Mac Pro, Mac OS X Virtual Desktops Announced at WWDC 647
haym37 writes "Of the many announcements yet to come at WWDC, the first is the announcement of the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro contains two Intel Xeons, up to 3 GHz, and is supposed to be 1.6x to 2.1x the speed of the PowerMac G5 quad. It can hold up to 2 TB of internal storage and up to 16 GB of memory. The graphics card can be up to a Radeon x1900 or an FX4500. The case will be the same as the PowerMac." MacRumors.com is providing running coverage from the floor (Note: "[U]pdates will be automatically inserted at the top of the updates section. Do not reload manually."), including another announcement that OS X will include virtual desktops. What a great idea!
Minor Quibble... (Score:5, Informative)
The outside of the case is almost the same as the G5 case...the inside is completely different, and has a pretty sweet setup for the drive bays, not to mention the 8 ram slots and room for a full length graphics card.
Apple pages (Score:5, Informative)
and the mac pros are here [apple.com]
i noticed nothing was said about the finder.. shame.
30" Cinema Display price reduction (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I agree (Score:4, Informative)
Full Write-up (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My keynote thoughts so far... (Score:5, Informative)
Are you sure it's Dashboard and not the widgets? I installed SuperKaramba and a few changes [revis.co.uk] to the widget files dropped CPU usage from 30%+ to under 1%.
If the widgets for Dashboard are also written by non-programmers they may be suffering from the same problems of polling too frequently. Why on earth do you need to update a display of how much hard disk space there is available every 100ms anyway!
Re:FP? (Score:4, Informative)
Let me write a paper to explain why this is on-topic(*sigh*).
While the summary of the Article states what Apple is adding, it specifically points fun at Virtual Desktops. The link for Virtual Desktops goes off to the Wikipedia page which shows us tons of applications and even information that Apple just announced this(go Wikipedia). So, the parent is saying... why the heck are we giving Apple a hardtime for implementing Virtual Desktops when "our" open-sourced version of OSX(GNUStep) have not been updated nearly as aggresively with the new functionality.
This is a very relevant post because this is insightful in regards to the Article Summary. How can we say, "thats a great idea... point to existing example", without saying... "man... i wish the community would implement some of these other things in OSX such as Spotlight, Dashboard, Expose, etc etc etc". I wish that GNUStep could at least compile my Cocoa applications.
Re:Sounds like a nice GUI for versioning though (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, everytime you saved a file you'd get a new version; if I saved file.ext, I actually got something like file.ext;17, and accessing file.ext would get the latest version, in this case 17. You had commands to purge files or entire directories - that is, delete everything but the latest version.
And this at a time where a 40MB hard-disk was a beast the size of a washing machine. I can't believe I had to wait about 30 years to get this nice little feature back... oh wait, we just got a preview, I'll have to wait a little longer to get my hands on it.
Re:What? No SLI configurations available? (Score:3, Informative)
- 2 x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB [Add $150]
- 3 x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB [Add $300]
- ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI) [Add $350]
- 4 x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB [Add $450]
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB, Stereo 3D (2 x dual-link DVI) [Add $1650]
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/Re:Photocopied! (Score:5, Informative)
In all fairness, Leopard's Spaces implementation [apple.com] looks like a quantum improvement on other virtual desktop managers I've used. (Granted, it's been awhile since I tried any since I was never very satisfied.) None of the other VDMs I recall were quite "Mac-like" enough--by that I don't mean flashy and animated, but easy to use and understand.
They borrowed some design ideas from Exposé, it looks like; you can view all four of your desktops at once; you can drag-and-drop windows from one to the other; and they all use the same Dock instead of using different Docks for each desktop, which is the one thing I always wanted.
See also Leopard's Time Machine [apple.com]. There's a dozen ways you could make this kind of backup-restore tool just as functional; you could probably make it flashy and animated a dozen different ways as well. Leopard's approach uses just enough flashiness to make it easy-to-use.
Re:My keynote thoughts so far... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple's appears to be a versioning file system, rather than a "save everything in a hidden partition every x days" hack.
But thanks for letting us know how great XP is.
Re:My keynote thoughts so far... (Score:4, Informative)
Time Machine is more akin to the Backup.app offered with
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My keynote thoughts so far... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My keynote thoughts so far... (Score:3, Informative)
Failed, Time Machine is a per-file backup and versioning for every single user file.
The only things that "have it" are fully journaling filesystems and full-blown version control systems (think Subversion).
System Restore doesn't come even close.
Re:I agree (Score:3, Informative)
Okay I don't know what level of expertise you have with non-Windows OS's so I'll assume none and go from there. Say you want to launch photoshop. In Windows you go to the start menu or the Windows explorer, navigate to it and run it. To do this you use the mouse. It takes more time than you think, since when you're using the mouse, you concentration is focused. If you actually watch someone else do it, this takes a little time, but nothing to unreasonable, unless they actually have to hunt through menus to find it, like they sometimes do. For the few programs you use most frequently, say top 10, Windows has them right there for you. And maybe you remember the locations of the next ten most common. Then there are the ones you rarely use which you actually have to hunt for in the start menu, maybe in Start->Programs->Utilities->Ubisoft->Monkey.exe or something.
