OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion

Interesting how the handheld OS is driving so many features in the modern PC OSes. Windows 8 is going the same route as well. I had predicted this a while back...the trend would be a sort of fusion of these devices and it would be most evident via software.

 

I am amazed that there were no leaks or rumors at all for this.

 

it feels like the new features are for owners of iphone, ipad etc. or the appleTV.

for instance I've just learnt about iMessage, which is an IM protocol for iOS5 users (really?). OS 10.8 now supports it along a few other ones, but leaves MSN out (which is where everyone is or used to be)

everything will play well together along as you buy the full Apple stack. but likewise you could go for a full Microsoft stack instead (down to using windows home server which I guess does the same thing as rolling your own text mode debian or BSD, but you just check boxes instead of dicking around for hours in documentation and google.. tss)

or you may choose to lock up your data and identity with Google services (down to cross datamining between your searches, your youtube history and the contents of your mails).

vertical integration is not so much for me, I'll try to live good enough with ubiquitous tech such as http, webmail, dlna, NAS, usb mass storage, ssh, 3.5mm audio jack etc.

 

Well, considering that current iChat does not support MSN, that's not surprising at all. Basically the new "Messages" application can be seen as the old iChat plus iMessage protocol for iOS.

 

What? People still use Messenger?

Messages support Jabber, AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo.

 

Many people probably use iMessage without knowing it. When I switched from the iPhone to a Galaxy Nexus, I was wondering why some people didn't seem to respond to my SMS messages. Until I had a look at my iPhone. Even though it was in a cupboard without a SIM card in it, it was still logged in through Wifi and other iPhones then default to responding to any text messages through iMessage.

 

There is a security bug where a stolen iPhone may still be receiving iMessages, even if it's been remotely wiped. This is a problem Apple needs to tackle with as soon as possible.

 

There's many bugs Apple needs to tackle but don't give a shit about because they're too busy swimming in money and laughing maniacally. For example the most important checkbox in the new OSX beta feature list isn't there; NEW FUCKING FILE SYSTEM.

Remind me again, just how old is this piece of shit really? I'm doing a secure erase of the trashbin (because my laptop HDD is encrypted). Somehow I've amassed nearly 5500 files in my trashbin, no idea how the hell that happened. I've dragged in a handful, and that's it.

5 minutes later of running with a core fully loaded the whole time it's managed to delete roughly 100 files. First time it sat there for half an hour whining with the fan going full tilt without deleting a single fucking file. I had to press and hold the power button because the erase wouldn't stop when I told it to stop, nor would the Finder shut down normally with the emptying operation still running.

OSX is a giant stinky turd. It's slow, resource-hungry, unstable, and it's an ugly piece of crap too. Everything's fucking grey and dismal and boring to look at. Fullscreen app switching by swiping is neat, but that's pretty much the only thing it's got going over Windows. Microsoft owns Apple SO BAD as an OS/software developer, and other than touch functionality (and drive encryption, which MS won't do without a "trusted" computing hardware module in the computer, even with Ultimate edition), Win7 just tramples all over the ugly hog that is OSX.

Fifteen minutes it's been going at it now and it's down to 5150 files. If I let it run all night maybe it will be done by morning at this rate...

 

this made me think of the classic macintosh troll

 

There were some rumors about Apple considering using ZFS in MacOS X, but it didn't materialize. Of course, ZFS is probably not a very good choice for a consume oriented OS. It's going to be slow and the major benefits of using ZFS are not largely relevant to a normal consumer system.

To me, as a software developer, the best things about MacOS X is actually Cocoa. It's a relatively well designed API (especially if you compare it to Win32). Microsoft is catching up with .NET and WPF though. If you consider other lower level thing, including OS kernel and driver models, Microsoft is well ahead of probably almost everyone (except maybe IBM and in some case Sun).

 

Ok, the WWDC OSX presentation showed a lot of rather good features actually, including some fairly heavy iCloud integration and iOS-style messaging center (massaging would have been nice to have too btw, but like new fucking file system it seems to be on indefinite hold... )

Airplay integration was also mighty impressive I have to say. You can't judge this stuff over a streaming internet video so I don't really know how solid and reliable the screen update rate was, but the video feed seemed sufficiently smooth and low-latency to even allow (light) gaming - the presenter claimed 1:1 pixel 1080P over what I assume is either gigabit ethernet or wifi-n; this suggest using realtime video transcode, as neither these networking standards have enough innate bandwidth to allow uncompressed video at full HD framerate.

Any more competent macheads than me out there who have any additional thoughts and opinions? IMO, mountain lion is looking like a more substantial update than lion was, because I didn't care at all about the launchpad and whatever the heck all that stuff was called.

Also... CHEAP. I'm sure there's some serious grinding of teeth up north the coast at Redmond, WA, at hearing Apple's selling their OS for twenty bucks, when MS wants to charge ten times that much for Windows 8...

 

Service Packs are free...

 

Considering SPs are relatively light on new features and consist mostly of rolled-up security updates and bug fixes I don't think the comparison really is all that comparable...

 

Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Hyper-V brought RemoteFX; the subdivision of the host 3D accelerator device(s) to guest virtual machines, and subsequent transmission of such accelerated graphics (whether it be 2D or 3D accelerated) over RDP to a remote client. Dividing your single 3D card into eight VM's, and then using any one (or all) of those VM's to play 1080P accelerated content over a LAN?

Yup, a service pack.

Just sayin...

 

I didn't say there weren't new features brought out in SP:s, so there's no need for you to give examples...

Anyhow, accelerated graphics over a LAN vs. all the new stuff that's in OSX, hm, I don't know about you but I say the two don't really compare. Apple themselves claim 200 new features.

 

Accelerated graphics shared from one physical card to multiple simultaneous virtual guests is part of OSX now? Nope. Neither is it part of ESXi. Dynamic memory allocation for guests is also a pretty powerful option that neither ESXi nor OSX can provide either, which was also part of SP1. Two rather powerful examples, but I realize it's not comparable because OSX has no server product

Carry on!

 

Don't give a shit sideways about that really; I'm just one guy here, a bachelor living by myself. I don't run a corporation.

 

All I know is even though I barely use my Mac, I'll be upgrading to Mountain Lion, whereas my wife is still on Vista because buying Windows 7 is too expensive.