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Apple's Newest Snow Leopard (10A314) Shows Steady Improvements
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Safari is running 64 bit in latest seed, (can't remember if it did run 64 bit in previous seed) and is using multi threading to render pages, for example large pictures render part by part now, 8 parts, each rendering independendly etc in an 8 core machine. Like cinebench multi CPU render. I'm not sure if it's about grand central or just some under the hood enhancements to Safari.
iTunes is still 32 bit though.
iTunes is still 32 bit though.
I hate the way people keep moaning on about how similar its going to be to Leopard and not really worth the upgrade, if you actually test the developer releases you'll see basically no 32bit software runs on it at all, so there are some pretty major changes, although funnily PPC software runs quite well. The main thing for me is that Little Snitch doesn't work so I cant continue testing the SL developer seeds at the moment.
Good to see that the 64-bit kexts are being tested. Bodes well for a Aug/Sep release. I imagine that getting the kernel nailed is the first step to layering on Grand Central and everything else up the chain.
Really a new UI can be delivered at WWDC or later and that would give devs a month or two to update their apps appearance and hammer out compatibility.
Really a new UI can be delivered at WWDC or later and that would give devs a month or two to update their apps appearance and hammer out compatibility.
When installing a new OS, you should do the same thing that you do anyway: Use Time Machine to have a backup on an external drive. One day your internal drive will fail. The question is not _if_ it will fail, the question is _when_. That day, you will be lost without a backup.
Installing MacOS X will not intentionally delete anything in your home directory. There is always the possibility of some bug, which is why you should have a backup.
There was a heated discussion a while ago on slashdot about the extfs4 file system and what problems user have with it, and in the middle of that there were two posts about ZFS. One post saying how great and wonderful ZFS is, followed by another post saying that it is only great and wonderful until you actually start using it, and then it doesn't actually work.
We can dream, can't we? If that happened I would purchase Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate Edition for my windows apps and buy OSX, & Final Cut Pro for my Apple fix. I'd move my iTunes & iPhone off of my PC and run it off of OSX where it belongs. I'd install both operating systems on my brand new Dell.
It would be a great day for me.
*wakes up*
Never going to happen.
I'm not interested in Marble unless it will _really_ be resolution independent. Another UI motif where half the apps aren't migrated over to it, is simply pointless. If it were truly resolution independent, that might be another thing entirely.
As far as ZFS goes, I would love to see it enabled on all Macs (not just servers) but it doesn't sound like something Apple is interested in doing. I'm not sure why, unless they feel there is some issues with it. I used it in "beta form" on solaris 4 or 5 years ago, and even then (although being a PITA to set up) there weren't a lot of issues with it once you got it going. And it was so easy to add/remove disks from a storage pool.
I haven't really played with it since then, but I would think that 4 years of open source development would have ironed out the worst of the bugs. I guess it still isn't bootable except on Solaris, but I'm not sure that that is such a big deal anyway. People looking to build a home server could really benefit from ZFS...
As far as ZFS goes, I would love to see it enabled on all Macs (not just servers) but it doesn't sound like something Apple is interested in doing. I'm not sure why, unless they feel there is some issues with it. I used it in "beta form" on solaris 4 or 5 years ago, and even then (although being a PITA to set up) there weren't a lot of issues with it once you got it going. And it was so easy to add/remove disks from a storage pool.
I haven't really played with it since then, but I would think that 4 years of open source development would have ironed out the worst of the bugs. I guess it still isn't bootable except on Solaris, but I'm not sure that that is such a big deal anyway. People looking to build a home server could really benefit from ZFS...
I don't mean to rain on this parade, but an honest question. Ok, and a small rant. Ranting is allowed, isn't it? :: puts on a protective vest ::
Why does everyone seem so welcoming of the amount of time it has taken to make this much progress (ie 'not as buggy') on the same OS, few large changes, and written entirely in Cocoa? Now please, before I am burned at the stake as a heretic, just consider some things. You have one of the most successful software and hardware companies in the world with cash oozing out of all crevices; Grand Central, an idea I'm sure they thought of years ago but officially announced last year; and oh, a marble look. Of course there is more too it, but am I the only person who thinks this is painfully slow development?
I'm know the the arrows have already been lit; lift up your bows and fire away.
Why does everyone seem so welcoming of the amount of time it has taken to make this much progress (ie 'not as buggy') on the same OS, few large changes, and written entirely in Cocoa? Now please, before I am burned at the stake as a heretic, just consider some things. You have one of the most successful software and hardware companies in the world with cash oozing out of all crevices; Grand Central, an idea I'm sure they thought of years ago but officially announced last year; and oh, a marble look. Of course there is more too it, but am I the only person who thinks this is painfully slow development?
