga). Every time you see a 1KiB, 2KiB or 3KiB file - OSX is hiding the "wasted" space in the allocation block. What does it matter if it is hidden in power of 2 or power of 10?

By the way, Windows doesn't use an allocation unit for small files - if the file is small it can be stored entirely with the meta-data, so that your 2KiB rounding error is gone. (For NTFS, the default allocation unit is also 4 KiB.)

I think that it is wrong to misuse a term like Kilo or Giga that is recognized by many international standards bodies, when simply adding a lower-case "i" to the abbreviation brings it into compliance. I think that Apple is doing the right thing to shift to decimal to match the storage and networking and processor people. Let's push to see DIMMs sold in GiB, and caches in MiB, and have truth in labeling.

By the way, did you know that the typical Ethernet packet is 1500 bytes, and 802.11 WiFi uses 2272 byte packets? What does that do to the "computers only know binary" arguments? And what about punched cards - shouldn't they have been 64 or 128 columns instead of 80? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTU_(networking)




No, I do not agree with your point.

Try to install a Windows 95 device driver on any version of NT - you'll find that "the OS communicates with the hardware using the same basic hardware interface" is only true in the sense that "OSX and Vista communicate with the hardware using the same basic hardware interface". Of course they use the same hardware interface - it's hardware!

The networking stacks are quite different as well. Some protocols are shared (CIFS, for example), but the code is very different.

By the way, what do you mean by the term "underlay"? I'm not familiar with that word used as a noun in operating system context, and web searches for '"operating system" underlay' didn't show any technical definition of the term.




Would you not consider that the break from 16-bit DOS and Windows 3.1 to 32-bit Windows NT was a REVOLUTIONARY step for Microsoft? The entire system was replaced with a completely new design that from the very beginning ran on multiple CPU architectures (x86/Alpha/MIPS/N10 initially, then x64/Itanium/SPARC/PowerPC later).

It had a compatibility layer (NTVDM) that was to the user similar to Classic, so that existing programs would run fine. It had a personality layer with a new set of APIs (Win32) that was an extension of the old APIs (again, echoes of Carbon).

The NT operating system doesn't owe anything to any previous Microsoft OS - it started from a clean slate. (Contrast to OSX, which was a port of NextStep with a Mac-like GUI added on.)

Also note that in some ways Windows95 is a descendent of NT - Windows95 implemented NT's Win32 API set on a hybrid 16/32 bit system.

Preach my friend! Dead on on both counts.