OS X Snow Leopard Details 489
JD-1027 writes in to kick off a discussion of OS X Snow Leopard. Apple's stated goal: "Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard's enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality." The technologies: Grand Central to get better use of multiple processors and multicore chips, OpenCL to tap the power of the GPU, 64 bit so we can finally have our 16 TB of RAM, QuickTime X for optimized modern codec performance, and built in Exchange support in iCal, Address Book, and Apple Mail that most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments. We've previously discussed ZFS in the server version of Snow Leopard."
End of PowerPC Support? (Score:5, Informative)
A good analysis of this decision can be read at RoughlyDrafted Magazine [roughlydrafted.com].
Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:To wait or not to wait (Score:5, Informative)
10.0 - March 24, 2001
10.1 - September 25, 2001
10.2 - August 23, 2002
10.3 - October 24, 2003
10.4 - April 29, 2005
10.5 - October 26, 2007
That's 6 months, 11 months, 14 months, 18 months, 30 months.
Heck looking at Wiki, Apple has always kept a relatively short release time (Nothing as short linux kernels, but absolutely nothing as long as Microsoft)
1.0 - Jan 84
2.0 - Apr 85
3.0 - Jan 86
4.0 - Mar 87
5.0 - ???
6.0 - Apr 88
7.0 - Jun 91
8.0 - July 97
9.0 - Oct 99
Re:Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:5, Informative)
There's also the case where many of Apple's own applications work in much the same way (the newest version of Safari for example, requires not only 10.5, but 10.5.2).
Re:Why did Apple ever go 32-bit x86 anyway? (Score:2, Informative)
Not everyone internally was happy about the choices, but management got what it wanted.
Re:64 bit (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:4, Informative)
If this is your situation, speed is not your primary concern, it's interoperability. That's where MacFUSE comes into play. Sure it won't access that NTFS drive as fast as Windows would, but so what. With MacFUSE, you can access just about *anything* in *any format*. Got a ext3 filesystem? MacFUSE reads/writes that too.
Just because Apple doesn't provide it doesn't mean it can't be done.
Re:Why did Apple ever go 32-bit x86 anyway? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why did Apple ever go 32-bit x86 anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple can't "go back" to something it never went away from. Tiger had limited support for 64-bit code, whether on PPC or x86, and Leopard had 64-bit versions of most of its userland libraries. The Snow Leopard page doesn't say much about what's being done other than "Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM - up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today."
Some of the PowerPC machines were 64-bit. The notebooks and the Mac mini were 32-bit.
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Informative)
Spotty?? Spotty???
The Exchange 'support' in Mail.app is through IMAP. Many Exchange admins love turning off IMAP. But even if they didn't Mail.app doesn't really support Exchange at all, they just support IMAP with a slightly different layout in the configuration dialog.
If they get real Exchange support going in Mail.app in Snow Leopard I know at least 3 people in my hallway at work, including myself, that will dance a jig of joy the day it is released.
Re:One wonders... (Score:2, Informative)
The 1.x series of this is free, and just 'wraps' the Cisco installation in a much nicer GUI, with a menu bar entry and some useful added functionality. Version 2.x is $20, but works with Cisco, OpenVPN, and all sorts of other stuff natively.
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think Apple would want to play to that customer base anymore... might destroy their brand.
Re:End of PowerPC Support? (Score:3, Informative)
Even Apple does it. The iPhone SDK requires 10.5.
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Informative)
A good VPN client for OS X (Score:2, Informative)
Admittedly I've only used this to connect to Sonicwall firewalls, but I found the interface clean and it worked for me where other VPN solutions wouldn't even connect.
Apple release times (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Informative)
But, there are a few other options.
One Free VPN GUI: http://www.lobotomo.com/products/IPSecuritas/
And one that costs a bit:
http://www.equinux.com/us/products/vpntracker/index.html
another one that I haven't tried:
http://www.nexumoja.org/projects/Shimo/
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:3, Informative)
MBP, MacPro, post '06 iMac's - All models use either ATI or NVIDIA
only the consumer Macbook, ultra portable MBA, and the svelt MacMini use Intel integrated graphics.
