#6 Govt=Gestapo, Vista=SOS
Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista: "Re:One good reason NOT to buy Windows Vista:
(Score:5, Insightful)
by waveclaw (43274) Alter Relationship on Saturday February 18, @11:35AM (#14750049)
(http://www.waveclaw.net/~jdpowell/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 14, @01:14PM)
DRM. Why would you pay for your own shackles?
Avereage Joe: But they were sooooo shiny! And look at all the pretty 'features.' And everyone's getting or got a pair! Besides, they go so well with my gamer clothes...I mean work suit.
The number one and number two reason people will buy Vista: it will come on their new PC and it will play all the video games sold for PC (that Average Joe cares about.) You can talk about 'compatibility' with work, but Windows 98 with Office 97 is all that takes for most cases. As soon as Duke Nukem comes out, you can be sure it will have a 'Made for Microsoft Windows Vista' sticker on it.
--
'You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know.'"
===================http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/02/18/149257
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"Taking Security to the Next Level"
(Score:5, Funny)
<lperson1 AT austin DOT rr DOT com> on Saturday February 18, @11:42AM (#14750098) (http://home.austin.rr.com/lperson/ | Last Journal: Saturday July 16, @12:52PM)
So, instead of a wide open door with a 'PLEASE ROB ME!!!" sign taped to it, they've half closed the door and put up a sign that says "ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, I WOULD PREFER THAT YOU NOT STEAL ALL MY BELONGINGS, IF THAT'S OK WITH YOU."
When your starting from the gutter, the "next level" is only the curb.
==========================="If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?"=====Re:So...
(Score:5, Insightful)Go, go, gadget Darwine! [opendarwin.org]The ability to run specific win32 apps.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'
===Mac tech blurb in GREY at bottom for hungry minds
Ten compelling reasons why not to upgrade!
(Score:5, Insightful)2. Internet Explorer 7: GetFirefox [getfirefox.com].
3. Righteous eye candy: Ooohhh shiny...
4. Desktop search: Learn to organize.
5. Better updates: Why update? Because it was broken in the first place!
6. More media: More DRM!
7. Parental controls: Real parents don't need an OS to babysit their kids.
8. Better backups: Already have that.
9. Peer-to-peer collaboration: ???
10. Quick setup: Why am I running setup more than once anyways?
In short, 10 compelling reasons why you don't need to upgrade to Vista.
Re:One good reason NOT to buy Windows Vista:
(Score:5, Funny)Because my wife complained that the garbage bag zip ties were irritating her wrists.
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Re:One good reason NOT to buy Windows Vista:
(Score:5, Insightful)If your computer doesn't support drm, then you can't see the content at all. Your system not supporting drm does not magically make all drm protected content play without restrictions. If drm is widespread, then you receive all the disadvantages of drm and none of the benefits (eg. more content being offered online).
The only good thing is if few people have drm then it is harder to distribute drm'd content but if by having a computer that doesn't support drm you are in the minority, there is no direct benefit to you.
====================
Re:Any Color You Like, As Long As It's Black
(Score:5, Funny) <jcrNO@SPAMidiom.com> on Saturday February 18, @11:54AM (#14750183) (Last Journal: Saturday November 05, @05:26AM)
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In case of /.ing, the 10 reasons are
(Score:5, Insightful)2. new IE almost as good as Firefox
3. new eye-candy almost as good as OS X
4. new desktop search almost as good as Google Desktop
5. new update program almost as good as Mac Software Update
6. new media programs almost as good as iLife
7. new parental controls almost as good as proper parenting
8. new backups almost as good as things not breaking in the first place
9. new P2P almost as good as turning off your firewall
10. new quick install almost as good as all the other planned features that don't actually exist yet
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http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Quartz 2D Extreme
What Quartz Extreme did for the Quartz Compositor, Quartz 2D Extreme does for the Quartz 2D drawing API. Here's what the Quartz implementation looks like in Tiger.
