http://www.apple.com/macosx/

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

I mean seriously, how many levels of tabs are too many?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/whats-ne...

I always wonder why Microsoft is so bad at advertising. They're not a stupid company. They create products that are nearly always good, if rarely (in my opinion) great. But they've never shown any sort of strength-of-focus and they make things that are ugly. I don't get it. In cases like this, it's easier to make something that's stark and simple than it is to make something cluttered and unappealing.

http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

But, as I said elsewhere, the major improvements are under the hood.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/

http://www.apple.com/macosx/universal-access/

http://www.apple.com/macosx/exchange/

I can't believe it has been considered important enough to be one of the major features of Snow Leopard, I am so happy for the blind and visually impaired. They did it with the new iPhone the first commercialized accessible touchscreen and they are doing it again with the new Mac OS. Apple is the most innovative tech company there is no doubt about it.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/16/2322203/Why-OpenBSDs...

PS: This article was written before 4.6 has was minted; it will actually be released a full month early.

Again, how do we know they didn't account for it when they buffered initially? Maybe they had a different internal timeline (end of aug) vs. an external timeline.

Only way to know is if one is in the Snow Leopard team or has access to that kind of info.

If they were like practically everyone else in this wacky industry, they would be late for the internal timeline but not worry about it because the external timeline is the one that matters. Thus, there would be very little pressure to meet the internal timeline and a lot of pressure to meet the external timeline. Worse, they would wind up being late for the external timeline as well as the internal timeline.

For example, if someone wanted to add a feature to Snow Leopard, the dev team might say "we can't make our internal schedule if we add this." But some product manager would say "well, will you still make the external schedule?" and bang they would start to slip.

If they had an internal schedule and managed to stick to it I believe they are an exception to how software is usually developed.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MACBOX-101801 click the family pack option...

Also, there is no difference in price when purchasing under the education store, afaik.

The following does contain marketeering, but also has some decent technical details:

http://images.apple.com/macosx/technology/docs/GrandCentral_...

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_pool_pattern for the basics on the idea - which has been around for a long time.

That sounds OK, if kinda unexciting. I'd like to see some benchmarks vs. traditional threading before I commit to liking it. History is littered with cute new IPC mechanisms that didn't turn out to have the benefits promised. This sounds a lot like a combination of sysv message queues and solaris doors, neither of which managed to drive much real innovation.

What a thread pool infrastructure buys us is the separation of tasks (the bundle of information passed around the queues) from their execution context (in this case, a kernel thread). It puts a level of abstraction between what is executed and how that's executed.

At the risk of belaboring a point, this is an old idea - this is traditional multithreading. Java has a library for doing it, as does C++ (in Boost). A library for this kind of parallelism was, in fact, the first C++ library, written by Stroustrup. Even the Linux kernel uses this technique internally (by which I mean it's not exposed to applications at the user level). Cilk (the MIT project that spawned the company Cilk Arts which was recently acquired by Intel) is probably the best known example of providing language-level abstractions for this technique. (I reccomend their paper "The Implemention of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language": http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf)

By pointing out that this is an old idea, I don't mean to denigrate what Apple has done. Execution matters, and from the looks of it, they've executed this well - they've got something working at the language and kernel level, which is non-trivial.

Actually (and I'll hide my lack of knowledge by being vague) it's a means of making it easier for developers to create robust multicore capable software. I think.

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.htm...

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-08-14-pra...

I agree there's too much marketing hype surrounding GCD, but neither the CLR nor the JVM can jump through that particular hoop.

Are they forking the Objective-C compiler?

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2008-August/00267...

Although, there's a comment by Johannes Fortmann here that says that the code has been available in an svn repository since at least September 5, 2008:

http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/08/blocksclosures-for-c/

"If you check out the llvm-gcc svn trunk, you’ll find all the code there (you can even build your own llvm-gcc with working blocks)."

http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/

http://images.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/docs/OSX_HW_UTD_FF.p...

