Rants Tagged with “Apple”
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With Apple moving to Intel chips, is a price war with Dell, HP and Toshiba far away? I'd love to get OS X in virtual machine to play around a bit. This might even make Mono more compelling. This might change everything...or nothing...
This week is expected to be the OS X (Tiger) vs. Longhorn week. With Steve Jobs taking the covers off the newest incarnation of OS X, he'll be trying to besmirch Longhorn at every turn. This newsweek article is probably only the first of many on the subject.
I am still impressed that the Microsoft spin machine hasn't been able to get WinFS out of the press's minds. They still beat up on them for dropping WinFS. I am hoping that Microsoft sees fit to include WinFS in a future version. My opinion is that they can't ship WinFS until SQL Server (the underlying DB engine that had powered WinFS) has row-level security. Building something akin to NT File Permissions over SQL Server is just too much overhead.
Even though I'd love to poke Microsoft about how Tiger will have something akin to WinFS, it doesn't really. Tiger's new feature is to allow metadata on files to help out search. This is not WinFS. While WinFS was to have supported additional metadata, it went a lot further than that. It was going to be an object-based file system with full support for relationships between objects in the file system. That's a lot bigger than just metadata support.
My only hope is that the continued bad press about lack of WinFS will push Microsoft to accellerate WinFS to earlier than the rumored 2010. I have heard whispers that the WinFS team is still working on the product, but when it will see the public eye is anybody's guess.
I am perhaps most disgruntled about Apple's new metadata/search functionality which mirrors some of the importance of WinFS. As Joe Wilcox stated:
"Apple also is in a position to exploit Microsoft missteps. Tiger will feature metadata search capabilities as part of the file system. Microsoft touted such capabilities with WinFS, but that file system now won't ship with Longhorn, if ever." (emphasis added, ed.)
I hope MSN Desktop search isn't Microsoft's answer to real metadata in the Post-Longhorn timeframe.
Since MacWorld, I've been delving through some of the public docs about "Spotlight". Metadata annotation of files, at OS level, integrated into system commands (e.g. ls). Sounds a lot like WinFS, but maybe less heavy handed. I wonder how it will perform. It might be a good model for how the WinFS team look at the metadata/file problem instead of trying to embed
SQL Server into the OS.
I was interested in where Apple was going with the new iWork productivity suite. But with just a word processor and a presentation app, can they really call it a "productivity suite" to complete with Office? I doubt it.
I just don't get it. Sure the UI is the best in class for the Harddrive MP3 players, but $249 for an IPod with *less* storage (4 Gig instead of 10, 15 or 30). I spend a majority of my time with my MP3 player, playing music, not diddling with the controls. I spent $249 for my player, a Creative Zen, and got 30 Gigs (yeah 30). Its a tad bigger than the regular IPod, but I don't think the smaller size would make me happier. Is anyone really excited about the smaller IPod?
