[andreas_g4]

I'm converting an .avi divx file to VCD using toast for the first time. And I'm surprised how well OS X performs, especially on my very low end Mac, an iBook 600/16/640. I have hidden Toast and, besides the cpu monitor that is up at 100% of course, I don't even notice that process!
I am doing some light Photoshop stuff, surfing, email, kdx, Filemaker, Acrobat etc. and it works like a charm... I think the 640 MB RAM have to get a credit, but OS X is totally awsome!

I needed to say this.

[sniffer]

Yep. It is great!


The ram help you a lot I am sure.

..

I need some more..

[-Q-]

I've found it to be only OK. Some of it may be related to the apps I use, but I still get the beachball too often when I have a few apps open and trying to do work between them.

[Kiddo311]

d@mmit i gotta join in:

my machine is a dual-gig quicksilver with a gig of ram so it should be pretty fast, but the multi-tasking of this machine is just out of the hook, i mean off the ballpark... ;-)

seriously: i can throw so much stuff at this beauty without killing it:
- rip a dvd to .vob-file
- encode another .vob-file into divx movie
- listen to streaming music over itunes
- getting files uploaded to my local ftp-server from a friend (which i, of course set up with the click of a mouse =)
- sending a .sit-file with pics to another friend over icq
- VIRTUAL PC RUNNING IN THE BACKGROUND
- of course mail, ichat, safari etc. all open in the background
- and still: work in photoshop - without any noticeable slowdown whatsoever!!!

i mean, everything in the computer is working at that time, the network, the processors, the disks, but there simply is Z-E-R-O slowdown.

i love it

[/happyrant]

had to get this out of my system, don't want to show off, i just thought it fitted with the spirit of this thread =)

[fetopher]

Originally posted by Kiddo311:
d@mmit i gotta join in:

my machine is a dual-gig quicksilver with a gig of ram so it should be pretty fast, but the multi-tasking of this machine is just out of the hook, i mean off the ballpark... ;-)

seriously: i can throw so much stuff at this beauty without killing it:
- rip a dvd to .vob-file
- encode another .vob-file into divx movie
- listen to streaming music over itunes
- getting files uploaded to my local ftp-server from a friend (which i, of course set up with the click of a mouse =)
- sending a .sit-file with pics to another friend over icq
- VIRTUAL PC RUNNING IN THE BACKGROUND
- of course mail, ichat, safari etc. all open in the background
- and still: work in photoshop - without any noticeable slowdown whatsoever!!!

i mean, everything in the computer is working at that time, the network, the processors, the disks, but there simply is Z-E-R-O slowdown.

i love it

[/happyrant]

had to get this out of my system, don't want to show off, i just thought it fitted with the spirit of this thread =)

Yeah, I have the dual 1.25 with 2 gigs of ram. I have never felt a slow down and all day long I am doing everything under the sun. I think that Apple not having the most powerful processors in the world with the G4 had to make its OS take full advantage of whatever speed was there. OS X is just amazing in the way all of the elements of the system work together to stay out of the way. I cant even imagine how OS X will use the G5s. Wow. I use both macs and PCs, and although PCs are faster at one task in many cases, they can never multi-task. On my PC I cannot expect to be applying a filter in Photoshop and do anything else, even browse the web. Ridiculous.

[Kiddo311]

you have to much money on your hands

[::maroma::]

Totally agree. And especially having to put up with OS 9's (and earlier) "multi-tasking", OS X's is just amazing to me. I recently upgraded my G4/500 Sawtooth to a 1.2GHz G4 (upgrade card). Now multi-tasking is almost transparent. When doing multiple tasks, I don't notice any slowdown. Can't wait to get G5 and multi-multi-task!

Multitasking is one of my top 5 favorite features for OS X.

[fetopher]

Originally posted by Kiddo311:
you have to much money on your hands

If that's aimed at me then half of it is for work. Its a family business, so I am very blessed, and I love toys. Mac toys.

[clarkgoble]

I have to agree. While I think that XP is often ignorantly badmouthed by far too many OSX users, this is a very valid concern.

All too often in XP I can't even switch to a different application for a full second while in Internet Explorer. Likewise Outlook "hangs" here and there leading to choppiness. I've also had choppiness in various other applications.

