Mossberg: Windows 7 narrows the gap with Apple's Mac OS X - Page 7

Originally Posted by majortom1981

You are wrong. In Vista UAC was on or off. In windows 7 there is a slider that you get to chose how annoying uac is. This slider works pretty well.

IF people are going to bash windows 7 at least make sure you know what you are bashing.

Originally Posted by Ireland

Leo Laporte is a shill to whatever radio show (netcast) he's hosting at that particulate time. He's a fake. All smiles, all cool radio voice. No genuine character.

Originally Posted by Gazoobee

I think this is a bit misleading.

Windows 7 is precisely "Vista" underneath in that it is internally 6.1 and not 7.0 (Vista is 6.0). The underpinnings are the same as vista, but more importantly, the hardware requirement is the same as Vista.

It would be fair to say that Windows 7 runs a smidge faster on the same hardware, but to make out like it's different from Vista in that it may not require "modern" hardware is not accurate. Machines that can run XP, but were not "beefy" enough to upgrade to Vista are in the same situation with Windows 7 as they were with the Vista upgrade. The people that passed on Vista because their computer wasn't powerful enough are still going to have to buy a new computer to run Windows 7 (if they haven't already upgraded in the interim), and that's a fact.

Additionally, since you can't actually upgrade from Windows XP, these people would have to do an "erase and install" to even be able to try it out on the old Windows XP machine. Most users of XP will not be upgrading without changing their machines, and most will likely not even be able to do so. There is also the fact that both Vista and Windows 7 are "different" UI's and more Mac-like than any windows has ever been before them. It's as big a change for the average XP user as switching to Mac would be and lots of the older folks just won't bother.

The only people that will have the "pop in the disk and click upgrade" experience that Snow Leopard gave to Mac users, are the current Vista users who are pretty much already sold on Windows anyway. For everyone else an upgrade will be a rather gruelling experience. Even if you recently bought a Vista capable PC and smartly had it downgraded to XP, you now have to erase the whole thing, change to Windows 7, and re-install all your programs.

It's worth mentioning that the vast majority of computer users in general (on all platforms), use the OS that came with their computer until the day they get a new one. Unlike the readers of this forum, most don't even do point upgrades or patches. Most users will be experiencing Windows 7 on the next brand new machine that they buy sometime next year.

Originally Posted by jnjnjn

My impression from reading (parts of) Walt Mossberg's reviews over the years is that he is a very reluctant Apple fan; if he is a fan at all.
He is more a wolf in sheepskin if you ask me.

Anyhow, he missed the point completely. Snow Leopard has LLVM, WebKit (HTML5), GCD and openCL under its skin. And Apple is at the forefront of software technology. This is essential for the (near) future. And Apple will, because of its software skills, and smart use of the open source community, dominate even more in the years to come.

J.

Originally Posted by yuusharo

Eh? What are you talking about. He took massive heat on his Macbreak Weekly show a few weeks ago, calling Snow Leopard a "Snow Job," and insulted all his hosts by calling them "Apple fanboys." He's also said many times that he loves Windows 7 (as most of the reviewers tend to agree), but still prefers the Mac as his personal machine.

He, like so many of us, have to live in a Windows world regardless of your personal choice. Windows 7 is, if nothing else, the best release of Windows. Better to work on it than any of its predecessors.

Originally Posted by jnjnjn

My impression from reading (parts of) Walt Mossberg's reviews over the years is that he is a very reluctant Apple fan; if he is a fan at all.
He is more a wolf in sheepskin if you ask me.

Anyhow, he missed the point completely. Snow Leopard has LLVM, WebKit (HTML5), GCD and openCL under its skin. And Apple is at the forefront of software technology. This is essential for the (near) future. And Apple will, because of its software skills, and smart use of the open source community, dominate even more in the years to come.

J.

Originally Posted by Ireland

That argument would work if this forum wasn't full of crazy people.

Originally Posted by cdyates

Webkit is readily and freely available for windows.

Originally Posted by Ireland

If I did so it was a mistake. Though to be sure you'll have to point me to that comment where I called it that. To be honest, at this stage I wouldn't put it past you simply making this up.

If this is true this embarrassing for him. Personally I don't rate him much at all and find his video reviews mega-boring and he style quite pompous.

That said I don't think Vista 7 is that bad. But, it's no OS X.

Originally Posted by teckstud

If you would take the time to READ the full WSJ you would see the NUMEROUS reasons why it is different- a MAJOR difference. People only believe what they want to on here. JEESH!

Please READ it:
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20091007...lp-you-forget/

Originally Posted by Lukeskymac

I stopped reading at the second paragraph. Too much wishful thinking.

I use windows 7 nearly as much as I use OS X daily and in many ways it is still a major leap backwards when compared to XP (I'm not saying nothing was improved, LOTS of stuff was improved, but still is just Windows.... It wasn't designed like OS X was, and there is no "under the hood Grand Central"-like stuff in it either.

Grrrrr, there is so much more I wanted to say, but I can't find the words to say it... maybe later

Originally Posted by teckstud

Ok then - who uses NEXT?

