- Tuesday, 1 December 2009
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The man behind the curtain is turning on the PlanetLab node - Patrick Wizard of Oz Gelsinger
Snow Leopard leaves smaller footprints
APPLE HAS ANNOUNCED that the next iteration of OSX (that's 'Oh Ess Ten' to the unindoctrinated) will represent a change of focus for the Cupertino Cabal.
Snow Leopard will move away from the company's traditional update schedule of adding hundreds of new features to each release, and will concentrate on making the core services of what it describe as "the most advanced operating system in the world" more streamlined.
Obviously spurred on by user feedback to the bloated mess that is the Broken OS, Apple engineers say that they will "dramatically reduce the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space".
Snow Leopard also addresses a number of enterprise issues, including Microsoft Exchange support out of the box. Apple's proprietary apps, including Mail, Ical and Address Book will use the Exchange Web Services protocol to keep all of your business goings-on up to date both in and out of the office.
Now that everyone seems to have got the point that it's not the clock speed of your cores, but how many efficient cores you've got running at the same time, Apple will introduce Grand Central to OSX 10.6. This new technology make the whole of the OS multi-core aware and will allow developers to take full advantage of the power of multi-core systems.
Apple will also extend the 64-bit technology used in the current OS to support huge amounts of RAM (up to a theoretical limit of 16TB) which will allow applications to run entirely on Solid State memory rather than having to access clunky HDDs.
Another Apple innovation, OpenCL, will allow developers to harness unused processing power in the GPU - which unless you're watching video or playing games generally sits around twiddling its thumbs waiting for a job - for mainstream tasks.
Apple is being a bit vague about the release date, saying it will be out "in about a year" and pricing details are non-existent. µ
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Well that won't be hard, will it? They're going to remove all support for PowerPC, which means no more bloated Universal binaries - in fact the required disk space should reduce by a half!
Are you listening, Microsoft?

Billy says they spent more resources on the broken OS than the US spent sending people to the moon. If I were a MS stockholder, I would like to know how they spent so much and got such a sh*tty product.
I didnt think apple GPUs had any spare power not too mention having stuff to do but playing some video. Hell cant even get a 3870 to run on the thing!
WTF! Apple: what a bunch of presuntuous egomaniacs... the most advanced! Ha... I am pretty skeptic right now. Facts, where are the facts to support an assertion like that?
1GB on a desktop costs $.16 while the same 1GB cost $.50 on a laptop. And these are at today's prices. So how is this $2-5 valuable?
Yes, maybe if they opened up the platform to be able to use some of the newer better gpu's. As it is they are always a couple of steps behind there. They just only recently go to the 8800gt. BFD!
"Apple will also extend the 64-bit technology used in the current OS to support huge amounts of RAM (up to a theoretical limit of 16TB) which will allow applications to run entirely on Solid State memory rather than having to access clunky HDDs."

Total rubbish. Does the author know the difference between RAM and mass storage?
This new technology make the whole of the OS multi-core aware and will allow developers to take full advantage of the power of multi-core systems.

I would really like to know what the difference is between the old way and the new way. Honestly, this is getting super old. The programmers need to suck it up and learn some new damn skills. Programmers have been dealing with multi-core apps since the 80s, how the hell do you think they ran the supercomputers they had back then? They probably had a hundred or so multi-megahertz processors strung together and were expected to get them to mesh.

They need to quit sitting on their hands and get to work.
Disks are getting so much bigger, so fast, that disk space is hardly "valuable". A few hundred megabytes is hardly worth the effort. Unless, they are really doing this for other reasons, like to try to unify the iPhone/Desktop versions of the OS
This is exactly what I was hoping apple would do. The market needs this, and after the mess that is Vista, a more streamlined OSX could well be a Microsoft killer!
No, removing the PPC code should remove about 1-20% of the application. The binary compile code isn't the big part of an application. The biggest part are the ressources, picture, media... The second big part often come from language implementation. So, no removing PPC code won't give you 50% of the application size.

Good news, maybe Apple finally see Corporate as potential users! Do they?
So, will it have a proper 64-bit kernel at last? Leopard is still a 32-bit kernel with 32-bit drivers.
This direction is way better than adding more features. Smaller footprint means better performance too i think.