On OS X the search feature is fast enough that it is easier to just use it for everything including launching most applications. Sort of the way Google is faster than trying 3 URLs before finding some company's fairly obvious domain name. You hit cmd-space and type the first few letters of the application or file name. then you use the arrow keys to select it (usually the top item) and hit enter. The whole thing is really, really fast when you try it, much faster than using the start menu in Windows. The recent items feature refines this slightly, so that if you have say 15 images beginning with the same letters, it will pull them up, but put the most recent ones on top. This is not the most recent 10 items you've used, but the most recent 10 items beginning with whatever letters you entered. The granularity and the interface mechanism are the difference.
All in all this is pretty cool, unless you don't have any idea what the name or contents of the file or program you are looking for are, then you have to fall back to using it like a traditional search (with content) or use the hierarchical directories for organization. I personally find it useful to organize my files and folders in a start menu like way, for when I want to launch that audio editing app whose name I don't recall at all. Then I just right-click on the icon on my dock and navigate to Audio and select it. Both methods are better for different instances, but they are not the same thing by any means. I hope that helps to clarify it for you.
Re:I'm a mac fanboy but (Score:3, Informative)
the whole "time machine" which is really just a versioning system from the looks of it. VMS had that years and years ago, it's nothing new.
VMS versioning was a "never overwrite" system, not a real versioning system as we understand the term today. Time Machine fuses the concept of a modern versioning system with automated backup and recovery. I've been doing something similar to Time Machine on my Mac Powerbook, using CVS to make remote backups of certain working directories to a server, which lets me recover not only by date, but also recover deleted files (which VMS versioning does not, or at least did not in the early 90s, last I used it). Time Machine promises to make this slicker because it autocommits (no more losing intermediate versions between commits), and makes rollbacks a lot easier.
My main concern is if you are doodling around in some package like iPhoto that auto-saves your changes, and you are making all sorts of experimental crops and enhancements to photos and then undoing them, is it going to save every single one? That's going to gobble a lot of disk space.
The other concern is that my homegrowm Time Machine doubles as a fileshare between multiple computers. That is, I can push data into the backup from one machine, and restore it on another, and can even go both ways simultaneously, relying on CVS to detect and resolve conflicts. I don't expect Time Machine will have this functionality.
Another Time Machine (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Time Machine == ZFS ? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.h
"Time Machine will back up every night at midnight, unless you select a different time from this menu."
That's not a versioning file system, alas.
Re:"MS steals from us" (Score:2, Informative)
Re: Copying Scorecard (Score:3, Informative)
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
* documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
They didn't, thus they threw away the license.
Re:My keynote thoughts so far... (Score:3, Informative)
There is a good Ars description of it here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060730-738
Here's an excerpt:
I thought at the time, "that looks quite nifty" despite the rather negative spin from Ars. Glad to see that Leopard will have something similar, hopefully superior.
developer discount (Score:2, Informative)
Regular price: $18,332
Student price: $16,003
Devloper price: $15,144
So by getting a Select membership for $500, you save over $2,600 over the regular price and $1,800 over the student price.
Re:My keynote thoughts so far... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:30" Cinema Display price reduction (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I've found several at that price that have DVI. Such as this one: Samsung 205BW [outpost.com] (hopefully the link works).
Re:My keynote thoughts so far... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Photocopied! (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe the guy is here at WWDC with the other 4000 Mac developers and happened to see it live at the Keynote, like me.
It *does* look awfully nice, nicer than most X11 WM implementations of virtual desktops so far that I've seen.
Having live previews of your applications (movies that continue playing, etc) is a great feature, and you can move them between desktops while they're updating live. Also, the system will automatically switch you to the relevant desktop when you click on an app that isn't running on the current one.
X can definitely do live previews, *if* you have Composite and a decent compmgr (like compiz) and something like Xgl or AIGLX. However, these technologies are still in their infancy and far from ready for mass consumption, and many of the video cards lack the proper support for accelerating all the nifty 3D goodness that the new toys require.
As usual, Apple is doing a good job, with some (in hindsight) obvious improvements. It'll be fun to see how soon we have the same features implemented on Linux, in X.
You wanted Linux: Boot Camp (Score:3, Informative)
The Apple Store, http://store.apple.com./ [store.apple.com]
I believe some folks have BootCamp working with Linux, http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_B
Re:a political joke? (Score:3, Informative)
Project Snapshots
Record the state of your project anytime, and restore it instantly. Experiment with new features without spending time or brain cells committing them to a source control system. Like saving a game in Civilization 4, Xcode 3.0 lets you go back in time without repercussions. If only reality worked this way at the Pentagon...
Re:Photocopied! (Score:3, Informative)
Try Desktop Manager [berlios.de], it is perfectly integrated into Mac OS X.