It is odd that the worst offenders typically appear to be Office or worst yet Internet Explorer.

Yes Safari crashes a bit. (Oddly more now than in the initial betas) And the Finder and the spinning wheel of death are notorious. But even when they are screwed up, switching to other applications is smooth and flawless. I just wish that this was the case under XP.

And note that initially I thought this was just due to a relatively slow system - a PIII 500 MHz box. But I just upgrades to an Athalon 2400+ and notice exactly the same thing.

While IE on XP is superior for many things (Flash, scrolling, etc.) is really does "hang" much more. (By hanging I mean stuck waiting for some element on a page while not letting me scroll or so forth) I'd actually say that IE and Safari crash or fully hang at about the same rate at the moment.

[DeathMan]

I agree 100%. With Windows 2k, sometimes you can't even print and go surf the web. this is lame.

Try scanning, printing, and watching a streaming video file all at the same time. Watch XP come to its knees.

In OS X, you can be Installing a quicktime update or some other lowish level component, scanning, capturing video, or whatever you want, and everything runs just peachy.

I love that.

OS X truly is the best Desktop operating system. Period. Now we even have the best hardware. Hmm. Imagine that. :smugsmilie:

[WJMoore]

Originally posted by DeathMan:
OS X truly is the best Desktop operating system. Period. Now we even have the best hardware. Hmm. Imagine that. :smugsmilie:

Yeah I feel exactly the same - now to get my hands on one of those 2 x 2Giggers...

WM

[LightWaver-67]

Raising hand in agreement...!

I have a mere G4/533Mhz... but I loaded it with 1.5GB RAM and it still AMAZES me that I can go into LightWave... start a high-res render... then minimise the app and continue to work in Photoshop AND Illustrator AND Dreamweaver AND have iTunes running, iChat running, iCal running, Mail app running and Safari running... and you'd NEVER know LW was rendering in the background.

The issue with switching between Adobe apps exists for me no matter WHAT I'm doing, so I don't see it as a multi-tasking issue. I could have ONLY PShop and Illustrator open and it still will give me a beach-ball switching between them.

LOVING the way I can work in OSX as compared to OS9 and previous.

Ever try doing anything else on your Mac running OS9 while rendering in Lightwave...? Sure... it's "Possible"... but not in the LEAST bit productive and would usually result in a system crash... so basically... I'd set a render... and not touch ANYTHING for fear of scaring it.



Long-live the new era of Mac OS'es... !

[Gee4orce]

I have to agree with you all - but on the other hand, it's amazing how much a badly written app can bring the system to it's knees.

My g/f was doing some work in SPSS 11 for Mac. It was so slow that it was actually quicker to run SPSS for PC in Virtual PC ! And attempting to cut and paste some graphs into Word just ground everything to a halt.

Still, force quit always worked

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

True but for the most part iPhoto and the Finder bring a Dual 1.25 to its knees sometimes.

[Sage]

I'm always amazed at how well OS X works on my lil' 600 mhz iBook. In OS 9 and earlier, I almost never "multi-tasked", because I was worried about bringing the system down (especially with those ridiculous application crashes where you'd get a useless Force Quit dialog box ), but X is just amazing. Actually, in some ways I tend to get less done, because I'm constantly switching back and forth to the Internet!

[stew]

If you think this is impressive, go install GNU/Linux with the preempt patch.
OS X' multitasking is just this - multitasking. It's not very impressive once you've seen BeOS, a well-tuned Linux or even an Amiga running at 50MHz. I have seen OS X down to a crawl more than once and I can reproduce it reliably if necessary.

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by stew:
I have seen OS X down to a crawl more than once and I can reproduce it reliably if necessary.

Someone always has to rain on a parade. Oh well, OS X is very impressive with multi-tasking and I don't give a rat's behind about Linux <except the ones i admin> or an Amiga.

[iJed]

Originally posted by stew:
If you think this is impressive, go install GNU/Linux with the preempt patch.
OS X' multitasking is just this - multitasking. It's not very impressive once you've seen BeOS, a well-tuned Linux or even an Amiga running at 50MHz. I have seen OS X down to a crawl more than once and I can reproduce it reliably if necessary.