Originally Posted by jnjnjn

My impression from reading (parts of) Walt Mossberg's reviews over the years is that he is a very reluctant Apple fan; if he is a fan at all.
He is more a wolf in sheepskin if you ask me.

Anyhow, he missed the point completely. Snow Leopard has LLVM, WebKit (HTML5), GCD and openCL under its skin. And Apple is at the forefront of software technology. This is essential for the (near) future. And Apple will, because of its software skills, and smart use of the open source community, dominate even more in the years to come.

J.

Originally Posted by al_bundy

OpenCL is also on windows as well as CUDA and Stream. and it has nothing to do with the OS

Originally Posted by teckstud

Now you're a down and out liar- show me where I posed that question. You still haven't answered my basic question


Which came first in a public OS- Microsoft's taskbar or Apple's Dock? And give the year of each's debut.
End of story.


I realize your at all sorts today with this kind of news story- but really?

Originally Posted by mrstep

Hahaha - that's funny, like asking 'Did you stop beating your wife yet?'. Is your question which of those 2 companies had the taskbar/dock first, or whether Apple stole it from Microsoft which I believe was the earlier comment?

Microsoft had their taskbar before OSX had the Dock since there was no OS X when Win 95 came out, but Apple certainly didn't copy MS for the idea since they purchased a company / assets that had it well before MS did.

And for the Acorn Archimedes having it before NeXT - totally possible, I think the question here was whether Apple 'stole' the Dock from Microsoft. Or at least that seemed to be the original question.

Originally Posted by teckstud

Who cares where it originated - it who utilzed it first and for how long. Besides, Mossberg states in the review today, if you would READ it,

In Windows 7, the familiar taskbar has been reinvented and made taller. Instead of mainly being a place where icons of open windows temporarily appear, it now is a place where you can permanently pin the icons of frequently used programs anywhere along its length, and in any arrangement you choose. This is a concept borrowed from Apples similar feature, the Dock. But Windows 7 takes the concept further.

Originally Posted by cdyates

It's been fairly well documented that the Windows 7 system requirements will be less demanding than Vista. Netbook manufacturers have been selling them with XP or linux because of the system requirements of vista. They are now indicating that they will be selling their netbooks with windows 7, rather than xp because it runs well on lower spec hardware, whereas Vista did not.

Originally Posted by Ireland


Oh and the need to consider making a real mouse.

Originally Posted by hillstones

I guess you have never heard of NeXTStep, which existed years before the task bar appeared in Windows 95. Mac OS X is a re-write of NeXTStep, which included the Dock.

Originally Posted by mrstep

... And for the Acorn Archimedes having it before NeXT - totally possible, I think the question here was whether Apple 'stole' the Dock from Microsoft. Or at least that seemed to be the original question.

Originally Posted by teckstud

Me no make things up (not like anoymouse and his buddy gazoowee):

Allow me to quote you master:

Originally Posted by teckstud

And that was you praising Windows 7?

Originally Posted by yuusharo

Well, one advantage OpenCL has over either CUDA or Stream is its not based on proprietary hardware. That means you write it once to OpenCL, and it will apply to either an ATI or nVidia card. Currently, the other two technologies only work on their respective cards, making adoption of either next to nil.

OpenCL is definitely an edge over Windows 7, but again, only theoretically. Nothing takes advantage of it, yet.

Home Premium / Business / Ultimate
* 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
* 1 GB of system memory
* 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:
* 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
* 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
* 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

Originally Posted by Erunno

At least you can switch graphic cards on the fly without the need to log out first on Vista and 7, something which is very useful on a new MacBook Pro which comes with 2 graphic cards. I was hoping Apple would redesign/extend their graphic stack to support this too but, alas, it seems that Microsoft is ahead of the game at least in this area.

I've been using 7 on my MacBook Pro for several weeks now (mostly for work) for free. Students here had early access to Windows 7 Professional from the end of August. Some quick impressions:

* It sometimes feels slow. I'm not sure if it is really slow or perceived slowness due to an overuse of fade in/out animations but since I don't notice any performance degradation on any application I used it's probably the latter.

* Aero Peek is a nice addition. Internet Explorer uses it to preview all open tabs and windows and I got used to it rather quickly to specifically select a tab when bringing IE back from the background.

* The active borders, especially the ones which makes 2 windows use 50 percent of available space side by side, is a boon to me who has to read a lot of PDFs and other documentation while writing.

* Progress on the dock icon is also a small but fine addition, especially when downloading large files. It helped me to cope with my compulsive behaviour to check the download progress every few minutes.

* Games like Lord of the Rings Online run fine under DirectX 10. Something I was really not expecting.

* RAM usage is noticeably higher when using the 64 bit version compared to Windows XP. If you use memory intensive applications or games 4 GB of RAM is recommended. Some of these applications and games never encountered noticeable memory bottlenecks on XP.

* Don't care much about jump lists on 7 the same I don't care about the OS X equivalent.

* Shutdown time is noticeably slower than on OS X. On the other hand stand-bye mode is quicker (probably because OS X always saves memory contents to the hard disk first) and waking up is almost instant.

