Apple's new non-feline Mac operating system, OS X Mavericks, ready to go Apple has released the Golden Master (GM) verion of its upcoming OS X 10.9, aka Mavericks, to its developers, along with the GM version 5.0.1 of its integrated development environment (IDE), Xcode. Screen shot from Apple's Developer website announcing that the Golden Master of OS X 10.9, aka Mavericks, is now available OS X …
nonsense, there're...
tabby
brown tabby
marmalade
persian
tortoiseshell
moggy
bengal
burmese
manx
...that'll do for ten years, plenty more after that
'mavericks', ugh, bunch of californians with over inflated egos thinking the rest of the world will bask in their trite place names
i'm sticking with snow leopard, by far the best of all the os x releases, cute kittens too
"There are now over 2,000 known security vulnerabilities in OS-X."
And OSX have no need to run no anti-virus software only because no one wants to target them blah, blah, blah. They are about to learn their lesson, yawn, and (for the 11th year running) the security train is about to come off the tracks, zzzzz.
Never mind the users feel safe because the OS has PROVEN to be one of the most secure and the users don't ever seem to encounter the supposed cataclysmic issues the (almost invariably non-OSX using) detractors have spent years wishing will become the next big security crash.
i'm sticking with snow leopard, by far the best of all the os x releases, cute kittens too
Nice to see that I am not the one using Snow Leopard. The only problem is I can't upgrade past Xcode 4.2, it is a bit buggy. Also took a while to stop curing single window interface... so much.
Total paid to Apple since 2005 if you kept up with every release (so, you bought 10.4 and everything since) in US dollars: 129 + 129 + 29 + 29 + 19 = $335
Total paid to Microsoft since 2005 according to the same rules (starting with an upgrade to Vista, assuming 'home' versions): 99 + 119 + 119 = $337
Which version are you including? Windows 7 ultimate is showing up as $179 on amazon.com right now.
Vista ultimate was far more expensive..like over $250. Windows 7 was over $200 too if you had bought it in 2009.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/06/windows-7-pricing-announced-cheaper-than-vista/
and vista's launch cost was $450 http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/30/windows-vista-ultimate-450-us/
But even if you take your prices into account, that only just works out because of Apple's price structure change. In the next 8 years, if prices stay the same, OS X is 80% cheaper.
That and $19 covers as many installs as you want. Apple even has a help article on it http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4854
If you want to stay legal on Windows, it'll cost you for each machine.
Home editions are not an equivalent comparison - Microsoft charge extra for features like remote desktop that you get as standard on a Mac. Full disk encryption, decent backup utility - need I go on.
These days you get OS X with your Mac and pay about £14 for the upgrades which are far more than 'service packs' - which is cheap when you even compare the current price for Windows 7 to 8 which many would regard as a step back.
Key difference being you don't have to upgrade in Microsoft land just to keep security updates going for more than 2 years. it is quite likely that most users of windows never upgrade version or only does so once. So it's not comparing it fairly, OS 10 was released in 2001 and has not been supported for as long as say XP (I had a Mac with 10.1 on!). Oh and you can't now skip a version of OSX, the App Store forces you to go one at a time, you can skip with windows.
BTW We have 2 Macs and 2 PCs so I am not trying to stir just point out the differences,
Windows vs OS X pricing is pointless unless you take Pro pricing as your comparison.
I have two machines with Win7 Home on them, and had to pay either £60 for an upgrade to Win8 Pro or £179 for a Win7 Pro license. Why? So I could install more than 16GB RAM.
Sorry, but M$ can f$ck off.
time wasted installing or reinstalling your OS.
Apple 2 hours.
M$ 2 weeks.
If it takes you 2 weeks you may want to check our Acronis True Image. Until I switched to Mac that was my daily backup routine, and it saved my rear end twice. I very much prefer a backup that supports a restore from the ground up, which is why I use Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac (a full restore from Time Machine is also possible, but I've never found the need to try).
Speaking as one who 2 weeks ago installed a clean Windows 8, I spent a whole day installing updates going back years - not for Windows 8, but for all the software and SDKs I had to install to do my job. Framework and security updates dating back to what must be XP days.
To be expected perhaps, but I didn't have nearly half as much of that nonsense in OS X with a clean install.
Also, Win 8 does a wonderful job of hiding the Desktop Windows 8 Update from the common user - the Metro interface options only let you either: Update Automatically, or Don't Update.... No 'let me know' option. Stupid.
"But your issue was due to other software you chose to install - nothing to do with the base OS...."
