I don't know exactly how it works but I suppose Apple is actually paying Nvidia and ATI to write the drivers for the cards every time they request some new cards from them. Apple cannot write the drivers on their own so it costs them to include new GPU's. And probably that's why they can't include every new GPU since that wouldn't be profitable for Apple. How many people would upgrade their GPU in their Octo Pro just to play games better? I would but I don't see many professionals doing it, they just want to get the work done and most are not interested in games. If it wasn't for the driver issue, I'm pretty sure ATI and Nvidia or Apple wouldn't have any problem supporting every new GPU on the Mac.
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New Snow Leopard Build (10A261) Seeded to Developers
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I don't know exactly how it works but I suppose Apple is actually paying Nvidia and ATI to write the drivers for the cards every time they request some new cards from them. Apple cannot write the drivers on their own so it costs them to include new GPU's. And probably that's why they can't include every new GPU since that wouldn't be profitable for Apple. How many people would upgrade their GPU in their Octo Pro just to play games better? I would but I don't see many professionals doing it, they just want to get the work done and most are not interested in games. If it wasn't for the driver issue, I'm pretty sure ATI and Nvidia or Apple wouldn't have any problem supporting every new GPU on the Mac.
I also would like to see Apple bring back some of the functionality from Tiger Spotlight (categories etc.).
Something a bit smaller I was a little disappointed with is the Quick Look's slide show feature. In Tiger, you had this nice fade transition between photos, but in Leopard that's all gone (now the next photo just appears on the screen without any transitions). That's not a big change, but it really made watching these easy and quick slideshows much more a pleasure than it is today.
So far these are about the only things I miss from the Tiger days. Now I hope Snow Leopard is available in a Mac Box Set like Leopard is (I think it's time to upgrade from iWork '06
)...
Something a bit smaller I was a little disappointed with is the Quick Look's slide show feature. In Tiger, you had this nice fade transition between photos, but in Leopard that's all gone (now the next photo just appears on the screen without any transitions). That's not a big change, but it really made watching these easy and quick slideshows much more a pleasure than it is today.
So far these are about the only things I miss from the Tiger days. Now I hope Snow Leopard is available in a Mac Box Set like Leopard is (I think it's time to upgrade from iWork '06
)...
I hadn't noticed that til you pointed it out. It's fairly obvious Leopard wasn't quite finished, whilst it makes steps forwards from Tiger in many areas it makes a few steps back in others:
[1] Every version of Mac OS X since ever has displayed live Quicktime Movies in the Dock. With Leopard this broke, they no longer update.
[2] Front Row lost the funky Desktop transition no big deal.
[3] If you use the Front Row interface to pick a song, then exit, in Tiger the song carried on playing, in Leopard it stops entirely bigger deal.
I wish they'd fix the bug in Mail in which the program tells me that it's sending the email I'm working on; even though it's only automatically saving it in drafts. I'm pretty sure it's just a mistranslation because I only see this on Macs set to Japanese as the display language.
Due to the rewrite of the Dock to be Core Animation based, most likely. Annoying.
Front Row no longer uses iTunes in the background. This led to a *huge* performance increase (it used to have to launch iTunes in the background, which just looked like lag to the user), but does mean that since Front Row is now doing the playing, it won't play unless Front Row is running.
The launching iTunes part was a one off event and iTunes doesn't even take long to launch. Whilst I appreciate the performance increases in Front Row and the Apple TV like UI in Leopard, the fact that I can't switch in and out of the UI when needed means I hardly ever use it.
I really hope not. I like working with OSX and I like the workflow provided by all the OSX components and programs.
Keywords are better.
http://www.macworld.com/article/132788/2008/04/spotlight2.html
Just type in 'name:[some part of a file name]'
So instead of battling over whether or not 10.6 is equivalent to a Service Pack from Microsoft, perhaps someone who has tried this build (if it is available yet...I don't know if it is) could shed some light on how it handles the big 64bit problem. Is the kernel actually 64bit? I know in the last builds, one of the biggest problems was the fact that the system preference panes didn't work because they are still 32bit, thus if you had to use system preferences, you had to disable the pure 64bit-ness of the OS and boot up in 32bit mode...or something like that.
It is shocking how little information there is about 10.6 overall. It seems like even October of this year is now a premature estimate of release.
It is shocking how little information there is about 10.6 overall. It seems like even October of this year is now a premature estimate of release.
Filesystems
about a year ago, Apple Insider noted that SL would be rewritten all in Cocoa. The rewrite, in addition to what many poster in the forum have noted to be better language selection, would make apps a lot smaller, reducing footprint. http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ard_seed_leak_confirms_cocoa_finder_more.html
Additionally, HFS+ will gain compression, meaning the parts of the system not being used a lot can be compressed to take up less space, like the library.