There should be little to no difference in multitasking performance between Mac OS X and Linux. While Mach may be slightly slower at task switching than the monolithic Linux kernel on modern hardware the difference should be so small it is practically immeasurable. I also remember reading that Mach supports kernel level preemption just like your Linux preempt patch gives you.

In the case of the Amiga, if you are talking about a pre-Linux based OS, then you are simply talking rubbish. The original Amiga OS, if I recall correctly, had no multitasking whatsoever and had to run something called "Workbench" on top of it for multitasking. I may be wrong about some of the details here since I never really used Amigas. It may have never had an OS at all for booting normal games and apps.

Unlike Linux the BeOS appears to be an impressive performer. It supported multiprocessing from the word go and appears to be lightning fast. It does however probably lack the optimizations of Mach and the Linux kernel which make them extremely good at multitasking. I also think its microkernel based like Mac OS X so this apparently makes it slightly slower than monolithic kernels like Linux. BeOS is also not a multiuser system and it lacks most of the advanced features of OS X.

What you may be talking about here is the huge overhead of the graphics subsystem on OS X which is slower than X but far far more advanced.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

I agree that nothing comes close to what BeOS was 5 years ago.

[stew]

Originally posted by iJed:
In the case of the Amiga, if you are talking about a pre-Linux based OS, then you are simply talking rubbish. The original Amiga OS, if I recall correctly, had no multitasking whatsoever

http://www.google.com/search?q=amiga...e+multitasking

I also think its microkernel based like Mac OS X so this apparently makes it slightly slower than monolithic kernels like Linux.

Neither OS X nor BeOS has a true microkernel.

Besides, there's more than just what happens at kernel level: Once OS X is busy swapping with some additional CPU action (e.g. a heavy 3D rendering task using lots of RAM), UI tasks get left behind - the mouse gets jerky, keyboard input is lagging way behind. Furthermore, a lot of Carbon apps need the scheduler's attention to move or resize their window since that is being handled in their main event loop (just like in Windows) and when the main thread is busy or has a too low priority you cannot move the window - X11 or BeOS handle that in seperate tasks. According to Apple, quite a few parts of Carbon's UI toolbox are not reentrant (which means, only one process running on the computer can use them at the same time). Also, some apps ported from OS 9 are using very multitasking-unfriendly habits like polling for events. MacOS X has a limit to 100 processes per user and will crash if a user process is spawning too many threads.
The default priorities in OS X are not optimized for a low-latency UI experience. Why else would you think that there are several OS X "system enhancers" available that raise the priority of the UI processes?

[iJed]

Originally posted by stew:

http://www.google.com/search?q=amiga...e+multitasking

OK you appear to be correct that the Amiga did have preemptive multitasking. However my bet is that it lacked memory protection since the 68000 didn't have an MMU.

Slightly off-topic but interesting nonetheless is that the Apple Lisa had preemptive tasking and memory protection. I wonder if it used a modified 68K? This page (which was my first result on Google) provides some info on that.

Neither OS X nor BeOS has a true microkernel.

Besides, there's more than just what happens at kernel level: Once OS X is busy swapping with some additional CPU action (e.g. a heavy 3D rendering task using lots of RAM), UI tasks get left behind - the mouse gets jerky, keyboard input is lagging way behind. Furthermore, a lot of Carbon apps need the scheduler's attention to move or resize their window since that is being handled in their main event loop (just like in Windows) and when the main thread is busy or has a too low priority you cannot move the window - X11 or BeOS handle that in seperate tasks. According to Apple, quite a few parts of Carbon's UI toolbox are not reentrant (which means, only one process running on the computer can use them at the same time). Also, some apps ported from OS 9 are using very multitasking-unfriendly habits like polling for events. MacOS X has a limit to 100 processes per user and will crash if a user process is spawning too many threads.
The default priorities in OS X are not optimized for a low-latency UI experience. Why else would you think that there are several OS X "system enhancers" available that raise the priority of the UI processes?

I realize that some of Carbon is not reentrant but neither is Cocoa or Swing (although AWT was/is). I'm quite certain that some of Win32 UI functions will not reentrant too.

Apps ported from OS 9 should adopt the new Carbon event model to avoid event polling. Its not Apple's fault if they continue to use the Classic model.