I'm know the the arrows have already been lit; lift up your bows and fire away.
About ZFS, the latest snow leopard server build does not support ZFS systems anymore, so ZFS is out of the picture for now. Maybe temporarily.
File Systems
The creation and use of ZFS storage pools and file systems are no longer supported.
IMPORTANT: Before installing Mac OS X Server, you should back up all of your data, as ZFS volumes will be inaccessible following installation.
File Systems
The creation and use of ZFS storage pools and file systems are no longer supported.
IMPORTANT: Before installing Mac OS X Server, you should back up all of your data, as ZFS volumes will be inaccessible following installation.
"Painfully" is subjective. Hell, even "slow" is.Why does everyone seem so welcoming of the amount of time it has taken to make this much progress (ie 'not as buggy') on the same OS, few large changes, and written entirely in Cocoa? Of course there is more too it, but am I the only person who thinks this is painfully slow development?
If they take their time with it, it will work better straight out of the gate. That's why we're "welcoming" with the development time. Some of us don't want it NOW, we want it RIGHT.
And as you said, there is more to it. A LOT more to it.
For end users it will be a very dull demo. Almost all of the new features are said to be internal. What will show are trivial things like what color is used in the frame around a window or one more option added to a pull down menu some place.
How many end users really would want to sit through a demo of the important new features like Grand Central and Open CL. That's the kind of demo where they put Objective C header files up on the screen and talk about how to use the new functions in your code. Great stuff really, and the whole reason to go to a developer's conference but not much use for end users.
This is one OS upgrade that will not be worth buying on release date. The whole purpose of SN is to give developers the tools they need. It will be some time until the developers do make use of the new stuff in SN. I'll wait to buy SN until one of the applications I use needs it.
I'm still wondering how they are going to market this to end users if all they have for them are cosmetic changes to the user interface. Maybe they will charge less than the normal $129.
On the other hand Apple may have ready on SN's release date a new version of their iLife suit or some other software that is ready to go. They could release SN as part of a bigger product release. They are going to have to have some kind of end user visable apps that actually use the new features or they will have a heck of a marketing problem
I believe iTunes is still a Carbon app so they will have to port it over to Cocoa if its going 64 bit. They seem to be porting just about everything in SL over to Cocoa so I'm guessing iTunes will make the jump soon.
I'm getting a little worried about my SR BlackBook's ability to run 64-bit OSX. It's capable (hardware wise), but from the list, it doesn't look like Apple are going to bother writing the new drivers for it.
If that's the case, it is unacceptable. It is certainly possible for Apple to do, given that they made all the hardware. You'd expect a Windows PC bought at the same time to run Windows 7 and probably version 8 as well. I expect my MacBook to run Snow Leopard and probably the next 3 or 4 updates to OSX. Yes, it will not run it all as fast and some hardware-dependent features may be disabled, but if it has the hardware (as it does for 64-bit), I expect it to be used.
This is worrying because Apple don't typically leave machines until later. If they don't start work on it early on, they're more likely to just cut support.
If that's the case, it is unacceptable. It is certainly possible for Apple to do, given that they made all the hardware. You'd expect a Windows PC bought at the same time to run Windows 7 and probably version 8 as well. I expect my MacBook to run Snow Leopard and probably the next 3 or 4 updates to OSX. Yes, it will not run it all as fast and some hardware-dependent features may be disabled, but if it has the hardware (as it does for 64-bit), I expect it to be used.
This is worrying because Apple don't typically leave machines until later. If they don't start work on it early on, they're more likely to just cut support.
I the only person who thinks this is painfully slow development?
I'm know the the arrows have already been lit; lift up your bows and fire away.
On the contrary, under the hood changes are most of the time more time consuming than adding features. Rewrite of the entire code in cocoa is also quite a big job. This is not a minor upgrade. If anything, it's an even major upgrade than Leopard over Tiger.
Yes it will, among all the apps I tried, iTunes was the only 32 bit one. So it seems like they are getting there.
I don't mean to rain on this parade, but an honest question. Ok, and a small rant. Ranting is allowed, isn't it? :: puts on a protective vest ::
Why does everyone seem so welcoming of the amount of time it has taken to make this much progress (ie 'not as buggy') on the same OS, few large changes, and written entirely in Cocoa? Now please, before I am burned at the stake as a heretic, just consider some things. You have one of the most successful software and hardware companies in the world with cash oozing out of all crevices; Grand Central, an idea I'm sure they thought of years ago but officially announced last year; and oh, a marble look. Of course there is more too it, but am I the only person who thinks this is painfully slow development?