When I follow the link for computers bought via a reseller it works without a problem.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html

Here is the id-less link for anyone who doesn't believe me (I can't change the url of the post unfortunately): http://store.apple.com/us/product/MAC_OS_X_SNGL

I also wouldn't trust Tiger security on an external network.

And I preferred spotlight in 10.4. In fact, 10.4 was all around a much better OS than 10.5, which was the first update to Mac OS X that felt like a step backwards.

Of course, I'll be updating to 10.6 as soon as I can get my hands on it. If nothing else, the promise of a 10.5 that doesn't suck is worth it. To be fair, 10.5 is much better now then when it shipped. When it shipped, it was terrible.

(a) intentionally, knowingly fixed

(b) disclosed.

I think you've fallen for the marketing trap where a list of features has to be present for it to be worth something. Not many lists include code and platform optimizations because it doesn't market well. I've used OS X since 10.1 and each update has gotten remarkably better. Things have mellowed out in 10.5 but the OS feels fully baked.

In the end I don't think there really is anything they can do to make me pay more money for the OS. I already bought iWork 08, I bought SuperDuper! for backup, and everything else I use is either open source or comes included with the machine. If Apple wants me to upgrade, then they need to discontinue security updates for 10.4 or some widget I badly need needs to be 10.5+. And honestly, it's not me that Apple has to contend with, it's my wife and her iron grip over the budget ;)

I'm hoping that a scorched-earth fresh install of 10.6 will either eliminate the amazing flakyness or alternatively point me to a hardware problem.

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3555.htm

It could be if you were required by some regulation to use a UNIX certified OS. IIRC, there were little feature changes that warranted the certification.

As for myself, I have an older iMac that won't run SL, a netbook that runs Linux and I am perfectly happy with both.

Still on Tiger here too, which is my main reason for wondering if I can get away with the $29 version!?

Edit: Mac Box Set seems a better choice too, US link: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MACBOX-101801 169$

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0906paowdnv/event/inde...

Also, if you use Macports, that's not up to speed yet so you'll be doing a lot of fiddling around to get that working. For example, I had to patch the port for Erlang to get that to install on 10.6, there's probably others. Wait a few weeks and that should all be sorted out for you.

I don't use Erlang, but I have a lot of packages from MacPorts (mysql5, mercurial, git, svn, xorg, perl5 and python26 ) installed without any problems. The only thing I've tried to build that failed is screen.

I did a clean install, so that may be the difference maker.

Yeah, all of those installed without an issue for me too. Of course, you also had to build macports itself from source, since there is no binary yet.

I have a copy on order but couldn't wait. Call it time-shifting.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html

And it's $29? Too little to be too much, but still a lot for a service pack.

Sadly the price point of Snow Leopard, and the sort of reaction that you have make me think that the big shops will continue to make ever more massive and bloated softwares...

After all, you get what you are ready to pay for : if you think features are worth more bucks than optimization, that's what you'll get.

Here http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/ are the new features that went into this release. And your comment doesn't even make sense, first you say it's a service pack than you rattle off a short list of new and upgraded items. These things do cost money to develop. And I'm pretty sure $29 barely covers the cost of it. I don't remember anything new being in Windows when a SP rolled out except a new browser. (There was the uPNP browser that popped up in SP2 I believe)

point me to a page that only displays those 2 updates as the main features. In my browser Apple is clearly marketing the 64-bit, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL as the main reasons to upgrade.

Also stop referring to an OS upgrade as a service pack. Because it isn't. Microsoft releases service packs, just like Apple releases minor updates to their OS, (eg. 10.5.7)

Well, that convinced me!

The only possible response to that sort of thing is snark.

Uh.. no it's not. You could respond like you just did now and explain that they "were telling someone that he was wrong without any argument."

And there really has been a lot of re-engineering, most of it focussed on making things a lot faster and smaller.

I think Apple deserve our thanks for actually making performance and improved footprint an explicit goal of a major release, rather than larding on new feature after new feature in some kind of misguided feature war.

1.8-rc1 has already been tagged in svn and I'm sure the final version will be ready in time :)