All of this may make Mac OS X "feel" unresponsive to the user but it does not make the OS poor at multitasking itself.

[stew]

Originally posted by iJed:
However my bet is that it lacked memory protection since the 68000 didn't have an MMU.

You are correct about that. There were developer tools like "Enforcer" that implemented partial mem protection on systems with MMUs (e.g. on the Amiga 3000), but that was nowhere near the real thing.

Slightly off-topic but interesting nonetheless is that the Apple Lisa had preemptive tasking and memory protection. I wonder if it used a modified 68K? This page (which was my first result on Google) provides some info on that.

This is a widespread myth that I myself believed once. You can find soures confirming and sources denying it. However, Google will help you finding the original Lisa developer docs which clearly indicate that the Lisa had cooperative and not preemptive multitasking.

Most sources I found seem to agree that the Lisa had an MMU, which was an additional chip to the 68k CPU (much like FPUs used to be coprocessors for a while).

I realize that some of Carbon is not reentrant but neither is Cocoa or Swing (although AWT was/is). I'm quite certain that some of Win32 UI functions will not reentrant too.

You always win when you compare to the worst (Win32). For example BeOS is almost entirely reentrant and thread-safe. Linux' libc is reentrant. Darwin is working towards it, but they would have to almost fully rewrite Carbon and Cocoa to make them reentrant.

The next Quicktime revision is supposed to become reentrant, the current version however is not.
http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1088.html

All of this may make Mac OS X "feel" unresponsive to the user but it does not make the OS poor at multitasking itself.

IMO a limit of 100 procsses per user limit and the lack of thread-safeness in large parts of the API do not make "OS X multitasking that good". These things are acceptable for MacOS 9 and Win32 as they are really old APIs, but if Apple really wants to claim the title "most advanced OS" for OS X, they better start improving that. IMO, thread-safeness should be standard in 21st century software, especially when OS/2, AmigaOS and BeOS were able to do that in the 80s and 90s.

Sure OS X is technically a lot better than MacOS 9 and wins over Windows in some parts, but that doesn't mean that there's no room for improvement.

[bamburg dunes]

Completely off-topic here, but I'vegot an old Amiga 3000 lying around. For fun I loaded up Lightwave 3.5, and it blew my mind, once again, how it could do 25fps wireframe previews. Amazing even for today.

[clarkgoble]

The earlier poster is right. It is quite possible for a poorly coded Sys9 port to screw up the responsiveness of the system. I can't think of any of these still widely used and to be honest I can't recall the last time Classic booted up on my system.

Compare this with XP where there seem to frequently be applications that a poorly behaved - sadly far too many from within Microsoft itself.

On the other hand I'd probably want to go back and (ugh) rerun Appleworks before slamming Microsoft too badly.

Realistically though I find that for the typical applications I run - even including MS Office on both platforms - that OSX multitasking simply shines.

Yeah there is the inevitable comparison to Linux. But typically one isn't running the same class of applications. Even with OpenOffice though I've found ways to screw up Linux multitasking. Probably just a bug or two. But it does happen occasionally.

Regarding BeOS or Amiga. Realize that there are *huge* aspects of functionality not present in those operating systems - i.e. multiple users and security. There were so many unfinished or non-existent aspects to BeOS that I wonder why it is brought up. Yeah, if you strip out half the things an OS has to do then you certainly can make it faster. That isn't necessarily a good thing. I know all the Sys9 zealots will cry, "but I don't need multiple users or security." Fine. Go back to Sys9. Had Apple simply added pre-emptive multithreading to Sys9 and kept everything else Apple would likely be dead now. The great strength of OSX is its Unix underpinnings.

Regarding thread safeness. Aren't the non-reentrant APIs more or less well known and primarily provided for backwards compatibility? New programs shouldn't be calling such functions. Can you think of a call that is necessary to be called by a modern program?

[stew]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
[B]Yeah there is the inevitable comparison to Linux. But typically one isn't running the same class of applications. Even with OpenOffice though I've found ways to screw up Linux multitasking. Probably just a bug or two. But it does happen occasionally.[/b

At least GNU/Linux is smart enough to handle window moving seperate from the application's event loop. I don't like having a Carbon app's window that I can't move out of the just because the app thinks it has more important things to do.

