The definitive Snow Leopard review: John Siracusa at Ars Technica

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    I read it. While it reads well, I felt it was a little lacking when compared to prior reviews. The focus was on the couple of core technologies that help developers out.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    sc_marktsc_markt Posts: 1,401member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Quadra 610 View Post


    http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews...-os-x-10-6.ars



    Enjoy.



    Read it last night and enjoyed it. It's a great (and big) review.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    I thought it was an excellent review that goes into far greater depth than Pogue, Mossberg and the like. It also gives context to the OS by reviewing the development of OSX from the beginning.



    Since the bulk of the changes, and most important changes, were under the hood, I think it was desirable to discuss them in detail- not that I understood all the intricate details.



    The definitive review IMO.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    Not keen on his opinion here:



    "Though I come down pretty firmly on the powers-of-two side of the fence, I can't blame Apple too much for wanting to match up nicely with the long-established (but still dumb, mind you) hard disk vendors' capacity measurement standard."



    It's not dumb nor is it a hard disk vendor standard, it's an international standard defined by the International System of Units that's used heavily in Physics and Maths. A teraflop, a nanometer and bandwidth MB/s aren't measured in base-2. It's not a matter of opinion that OS makers have been doing it wrongly because to put it plainly, defining 1 kilo as 1024, is just an arbitrary choice that actually doesn't help in any real world scenario.



    It seems like a minor thing in the OS but I'm impressed that Apple have the balls to change something that fundamental. It will be interesting to see if Linux and Windows follow suit.



    I was wondering about the filesystem compression as I tried to measure app sizes on Leopard and it wouldn't. There are a list of exclusions like dmg, mp3 etc but it means you can save a decent amount of space. Problem is it's in the resource fork apparently. Don't try moving apps onto a Windows partition and expect them to work, not that you should ever do that anyway.



    Overall, a very thorough and well written review though.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    The file system compression has been around for a while on NTFS and I always turn it off for performance. Does this compression happen for all files (with the exception list above) or is it only an one-way decompression?



    With regard to copying things over to a non-HFS+ volume, I expect OS X to have the smarts to handle the compression. This is required in a corporate environment or if you backup to a FAT partition.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by talksense101 View Post


    The file system compression has been around for a while on NTFS and I always turn it off for performance. Does this compression happen for all files (with the exception list above) or is it only an one-way decompression?



    It seems to be just for apps so it should just be one-way - they probably built support in XCode. The rest of the filesystem is mostly media so it won't save much from compression. The exclusion list was longer, I think it had image types in there too. Perhaps Spotlight will compress small files on-the-fly when indexing.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    bertpbertp Posts: 274member
    Sircusa's review didn't disappoint me. I liked the basic focus on emerging software technologies. In particular, page 7, "File system API unification". This should be quite helpful in a hybrid system like Mac OS X, where different ways of locating objects is contextual, as I found out when studying up on AppleScript 2.0.
Sign In or Register to comment.