When the parts of the base OS at the time the software was written (DirectX, .NET, etc) require re-patching with yet more windows updates to allow it to run, then yes it has plenty to do with the base OS.
Windows is more than it's install didk: it's a whole trove of legacy libraries and frameworks. When you install a Windows OS, you're not installing the "whole" package.
You can say the same for most OS's, but OS X isn't even remotely in the same ballpark as Windows.
And you have far fewer security patches / updates to install with a current version of Windows than with OS-X....
BS. I happen to run both OSX and Windows. What gets updated often in OSX are individual apps, which is a side effect of them being so cheap you can have many of them helping you in your work. When it comes to Windows there's so much they had to concentrate it into a couple of fixed days so you could plan ahead for the waste of bandwidth that day. OSX's core does get updates, but it actually surprised me to see two in the span of a week.
I wouldn't count on that. It took me a couple of hours, plus one e-mail to EA tech support, to migrate my Mac from Snow Leopard to Lion (ok, so I was doing a migration from a old hackintosh running SL to a proper Mac Mini running Lion. The e-mail to EA tech support was because for some reason my key to Plants Vs Zombies, which I snagged during an EA giveaway, had become unusable). I imagine that it would have took me two weeks too if I were to do a clean upgrade- had to download my apps all over after all, and XCode is one huge SOB.
Top tip: in 10.8 and above (so, I assume also the pending 10.9 though I haven't used it), hold down 'option' while the file menu is open. The hated 'Duplicate' will turn back into 'Save As...'
If your hands are up to it, shift+option+command+S is the appropriate keyboard shortcut.
"Save as" is the perfect example of how users get used to bad practice and obstinately wish to remain with what they are used to.
"Save as" is responsible more than anything else for file system detritus, with multiple versions of files littering the filing system where there is no clear cardinal working version. A recipe for disaster. When you consider that OSX now has versioning built right-in why, oh why do you need "save as"?
If you are renaming, use the rename function. On OSX you keep a single file with *all previous versions in it and browsable (with a handy comparison tool) and retrievable* and you won't end up with different versions littered everywhere and end up forgetting what the crap each one was for.
If you are starting a branched version, use the "duplicate" command. You will end up with a duplicate version you will be prompted to give a new name when you next save and you will also be explicitly prompted to save the old version before you exit that one too. The problem with using "save as" for making duplicates is users often forget to save a version before they use "save as", so what is in that version they have left behind, well um they aren't too sure when they last saved it, so better just leave it there for ever and f**king ever because the file is in that all important intermediate state "I'm not sure what but, hell, one day I might need it."
Like we need more of that in our lives.
Cm'on, engage brain, tell me one way "save as" can remotely be seen as better than using "duplicate" and "rename" commands.
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"Compressed memory? App Nap? These sound like ways of making a machine slower."
Compressed memory is used as a strategy to avoid page swapping for VM, so it actually makes the machine faster. The computational cost of doing the compression/decompression is significantly smaller than the I/O cost of making the slow, expensive trip out to hard drive storage.
Actually much of the wasted power in the CPU goes on static power which can only be mitigated by turning down the voltage. So it turns out to be more effective to run the CPU more-or-less flat out until you've completed present workload, then halt CPU and wind the supply voltage down to minimum that will maintain state whilst waiting for an event that requires servicing. Reverse the sequence to resume processing. I would guess that the mac hardware products have this little trick completely optimized already.
I don't know what App Nap is.
I am a little more skeptical about the VM impact of compressed pages.
There are certain obvious "compressions" which are really de-duplications, but I assume that Mac OS X already does these (i.e. only load the code portion of a shared library once and map it into the process space of each executable that's using it)
To make it work well with dirty pages, you would need a particular type of workload that leant itself to this - the most obvious being that you are using 6 applications but each one is full screen so that when you application switch (alt-tab?) between them the ex-active one's dirty pages will become eligible for compression and the newly-active one will cause it's pages to be decompressed (the latter forcing the former). This might be how people use Macs, in which case fair enough.
The capacity argument is weak, the majority of people out there have more than enough RAM & swap space available to them these days.
Here's my take on how compression could help VM performance. I will start off by stating the bleeding obvious:
The thing that kills you with paging is the time it takes to do the I/O.
You can reduce the amount of time doing I/O by using compression to reduce the number of blocks you need to read/write.
If the I/O time savings are larger than the cost of the compression then you can achieve better VM performance.