Regarding BeOS or Amiga. Realize that there are *huge* aspects of functionality not present in those operating systems - i.e. multiple users and security. There were so many unfinished or non-existent aspects to BeOS that I wonder why it is brought up. Yeah, if you strip out half the things an OS has to do then you certainly can make it faster.

We were not talking about speed. We were talking about multitasking in regard of latencies. Well, if you need multiuser capabilites (where I don't know how that would ever affect your system's scheduler), try QNX and see how responsive (or not) that is.

Regarding thread safeness. Aren't the non-reentrant APIs more or less well known and primarily provided for backwards compatibility? New programs shouldn't be calling such functions. Can you think of a call that is necessary to be called by a modern program?

Let's see...who is not thread-safe?
Quicktime
Carbon's HI Toolbox
Speech Recognition Manager
The following Cocoa Classes:
NSArchiver
NSMutableCharacterSet
NSAutoreleasePool
NSMutableData
NSBundle
NSMutableDictionary
NSCoder
NSMutableSet
NSCountedSet
NSMutableString
NSDateFormatter
NSNotificationQueue
NSEnumerator
NSNumberFormatter
NSFileHandle
NSPipe
NSFileManager
NSPort
NSFormatter
NSProcessInfo
NSHashTable functions
NSRunLoop
NSHost
NSScanner
NSInvocation
NSTask
NSJavaSetup functions
NSUnarchiver
NSMapTable functions
NSUndoManager
NSMutableArray
User name and home directory functions
NSMutableAttributedString_
(source)

If your modern program can live without those...

[Don Pickett]

Comparing OS X to BeOS is silly, as BeOS is dead as a doornail. If you want to compare OS X, compare it to the others OS's which is competes against - Winders and Linux.

A Porsche 917 will destroy any car you can buy, too.

[clarkgoble]

Some of those functions aren't quite fair. If you lock the variables in question they work fine with threads.

I didn't know about Quicktime.

Hopefully a lot of this will change with Panther. On the other hand, with the exception of some window handling, I think Apple's idea of threading is to have the "functionality" of your program in multiple threads and then the UI in an other thread. That programming model works rather well.

On the other hand, to be perfectly fair, it is also what allows one Finder window's "hanging" to hang up all other Finder windows, if the multithreading isn't well thought out. (i.e. if the tasks aren't truly handed off to a separate thread)

[stew]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
Comparing OS X to BeOS is silly, as BeOS is dead as a doornail. If you want to compare OS X, compare it to the others OS's which is competes against - Winders and Linux.

What does commercial success have to do with the implementation of multitasking? Is "It's dead, Jim" the only answer you have? Anyhow, if it makes you feel better, I'll let you know that BeOS is under continued commercial development and that you can buy your copy of it: http://www.yellowtab.com/
Not bad for a dead one, eh?

[andreas_g4]

Originally posted by stew:
What does commercial success have to do with the implementation of multitasking? Is "It's dead, Jim" the only answer you have? Anyhow, if it makes you feel better, I'll let you know that BeOS is under continued commercial development and that you can buy your copy of it: http://www.yellowtab.com/
Not bad for a dead one, eh?

Even if a number of people is using be software, it's dead anyway in the long run.
Of course, BeOS was a superior system in many ways (and still is), the lack of support from software developers is too evident.

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by stew:
What does commercial success have to do with the implementation of multitasking? Is "It's dead, Jim" the only answer you have? Anyhow, if it makes you feel better, I'll let you know that BeOS is under continued commercial development and that you can buy your copy of it: http://www.yellowtab.com/
Not bad for a dead one, eh?

Because BeOS is moot. The vast majority of computer users have never, and will never, hear of BeOS. Comparisons only matter if they compare the OSes the vast majority of people actually use in their daily lives: OS X, Winders and Linux.

You can compare a Honda Accord to a F1 car, and the Accord will fare poorly, but the comparison doesn't matter, as people will still buy Hondas.

[stew]

Sure it does matter, because one day Honda might be using carbon fibre technology that was developed for the F1 car.