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, this misinformed Bumpersticker logic has to stop, and now...
NTFS may be a bit long in the tooth, but it has taken 15 years and ZFS to catch up to NTFS on a number of features. And even with that said, ZFS, still lacks several important features that is just expected to be there by people using NTFS.
Can't believe I'm going to use quick Wiki here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs [wikipedia.org]
If you want 'technical' information, go freaking read the NTFS whitepapers, or even get a academic code release version of how and why it works WITH SOURCE code. There are important reasoning to the technology of NTFS, especially in terms of performance and features just not currently found in ANY OTHER File System made, and this even includes ZFS, that gets close.
Back to the myth. Does the poster know why NTFS will fragment a bit more than older File System technologies? Apparently No...
NTFS has copy of write and snapshot features, this adds to the fragmentation on a volume by the nature of the way snapshots and copy on write operations are handled.
This feature (snapshots/copy on write) is a MAIN FEATURE of ZFS, so if OS X moves to ZFS, it will have the same inherent added fragmentation as NTFS. Whoops, guess you should be making fun of something you are getting as an UPGRADE in terms of features.
1) Microsoft never said NTFS didn't fragment, they said it was less prone to fragmenting that DOS's FAT/FAT32, which is TRUE.
2) Microsoft did state NTFS's fragmentation was not as great of a performance issue compared to FAT/FAT32 because of how NTFS's lookup behavior works, making no additional fragmentatin lookup seeks, like FAT does. This means it can get the file locations and read it in a swipe, even if it is in 1000 fragments.
3) Microsoft has always stated snapshot and copy on write features of NTFS would mean it will always have a bit more fragmentation than 'simpilier' file systems, like OS X and most default Linux installs use today.
Just to recap:
When/if Apple adds ZFS to OS X, its inherent level of fragmentation will be equal to NTFS, because it is the nature of the File System design features of both that prevent this trade off for more advanced features.
Also, people do realize that NO FS is fragmentation free, even the current mainstream file systems in OS X, right?
OS X runs a background defragmentation utility, just like Vista does. There is nothing hard or special about this. (Vista has a low I/O priority added to the inherent NTFS priority abilities, making backgroun operations like defragmenting seamless in terms of performance to the user.)
ZFS is good and finally steps up to the plate on some important and modern File System features long needed. It still is young and lacks inherent encryption, file level quota management, and other little features, but with some good support will be a good alternative to NTFS in the UNIX world. NTFS is far from primative or old in terms of features, as it has been the File System to live up to or beat outside of Microsoft.
However, NTFS is MS Intellectual property and MS probably won't be giving up the code to it anytime soon. I actually wish Sun and Microsoft had a better relationship, as it would be nice to see a unified File System technology across all platforms, and a combination of Sun's ZFS work and NTFS would be a freaking awesome mix of technology in terms of File System features, and performance.
NTFS is nothing to mock, especially when you are responding to an article talking about Snow Leopard getting ZFS which will present the same issue for OS X you are making fun of NTFS for...
Re:first post (Score:3, Informative)
All the "features" that you're talking about aren't part of an operating system, and thus have no place in a discussion of how easy or hard it would be for Apple to add significant features to a future OS. They are applications. It's possible that an apps team at Apple might write them and include them for free with the OS, but they aren't part of the OS in any meaningful way.
When an OS vendor says that they're focusing on stability and performance, they mean that the engineers who work on the system libraries and kernel aren't going to spend their time making it do fundamentally new things, they're going to focus instead on making it do the thing it already does faster and more correctly (which may require a complete rewrite of huge sections of code).
This has essentially nothing to do with the sort of "features" that you're talking about. Trivial little toy applications are neither here nor there.