I just hope iTunes and all the other apps go Cocoa too.
I think ZFS support will be available in client at some point, but it will be enabled by download only like HFS+ was in 10.2 or 10.3. It is really difficult to make it work with the UI, Finder, TM, etc. using Carbon and Cocoa blend. I imagine that going to Cocoa will help that - and make an OS less than 20-30 GB again (I'm over exaggerating). I think i read somewhere in the opensolaris forums that ZFS also requires a 64-bit kernel to work correctly as well, so I imagine the SL 64bit kernel is key. I wish I knew more because ZFS in OpenSolaris is FREAKING SWEET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
about a year ago, Apple Insider noted that SL would be rewritten all in Cocoa. The rewrite, in addition to what many poster in the forum have noted to be better language selection, would make apps a lot smaller, reducing footprint. http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ard_seed_leak_confirms_cocoa_finder_more.html
Additionally, HFS+ will gain compression, meaning the parts of the system not being used a lot can be compressed to take up less space, like the library.
I just hope iTunes and all the other apps go Cocoa too.
I think ZFS support will be available in client at some point, but it will be enabled by download only like HFS+ was in 10.2 or 10.3. It is really difficult to make it work with the UI, Finder, TM, etc. using Carbon and Cocoa blend. I imagine that going to Cocoa will help that - and make an OS less than 20-30 GB again (I'm over exaggerating). I think i read somewhere in the opensolaris forums that ZFS also requires a 64-bit kernel to work correctly as well, so I imagine the SL 64bit kernel is key. I wish I knew more because ZFS in OpenSolaris is FREAKING SWEET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Relaunch system preferences, not reboot the OS, and only for a few of the pref panes.
Oh that's much better. Are their certain preferences that are in the 64bit part and others in the 32bit part?
And as for disk compression, I would never use it--anything less than pure flat-binary disk format will be far slower in use.
That chart is a little exaggerated, I think; under leopard, my binary sizes are:
Automator: 2.6MB
Calculator: 1.9MB
iCal: 12.5MB
iChat: 12MB
Safari: 8.4MB
TextEdit: 1.7MB
They are all Intel-only binaries, so I guess that might account for some of the difference.
Automator: 2.6MB
Calculator: 1.9MB
iCal: 12.5MB
iChat: 12MB
Safari: 8.4MB
TextEdit: 1.7MB
They are all Intel-only binaries, so I guess that might account for some of the difference.
You should consider "cp -Rp" for copying large bunches of files to your Windows boxes.
Ah, it is Windows 6.1 - they didn't change the version number to a major because it isn't a major change; it is an evolution built upon 6.0. People coming up with cock and ball stories of 'oh, the version number because of compatibility' - its a load of bollocks. The change wasn't made because the change from 6 to 7 could not be justified.
Windows 2000 = Windows NT 5
Windows XP = Windows NT 5.1
Windows 2003 = Windows NT 5.2
Windows Vista = Windows NT 6.0
Windows 7 = Windows NT 6.1
Checksums? (No silent data corruption. The system can tell you when you have to restore a file.)
Ditto blocks? (If your disk begins to fail, there are better chances your valuable data can be retrieved because it is stored multiple times on the same harddisk)
Per-file Compression? Per-file Encryption? (Without the need for disk images/FileVault)
Snapshots? (Time Machine without an external harddisk for easy access to historical files - not for backup, of course)
All of this is pure speculation, of course. I don't have access to the beta.
A lot of people never had any problems with 10.3.0, 10.4.0 or 10.5.0. I'm one of them. I don't think the rule of thumb that should emerge from something like this is "don't trust the OS until OS 10.X.5", but more "Have a sensible backup plan, as with any upgrade of software, things can go awry".
Actually, versioning it as 6.1 is only for the Beta. It's because many apps adapt to Vista's security changes by checking if the major version (the first number) is 6. Changing it to 7 may cause applications to not enable things like UAC. They're going to wait until developers have had enough time to update their code. Also, during the Vista beta as I remember it, it was versioned as 5.x. They haven't hit the 7.X version yet, so it's between 6 and 7.
Core Animation is very easy to add, it doesn't require a rewrite. Apple has responded to this by saying that the Dock-Quicktime link was a potential vulnerability and they removed it for security reasons.
Apple does write their own drivers. They get the specifications from the hardware manufacturer and write it themselves. That's why driver updates only come in 10.5.X updates, not as their own update.