I'm know the the arrows have already been lit; lift up your bows and fire away.
The development is slow most likely because the same team that develops OS X for Macs is also working on the OS X for iPhone. It's reasonable to assume that they've split the team with some working on Snow Leopard and some working on the iPhone SDK 3.0. Once the iPhone work is done they can all work towards polishing Snow Leopard and preparing it for release. The fact that they're testing the 64-bit kernel right now is good.
An Aug/Sept delivery is perfect for Apple and consumers because mainstream Nehalem systems will be shipping and we could see late year refresh for iMacs delivering quad core systems which will benefit from Snow Leopard.
Never going to happen.
Damn good thing too. If it did Apple would go out of business because people wouldn't buy Macs, and eventually you'd be stuck running just Windows again. Defeats the entire purpose doesn't it?
--mAc
The one thing Apple will probably demo is Exchange 2007 support, and for Mac users that have Entourage 2008 right now (business users and universities), they'll buy Snow Leopard on that point alone!
What makes you think that? ZFS will be available to everyone. Just like it is right now. Most people aren't smart enough to use it though, That's fine with me. I still get ipfw too.
Yes. As of the last release (10a286?? I forget the build..) there's zpool version 11 which integrates with finder MUCH nicer than what we have on 10.5
I only tried it for about 15 minutes but a couple of the things I noticed were.
a) the root pool isn't mounted at all. kind of strange, Solaris and FreeBSD don't act this way. Apple specific but it works. If you do a zfs list the root pool doesn't even show up. Only datasets created on the pool show up. I can see why Apple would want to do this.
b) Finder doesn't get confused about dataset names and doesn't think every single one of them is a separate volume (wowthx).
Of course zpool version 11 supports case sensitive property so you can have a dataset that is case insensitive and one that is case sensitive and they can share the total space of the pool. FINALLY. **** I wish I had that on 10.5 right now..
I know that like 80% of my posts are me complaining about people who don't know what they're talking about always spewing misinformation but seriously...come on.
You have no personal experience what so ever but you heard something from some random person on a slashdot forum once so it must be true? Forget the Solaris sysadmins who have been using it for years! What the hell do they know? Some biased, idiot, ubuntu user on slashdot claims it doesn't work! It must be true!
We use ZFS on almost all of our machines at work and have for a few years now. We have this cute little 1u running sxce. It used to have four 250gb disks (two two-disk zfs mirrors). Very simple configuration.
So we decided to swap the little 250gb for some 500gb. While the machine was running I replaced all four drives (one by one, slowly letting them rebuild). When it was over I had replaced all disks in a running system without ever shutting it down and grew the FS at the same time without any interruption of services. This includes the root mirror that the os was installed on.
On my 10.5 Mac Pro I have a mirrored zpool of two little 320gb disks. I finally decided that I need more space but I have no money (Thanks IRS!) and I'm not at all concerned about data integrity (I have a fileserver) so I quickly converted my mirror to a stripe
http://loveturtle.net/~turtle/from_mirror_to_stripe.png
Same thing on my FreeBSD fileserver a few months back when I got a couple more 500gb disks I wanted to add.
http://loveturtle.net/~turtle/growing_zpool.png
ZFS seems to work fine for me...But what do I know? I need to start hanging out on slashdot forums and switch to Ubuntu.
1) In the past Apple has charged $129 but with SN there will be few "user facing" new features so we all are wondering if Apple can ask the same $129 price this time.
2) You mean you have not already done that? I'd think if you have data you'd already have multiple backups with at least one copy stored off site. If not you WILL loose it eventually.
I think Apple could demo a lot of stuff to get people excited. Performance is always exciting. Assuming that Final Cut Studio has been announced by WWDC I'd love to see a Snow Leopard build of FCS3 running and leveraging Grand Central and OpenGL/OpenCL and using 8GB of RAM.
I'd love to see Cocoa Touch apps for the desktop and Location Aware services for Macbook/Pro
I'd love to see a Quicktime X that plays back video content effortlessly.
I'd love to see Marble and a more unified GUI and Core Animation used in the system more.
People don't respond to feature lists (unless they're geeks) they respond to seeing cool stuff demoed and being educated on why such technologies are cool.