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laxthxdude · Sep 30, 2003, 01:53 AM

There are many cool things about Panther, but here are 2 I've come across.

1. I have an eyeTV. I also have a roommate that records and watches TV on it. With fast user switching, just setting up a shared folder with the stored recordings (under preferences) the recorded listing shows up for both of us. The only limitation is that only 1 person can have the live TV window at once. Still pretty cool...We both can schedule shows to record and we can both watch them with the user switching.

2. Zip archiving. Its fast as hell. Unzipping is even more extreme. Just downloaded the .zip of the Return of the King trailer (26MB) and it was unzipped in what was about 1 second. CPU doesn't flicker (Dual 1.25). Zipping it took about 4 seconds and the the CPU actually shows that its doing something when zipping it. Still, the unzip performance is crazy fast.

The only program that doesn't seem to work under fast user switching is iTunes that I've found so far. Office works fine with multiple users running it at once.

Other cool things:
-Safari 1.1 (v100). Has yet to crash on me. Performance is excellent.
-Noticeable under the hood improvements. The system will not allow programs to 'slow down' the system, even if they are requesting more CPU. Everything remains smooth - you almost need to have the CPU monitor open and watch it to be aware that something is misbehaving (Microsoft RDP does constantly...)
- DVD player v4.0. Works great on this system.
- Toast 6 works well as of build 7B74.
- Preview will not display PDFs made for Acrobat 6 (PDF v.1.5?)
- Samba is improved, but still not 100%.

Shaping up to be a very cool upgrade. Most users, I would say you can expect about a 15-25% speed increase by upgrading to Panther. That includes having journaling on. Later.

arekkusu · Sep 30, 2003, 02:14 AM

It's not that ZIP is fast. It's that Stuffit is HORRIBLY SLOW.

LZW/Huffman compression ought to be completely transparent on a 1GHz CPU. The limiting factor is the disk speed.

laxthxdude · Sep 30, 2003, 02:24 AM

Well, in comparision to using Winzip on a PC, I'm impressed with the speed... (And I do agree that StuffIt is very lacking...)

- - e r i k - - · Sep 30, 2003, 02:45 AM

Originally posted by laxthxdude:
Other cool things:- Preview will not display PDFs made for Acrobat 6 (PDF v.1.5?)

Is that a cool thing

Chuckit · Sep 30, 2003, 03:43 AM

Originally posted by laxthxdude:
Other cool things:
- Preview will not display PDFs made for Acrobat 6 (PDF v.1.5?)

Awesome!

I don't want none o' them Acrobat 6 PDFs. Unnatural, those.

ambush · Sep 30, 2003, 07:09 AM

Originally posted by laxthxdude:
2. Zip archiving. Its fast as hell. Unzipping is even more extreme. Just downloaded the .zip of the Return of the King trailer (26MB) and it was unzipped in what was about 1 second. CPU doesn't flicker (Dual 1.25). Zipping it took about 4 seconds and the the CPU actually shows that its doing something when zipping it. Still, the unzip performance is crazy fast.

Yes, but that's because it was already compressed, I believe.

You don't zip a compressed movie

Try the same thing with a 4gb uncompressed TIFF and come back with the results

Wevah · Sep 30, 2003, 08:50 AM

Originally posted by - - e r i k - -:
Is that a cool thing

I'm guessing it was a typo, and "not" should be "now".

Ken Masters · Sep 30, 2003, 10:21 AM

Originally posted by ambush:
Yes, but that's because it was already compressed, I believe.

You don't zip a compressed movie

Try the same thing with a 4gb uncompressed TIFF and come back with the results

True,

if you see ratio of the compression its probably less than 2%.

Try zipping a .jpeg and you get nearly no difference in file size. Therefore the process is fast as hell, because really its not comopressing.

- - e r i k - - · Sep 30, 2003, 10:33 AM

Originally posted by Ken Masters:
True,

if you see ratio of the compression its probably less than 2%.

Try zipping a .jpeg and you get nearly no difference in file size. Therefore the process is fast as hell, because really its not comopressing.

Panther compression benchmarks

pantalaimon · Sep 30, 2003, 02:33 PM

will battery life on the new powerbooks improve with Panther? I've heard rumours but is there anything concrete about this?

CharlesS · Sep 30, 2003, 03:33 PM

Originally posted by laxthxdude:
The system will not allow programs to 'slow down' the system, even if they are requesting more CPU. Everything remains smooth - you almost need to have the CPU monitor open and watch it to be aware that something is misbehaving (Microsoft RDP does constantly...)

I am skeptical of this... if some app starts paging like crazy, it is going to slow the system down.

iJed · Sep 30, 2003, 04:12 PM

Originally posted by ambush:
Try the same thing with a 4gb uncompressed TIFF and come back with the results

Just imagine this in Stuffit. It would take all week!