Screw car analogies. Should Apple have ignored Xerox' GUI advantage just because the system wasn't a commercial success? What the heck does market share have to do with a discussion about OS engineering anyway?

[stew]

Originally posted by andreas_g4:
Even if a number of people is using be software, it's dead anyway in the long run.

By the way, am I the only one who thinks it's funny to read that in a Mac forum?
Just look at how many people call the Mac a dead platform because of sinking market share, and what did people say about NeXT? Don't tell me any MacOS X user does actually believe market share is related to technical quality.

[MrBS]

It's really amazing when you go back and use os 9. You do a little thing that will take a few minutes, say "hmm, this'll take a few minutes". In OSX, you just go browse the web for awhile, or catch up on some email lists, or play a game or dink around somewhere else. In 9, you just get to sit there, thinking "hmm, this sure is taking a few minutes....".

~BS

[Brass]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
Because BeOS is moot. The vast majority of computer users have never, and will never, hear of BeOS. Comparisons only matter if they compare the OSes the vast majority of people actually use in their daily lives: OS X, Winders and Linux.

You can compare a Honda Accord to a F1 car, and the Accord will fare poorly, but the comparison doesn't matter, as people will still buy Hondas.

What a ridiculous analogy in this context. So an F1 car with millions of dollars worth of backing performs well, but isn't used on the road. No @#%$! I bet if it was legal, prices would drop and avery second wealthy person would buy one.

I think that comparisons to BeOS or any other OS are very reasonable. Even more so because BeOS produced an operating system that was almost full-featured, on a very slim budget, and it's performance was far superior to that of OS X, despite Apple's much larger pool or resources.

The fact the few people used BeOS is irrelevant. The point is that Be could do it, why can't Apple?

The answer may indeed be as other people have suggested that Mac OS X has many features that BeOS didn't and these are what slows it down. Personally, I think that's a crock, but at least it's a valid argument.

[damosan]

Originally posted by stew:
I have seen OS X down to a crawl more than once and I can reproduce it reliably if necessary.

When you live on the edge you're bound to get cut.

[damosan]

Originally posted by iJed:
OK you appear to be correct that the Amiga did have preemptive multitasking. However my bet is that it lacked memory protection since the 68000 didn't have an MMU.

What Stew forgot to mention was that Amiga multitasking sucked in a major fashion. At least initially when running on the 68000.

Well...that's not true. It multitasked one application real well.

Once you started loading others the performance of the whole machine pretty much died.

Later Amiga's were a different story...not much different mind you...but better than the original 68k Amigas by far.

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by Brass:
What a ridiculous analogy in this context. So an F1 car with millions of dollars worth of backing performs well, but isn't used on the road. No @#%$! I bet if it was legal, prices would drop and avery second wealthy person would buy one.

I think that comparisons to BeOS or any other OS are very reasonable. Even more so because BeOS produced an operating system that was almost full-featured, on a very slim budget, and it's performance was far superior to that of OS X, despite Apple's much larger pool or resources.

The fact the few people used BeOS is irrelevant. The point is that Be could do it, why can't Apple?

The answer may indeed be as other people have suggested that Mac OS X has many features that BeOS didn't and these are what slows it down. Personally, I think that's a crock, but at least it's a valid argument.

Because you are comparing a hypothetical with reality. BeOS worked very well in a very narrow set of circumstances. If never had widespread adoption and was missing many features which is would have needed to gain widespread adoption. For all intents and purposes, it was an F1 car: very good at a very narrow set of criteria. One of the reasons Apple chose NeXT over Be was because Apple knew than it was much easier to make NeXTStop/OpenStep into a full-featured OS than Be.

You don't seem to understand why I keep mentioning the three major, real world OSes; they are full-featured, real world OSes which work, and which people use. They have all the good and bad things which come from being full-featured OSes, something Be never was, and never will be. It's easy to compare something which has to work in the Real World with something which doesn't and find fault.