* Boot time is comparable to OS X (maybe a tad longer but not much).

* The file explorer now has most of the good features of the Finder (and some unique ones) without the retarded stuff. Using 7 I reminded me again of how I much miss a good default file manager on OS X. Thank god for Path Finder.

There's probably more stuff which would deserve further comments. Maybe at a later time.

EDIT: Something I remembered:

* Windows Media Player 12 now has the same retarded interface as QTX where the controls overlay the content even when not in fullscreen mode. Makes watching anything with subtitles a chore. On a positive note: It now supports H.264 and AAC natively. Here's still hoping that QuickTime will support WMV/VC-1 out of the box one day.

Originally Posted by JupiterOne

From the horse's mouth. The basics

Vista



Windows 7

Originally Posted by Gazoobee

it wasn't a question actually.

teckstud made the bold assertion that Apple stole the dock from Microsoft. That's what started it.

He is wrong about five times over, but now he is claiming he didn't say that all along, and that he is right that it didn't happen that way, or some such convoluted BS. It's really hard to keep track of the thoughts of a person with such a poorly organised mental state.

The real story in a nutshell is that the dock and the taskbar are not really the same thing at all either visually or technically (based on their method of operation). Acorn used the dock first, NeXT used a slightly different version which then migrated to OS-X and changed yet again.

Microsoft has not had a dock until recently. It's taskbar is a (functionally), different thing from a dock although it has "dock-like" elements. Microsoft's taskbar has now evolved (with Windows 7) to be very very similar to the OS-X dock indeed. By virtue of the fact that you can now "pin" things to the taskbar and the fact that it shows status changes and does context and window management, the taskbar in Windows 7 can probably, for the first time, rightly be called a "dock."

There are many long articles on the Internet about the history of these changes that I have read, (one is referenced in this very thread). This is all common knowledge. None of this is in question, and it never has been except perhaps in teckstuds mind.

Originally Posted by Zoolook


I've been using Win7 for almost all of this year and while it won't convince me to sell my Mac, I'm very happy it's pretty good.



Yes there is. Although you will have to do a clean install (sounds like that doesn't matter, you're already running it) you get the upgrade price if you have a valid version of XP.

Originally Posted by teckstud

L-WTF?
Apple didn't- NEXTSTEP did.
Cannot you READ?

Originally Posted by teckstud

WRONG- Apple has not had a dock since 1988 in its OS. No more wasting my time.

Originally Posted by rhb

This is a fascinating thread... and I, for one, am glad that (by the looks of it) Windows users might be getting something better, after years of pain.

My question is this. I'm a Mac user (doing a lot of multimedia development), and my wife is a Windows user (doing tons of data processing for medical research). In both cases, we find ourselves running up against the 32-bit RAM ceiling (which I believe is 4Gb per application space). When we're both crunching big numbers, both current O/S's (XP and SL) have real problems from a RAM allocation standpoint.

I know that SL is now 64-bit ready, but I'm still waiting for the app devs to catch up to the ridiculous capabilities of the MacPro, including its big RAM capacity. Same for her, over in Windows land.

So the question is -- which O/S is best positioned (with its dev community) to get over this 64-bit hump once and for all, and release all of the power our hardware has, but can't use?

... or am I missing something obvious?

Originally Posted by bloggerblog

The Home version is a feature crippled version with many pre-installed trial software which sometimes is impossible to un-install if you don't have the exact know how, one example of that is McAfee.

Originally Posted by Ireland

Yes subject, now go to bed.

Originally Posted by al_bundy

most of these have nothing to do with the OS

webkit is on windows

HTML5 can be had in any internet browser that supports it. i have 5 installed now. IE, firefox, chrome, safari and opera

GCD is nothing but thread scheduling and MS has the same thing, minus the catchy marketing name. on SL it's useless without appication support.

OpenCL is also on windows as well as CUDA and Stream. and it has nothing to do with the OS

two things Vista and 7 have that SL doesn't is full native 64 bit support and randomizing the memory space for security reasons. my laptop runs native x64 Windows 7 and any "legacy" crap i have a virtual XP machine. MS rewrote virtual PC for WIndows 7 Ultimate where it takes advantage of VT on the CPU and it runs almost as fast as on the bare hardware.

itunes works just fine on Windows 7 x64

Originally Posted by Gazoobee

dude, you said Apple stole the dock from Microsoft.

Just admit you are wrong. It won't hurt that much. It will make you a better person and save a lot of space on the forum.

Do you realise that if you take your crappy one-liners out of the thread, it's like a page and a half shorter? Don't you ever get tired of complaining about everything and everyone?

Originally Posted by teckstud

Finally - the answer and answered with a sense a humor. thank you , thank you.

(to answer your question- it was both- one begat the other)

Originally Posted by doyourownthing

nice to read reviews from people which are probably in microsoft's payroll

also how is this apple news?

people that compare snow leopard to windows 7 are angry pc users which have never owned / operated a mac and have no idea of what they're talking about, and were paid big amounts of money to write good reviews, like this mossberg character