Even back in '97 it was quicker to decompress a TIFF read off a striped pair of Ultra-SCSI drives, than read the raw bitmap (Pentium Pro 200 + Adaptec 3940UW, ~3:1 compression ratio). The cost of the I/O far outweighed the cost of the compression.
Compressed memory is not a new idea, but it is a good idea for certain system usage patterns. These days even a web browser can gobble stupid amounts of RAM and in-memory compression is typically faster than disk paging (and less damaging to flash storage devices).
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
Having to compress data in RAM to avoid swapping is just symptomatic of not having enough RAM in the first place. And if data is compressed in RAM, it's not really RAM any more. That's OK for some types of workload, but it's a disaster for something that actually wants random access to its data.
It doesn't even really mean that you can get away with putting a lot less RAM in the machine in the first place; if you did, apps with data that doesn't compress well might find themselves short of space. Furthermore, I don't suppose that the algorithm is going to spend very long doing the compression, so it is unlikely to achieve high compression ratios.
On the other hand, compressing data that's been left untouched in memory for ages could be worthwhile compressing. Sort of not-using-it-I'll-shrink-it. But that sounds more like it'd be down to average user activity profiles, not the apps themselves, so it might come as a disappointment to someone who actually does stuff.
I dare say that if Intel or anyone else seriously considers RAM compression to be worthwhile they would have done it ages ago in silicon. I know some people did play around with slotting FPGAs into AMD CPU sockets to do this sort of thing, but that's not exactly taken off in a big way.
I figured "compressed memory" were what the various ram-pack programs for Windows 3.1 and 9x were doing years, and years ago? They tended to make things run slower, if not as slow as virtual memory.
So long as Apple don't try to claim this as some kind of innovation, then yay.
[quote]Here are just a few of the innovations that will make your Mac work smarter, not harder....[/quote]
Oh. Well then. How unusual.
"Also aboard will be compressed memory, which not only saves power by reducing the need to spin up your hard drive to keep RAM stuffed full of data goodness, but should also increase performance if the compression algorithm is sufficiently zippy."
Hopefully they have an adjustment or at least on/off for this. I used zram on Linux and for my workload it turned out to be rubbish for my workloads on my lower-RAM systems. Graphics? Check, raw bitmaps compress like crazy. Compiles? Check, gcc stuff also compresses like crazy. ZRAM worked wonders for this stuff. Apps that want to buffer a bunch of video or zip file or anything in a compressed or encrypted format in RAM? Oh no, that doesn't compress, so instead of more RAM you end up with effectively less and may swap like crazy. Oh, and VirtualBox is non-pageable so ZRAM does nothing for it but take away available RAM.
Regarding Mac vs. Windows ownership -- please, Apple fanbois, don't be daft and pretend you are saving money. Linux cost: $0 since 2005 (including hardware, I only replace hardware if it fails since linux has nice low system requirements.) Windows cost: Don't be silly and pretend anyone would downgrade from XP to Vista, and also, as some have said, Windows does not have the forced upgrades by dropping support for older versions so quickly. OSX: As a few have said, you would have to replace your Mac at least once since 2005 to be running a current OS, and possibly twice.
This here is the big problem I've seen with Macs, and actually follows a nice curve...OS7 supported systems up to about 10 years old (basically all the Macs that you could shove enough RAM into). OS9, about 8 or 9 years old. By OSX 10.0 it was down to about 6 or 7 years old. Then 5 or 6 years old. 10.4 or so, 4 or 5 years old, 10.7 or so, 3 or 4 years old, now 2 or 3 years old. You see where this is going, if it kept going within a few years OSX would only support currently shipping hardware. If Jobs were still around, i feel like he'd possibly even favor that... I don't know now.
As somebody else pointed out: Linux is only free if you do not value your time to get basics working (and you are the kind of nerd who knows how and thinks it is fun); if, as a professional, you need a supported system for your many employees and essential work, "professional" versions tend to be expensive, with good reason. Of course, a firm could have its own people do maintenance, find all those libraries and drivers and basic office software that are fully compatible with all its customers and suppliers; but people cost money, probably more than a support contract with a specialist supplier.
If you are sticking with hardware more than a couple of years or so old, I assume your performance and reliability needs are not great If you keep it going by patching and mending, using second hand or cheap parts, see the first sentence and move into the 21st century.
I don't know how you measure "major", I can only imagine that the author uses a quantitative yardstick rather than a qualitative one.
I know that I for one am really looking forward to file system level file tagging and tabbed Finder.
Only 2 changes, granted, but in terms of the impact on usability, I anticipate that these will be HUGE.
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