Quartz in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
If you look at the three Quartz implementation diagrams in sequence, you can see how the video card portion of the diagram has slowly expanded over the course of four years to encompass more and more of the display layer. The reason is clear when you look at the bandwidth numbers: 30GB/s between the GPU and VRAM, and that number is climbing rapidly—much more rapidly than the bandwidth between the CPU and RAM.
This leads us to the most painful reality of the brave new world of GPU-powered drawing: VRAM is finite. The simple block diagrams shown earlier sweep this reality under the carpet. What happens when there's simply not enough room in VRAM to cache all of the backing stores and bitmaps and rasterized glyphs and who knows what else? Does performance fall off a cliff?
As it turns out, VRAM has been "virtualized" by Mac OS X since Quartz Extreme debuted in Jaguar. Although the Jaguar Quartz diagram shows the backing store in RAM, the Quartz Compositor is smart enough to cache those backing stores in VRAM as well. The biggest limitation of Jaguar's Quartz implementation is that the actual drawing is still done into the backing store in RAM, so the diagram accurately reflects the sequence of events during an actual drawing operation. But as long as a window's contents don't change, the Quartz Compositor can continue to use its VRAM cache of the backing store instead of reading it from RAM every single time. .../...
.../... Unfortunately, this has not been a common practice in Mac OS X applications. Prior to Quartz 2D Extreme, keeping references to large pieces of data around long after the things they refer to have been used was usually considered a waste of memory for no significant performance gain. Remember, in Panther and earlier, drawing with a large number of pixels was likely to be limited by the upload bandwidth from RAM to VRAM more than any other factor. If a bitmap was used for repeated drawing, Mac OS X's excellent disk caching system made it less critical to retain the bitmap in the application's memory. It made just as much sense to discard the reference and then get the bitmap from memory anyway (the disk cache) the next time it was needed. ...It's an easy problem for a developer to fix, however, and they should be used to it by now. Every time a major new version of Mac OS X is released, it behooves developers to profile their applications again. As Apple has warned on many occasions, "What was once cheap may now be expensive and vice versa. Don't assume; measure!" The price of performance is eternal vigilance.
//// a few pages later:
Like Kaleidoscope, the popular user interface theme engine for classic Mac OS which was also coauthored by Arlo Rose, Konfabulator is meant to be an environment for hosting user-created content. There is a large and growing collection of user-contributed Konfabulator widgets.
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger includes a technology called Dashboard which is very similar to Konfabulator. It too is an engine for running small programs called "widgets." Dashboard widgets are also bundles containing a description file, images and other resources, and JavaScript code to make the widgets actually work. The implementation details start to diverge from there, however.
Instead of purpose-build XML files and a custom JavaScript API, Dashboard uses HTML, CSS, DOM, and all the other technologies used in a modern web browser. Dashboard actually uses Web Kit, the engine that powers the Safari web browser, to run its widgets. The widget description files are actually HTML pages, and the JavaScript code behaves just as it would if it was running inside a web browser. In fact, the Tiger version of Safari (2.0) can also be used to display and run widgets.
.../...
The product
Dashboard has visual frills and thrills galore. In addition to the Exposé-style activation, there's an extremely cool water ripple effect when a new widget is activated. Closing a widget causes it to be sucked back into the tiny "x" button like a piece of transparent taffy. The "widget drawer" on the bottom of the screen, activated by the slightly larger "x" button in the lower-left corner of the screen, pushes the entire screen background upwards as it appears. The widgets it contains slide in from the left. Dragging a widget icon out of the drawer causes it to do a cross-fade "morph" into its full-sized form.
If the Dock was the "ooh, ahh" demo in Mac OS X 10.0, Dashboard is it in Tiger. Here's a screenshot.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/17
-------------...-For over four years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release—not just "faster in the experience of most end users," but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.
...But that's really reaching. At a certain point, you simply have to accept that Apple is doing a heck of a lot more than patching up grossly inefficient code rushed out to make the 10.0 release. It's time to give credit where credit is due. Apple keeps making Mac OS X faster, and it rules.
------------------...
