Leopard Preview

its funny how the 3 major OSes borrow from each other, i haven't even clicked the link yet and something tells me we'll see some "ground braking" features which are already available in linux and windows. lets begin:

Time Machine = System Restore in XP

Mail 3 = just a fancier emailer than the previous version.

iChat = new version with some more features, including connecting and controlling other people's desktop. MSN Messanger + XP already do that too.

Spotlight = can now do network search. I believe Beagle can do this already, but not sure.

Dashboard = some new widgets, did they really have to make a separate OS for this?

Spaces = virtual desktops....both Win and Lin had this for ages....nothing ground braking.

and its going 64-bit but its not the first OS to do so.


All critisism aside (since after all, there are only so many things to do and only so many ways to do them....the above could just as easily be said about Vista stealing from OSX) ... I am actually liking this release...its getting more useful, simpler, and more powerful.... for apple.

Uh, Time Machine is a lot more than system restore.

Time Machine can save everything you've ever deleted and bring it back to you. Of course, you'll need a shitload of space for all this, but it's there.

Windows does not have virtual desktops unless you use a third party addon.

And OS X was the first OS to support 64 bit with Panther.

Panther was realsed 10/24/2003, 6 months earlier on 04/07/2003 SUSE released 8.2 which came in i386 and x86_64 flavors, 2 days before panther on 10/22/2003 RedHat released RHEL 9 available in x86_64.....so no, Panther was not the first publically available 64 bit OS.

ABF is right on this though 64Bit was availiable even before Suse if you did you own stuff on Linux.

Plus with Linux you could compile everything 64 bit, Leopard is the first Mac OS that is true with(One of their advertising points in fact

Time machine looks to be nothing more than a backup solution on a cron script to be perfectly honest, nothing that dar+cron havent been doing for a while. Actually because of this I would venture a guess Time Machine uses a very similar technique that saves differential backups after the initial, meaning you wont need as much disk space as you might think. It also means that it might take a bit longer to restore depending on what you are restoring, but still it can be useful, and will need more disk space than people may be used to by default. For that reason if/when I get Leopard I would be setting it to only backup certain directories that dont include Media I have backed up elsewhere(DVDs I put on my HD for instance) etc. It could be most useful to be perfectly honest, with documents etc.

ABF is right, OSes do tend to borrow a lot from each other, MS borrows from Mac, Mac borrows from Linux, Linux borrows from Mac, etc. Makes one nice little triangle.

Seablade

I wonder how long it took abf to research that.

yep....when i read that i was thinking the exact same thing....system restore + cron.... personally i find it a waste of hdd space (i always disable sys restore, even in XP) but i know other people would rather be safe than sorry (i would rather take the opportunity of a trashed OS to try a new linux distro)

Actually despite how much you may dislike him, that peice of info is not hard to find, especially since AMD made it a point to get 64 Bit support into linux as early as possible to support the launch of the AMD64. As such Linux was a marketing tool for them, not hard to find out dates for things like that then

Seablade

took like 10 seconds. i found linux release dates on distrowatch

They only previewed a couple of the new things in Leopard. I wonder what the top secret items are....???

Things that arent stable.

They probably dont want a repeat of MS presentations where computers threaten to kill aunts, or BSODs exist

Seablade

I am a bit disappointed as I was hoping to hear of improvements to iWork, and especially that Apple was going to take aggressive steps to improve OS X application compatibility (for instance by creating something like Darwine but that, unlike Darwine, actually works).

like regular wine for linux

Please take the Linux shilling somewhere else, this is a discussion of OS X Leopard.

Wine is passable, but the X Windows system it uses is an abomination. I want a fully functional Darwine that fully uses OS X functionality.

there are legal issues that come with making a program like wine.....you don't wanna cross into MS's copyrighted territory unless you have a legal budget the size of bill gate's bank account...so in a word, take it or leave it.....take waht is given to you because nothing else will come for a while.

well, for macs the big issue w/ virtualization and/or API calls was the hardware difference. since the change to intel the market for wine-like applications and virtualization on macs has blossomed. so i don't think the take it or leave it line will last for much longer or even if it's even applicable, particularly afterfollowing the various software releases at WWDC.

HMm that is one opinion, I happen to disagree with it, but you are welcome to your opinion. I will say I am actually looking at loading X on my powerbook to run e17 by default and run Aqua in some form behind it, either rootless, or if needed as a root environment and running X fullscreen. Triadona you are talking two entierly different beasts there. There is a difference between API compatibility(Wine) and Virtualization. Thus why WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator, because it does not emulate the environment, but rather translates the API calls into something that DOES work in the environment. This would be the same for any code on any platform, but there are catches which I cover below. Compare that to virtualization which runs the entire OS inside of the OS. It would be closer to compare the Virtualization market on Macs that is blossoming to the market for VMWare on Linux. Actually you will be finding VMWare moving to Mac I believe(Is already in Beta testing I think). Now where the chip differences play into this is compiled code. A process like Wine could have existed on Mac, however it would have required compiling for WineLib(IE Picassa or Google Earth, one of those two did that, I want to say the Google Earth) which would have provided compiled code compatible with that chip and instruction set and translated the calls as needed via winelib. THat is still a lot of work though, and fixing Endianess issues etc. Now obviously MS wasnt going to compile their OS for PPC very quickly, so in order to virtualize it, the VM had to translate the actual x86 instruction set to PPC and a few other tricks. This is much more intensive, preventing really useful performance, not to say that it wasnt useful to do, just that you shouldnt expect realtime performance out of much Seablade

By the way ABF isnt to far off, to see how seriously you have to take legal issues for things like API compatibility, take a look at ReactOS, you will notice one of the first things they have on their website is an audit of their own code to make sure nothing was copy/pasted from MSes stuff to cover their own arse.

Seablade