[kmkkid]

*sigh* Sometimes I wish Apple had chosen BeOS to develop off of. It was such a great OS, and had ALOT of potential. BeOS 6 may very well have brought BeOS back into the sun, unfortunatly, things didnt go as planned


Chris

[Brass]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
Because you are comparing a hypothetical with reality. BeOS worked very well in a very narrow set of circumstances. If never had widespread adoption and was missing many features which is would have needed to gain widespread adoption. For all intents and purposes, it was an F1 car: very good at a very narrow set of criteria. One of the reasons Apple chose NeXT over Be was because Apple knew than it was much easier to make NeXTStop/OpenStep into a full-featured OS than Be.

You don't seem to understand why I keep mentioning the three major, real world OSes; they are full-featured, real world OSes which work, and which people use. They have all the good and bad things which come from being full-featured OSes, something Be never was, and never will be. It's easy to compare something which has to work in the Real World with something which doesn't and find fault.

Well, I think the BeOS was quite full featured. Many people used it as their primary OS and some as their only OS for some time. I found it did everything I need and it did everything better than OS X. The only things it lacked was applications.

Is used the BeOS quite extensively for a few years and never once found the OS to be lacking in features.

BeOS was NOT like an F1. It was more like an obscure new cheap asian brand of car that was far more economical and performed better than any well-known brand of car, and even better than the F1.

[iJed]

Originally posted by stew:
By the way, am I the only one who thinks it's funny to read that in a Mac forum?

I have to agree that this is a very strange thing to see on a Mac forum.

However I prefer having a multiuser unix based OS than a half implemented OS such as BeOS. I would also like to point out that OS X is slow largely because of Quartz. If BeOS had a similar graphics subsystem to Quartz then I bet its UI would be less responsive too. Also threading is not always a good thing. The more threads you have the more the scheduler has to do, and does every BeOS window [maybe this was to open a Window in a new app] not use at least three threads or something like that? I know BeOS has some of the lowest scheduling latencies of any OS but this is surely overkill? The BeOS API is also not as nice as Cocoa. While I've not done very much on either of these APIs I can say that Cocoa is just, generally speaking, far nicer to work with.

[Eug Wanker]

As an end user, I personally was completely unimpressed by BeOS. I installed version 5 on my PC many years back and I didn't see what the hooplah was all about. It was at best a "Meh".

As soon as I installed it I knew it was doomed to fail on the desktop space.

[stew]

Originally posted by iJed:
and does every BeOS window [maybe this was to open a Window in a new app] not use at least three threads or something like that?

Two. One for drawing, one for event handling. This is a good thing, cause otherwise you'd end up with stuck windows when the app's busy (e.g. how you can't move the windows of many Windows or Carbon applications when they're busy).

[rlmorel]

Beats the pants off of Windows 2000...hands down, so much smoother and trouble free. I have a problem on my PC with Outlook (of all things), and I have a problem also with Filemaker Pro. On my Mac, no problem at ALL! Heh, I remember when I first had OSX running, I tried to open up as many apps as I could just to see when it would choke. It never did, but Quicktime playback suffered after opening a whole bunch of movies.

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by andreas_g4:
Even if a number of people is using be software, it's dead anyway in the long run.
Of course, BeOS was a superior system in many ways (and still is), the lack of support from software developers is too evident.

BeOS had some serious flaws as well. For one, it was written in C++, and as a result it suffered from the fragile base class problem.

Another thing was that the system was not multiuser.

It did have a nice file system though.

[clarkgoble]

The file system was one of the nicest features of BeOS. However the author of the file system now works for Apple and is working on their new file system. Take that for what it's worth. (I admit that I'd hoped it would be part of Panther)

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
The file system was one of the nicest features of BeOS. However the author of the file system now works for Apple and is working on their new file system. Take that for what it's worth. (I admit that I'd hoped it would be part of Panther)

Isn't it?

How is the live filtering in the Finder done?

Or are they unrelated?

-s*

[Brass]

From all accounts, no-one who's installed Panther has had to reformat their HD and use a different type of file system to get the live Finder searching to work. So I'd say NO there is not a new File System for Panther.

I don't know how they're making it work so fast though. Even the unix "find" command isn't always instant if searching a large and complex directory tree.

[smeger]

I believe that HFS+ has had an extensible metadata system from day one, it's just never really been used. Maybe they're finally using it.

I remember seeing something in the WWDC keynote that made me go "Ahhh, extensible metadata" when I saw it, but I can't remember what it was now. I remember that it was something subtle, though.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.