Performance summary
There's not much more to say. Tiger is faster than Panther, and you'll notice. The GPU-powered graphics technologies play less of a role in day-to-day performance increases than you might expect. Think of them instead as enablers of entirely new things (e.g., Core Video effects) rather the bringers of "the snappy."
Has the interface responsiveness everyone has been clamoring for finally arrived in Tiger? Let me put it this way: I fully expect to see our friend "the snappy" appearing in Mac web forums during the run up to the Mac OS X 10.5 release in late 2006 or so. (Resizing an application like iCal is still way, way too slow.) But Tiger pushes things much closer to the tipping point.
============ .../...
Safari
My Panther review contained a paean to the glory of Safari. The new version (2.0) continues those winning ways. Tiger's Safari comes with the expected (but still appreciated) collection of page rendering performance improvements and better conformance with web standards. The performance of the JavaScript in particular has improved. This makes script-heavy web application like GMail feel a lot snappier. (As a bonus, Panther users get most of these improvements in Safari 1.3 which is part of Mac OS X 10.3.9.)
Safari 2.0 supports RSS in an interesting way. Articles from one or more news feeds are displayed in a single web page. A slider control adjusts the length of the article summaries. An example is shown below. You can see it in motion at Apple's web site.
------------------ http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/20 ==
The new options for PDF-related printing activities are nice, but why in the world are they sprouting from a button? Why not use, oh, I don't know, a pop-up menu widget instead? Yes, then the dialog would need a pop-up menu and a button, but somehow we'd all survive.
The inaugural winner of this award, the Panther Finder's crazy context menu for labels, is still the overall champion, I think. But Tiger's PDF button-menu gives it a run for its money. (The Mail toolbar gets an honorable mention this year as well.)
----------------
To quote a forum post by Thaen, "Someone got paid to change that. Think about it." Actually, it doesn't surprise me. Dissatisfaction with the status quo is what drives all progress. If any technology company is going to indulge its employees' pursuit of perfection, it's Apple.
Yes, the spacing still looks like ass
I am once again sad to report that my pet Apple Type Services bug remains unfixed in Tiger. For all you folks out there who, like me, want to use 9-point Monaco as your Terminal font, the work-around is still the same: manually edit your ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist file and set the value of the FontWidthSpacing set to 1.003, a value that is impossible to get via the GUI.
FontWidthSpacing 1.003
Then never, ever touch the font panel in the Terminal application, and patiently wait another year. (Well, probably 18 months this time.)
==================
If you're still running Jaguar or earlier, you really owe it to yourself to upgrade to Tiger. It'll be the best $129 you've ever spent on an operating system. If you're happy with Panther, I strongly recommend going to an Apple store and checking out Tiger in person. Chances are good that there'll be at least one or two features that you'll decide you need, if not right way, then soon. As with any new release, it won't hurt to wait for version 10.4.1 or later.
Overall, Tiger is impressive. If this is what Apple can do with 18 months of development time instead of 12, I tremble to think what they could do with a full two years—let alone the length of time it took for Mac OS X 10.0 to first ship. The productivity of Apple's Mac OS X development team has increased tremendously since 10.0; they're now firing on all cylinders. While I dearly wish someone would steer them in the direction of the eternally neglected Finder, I can't help but be proud of the little OS team that could.
Mac OS X started its life as the most ambitious consumer operating system ever produced. Apple abandoned its existing, 16-year-old code base for something entirely new. Out of the gate, Mac OS X was a technical curiosity with few applications, and a performance dog. A scant four years later, Tiger is a powerhouse that combines the best Unix has to offer with a feature-rich, user-friendly interface. The increasingly capable bundled applications are just icing on the cake. We've come a long way, baby./////////////////
boring but maybe similar: (from /. i'm just being nice) http://cyborch.dk/pages/tiger ////////
http://darwine.opendarwin.org/ [if you can't guess, don't bother, it is WAAY over your element] /////////
Re:So...
(Score:5, Insightful)"... grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat.
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posted by USSSlavebation @ 2/19/2006 04:33:00 pm
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