[NEWS] The Microsoft Singularity - new O/S

[zip22]

one thing you will notice is that almost ALL Apple's CPU comparisons are always against Intel - you will rarely see AMD in the mix - especially when their G5 came out - it was always "Apple is faster then intel" and only intel CPU's in their comparisons - never AMD, now why would that be ?....

market share. an insignificant number of people trying to decide between and apple and a pc would know or care about AMD. a 3 way comparison would be too confusing, so they chose the brand that significantly dominated the market. its not that hard to figure out. there would be no reason for them to compare to AMD.

 

[9mmCensor]

Apples are dependable, look sweet, has great interface graphics, is a major resoruce hog, and are very exspensive and lack program support. Windows is unreliable, is faster, has huge software support, cheaper, more hardware, and has just enough graphics to hog recources; but not look good. The only thing that keeps apple alive since money is a major factor in a pc for most people is looks good and is more dependable.

Apple is kept alive by quality products that work and are secure, backed by great tech support, and iPods. And rich yuppies that want to be cool. And by graphics people that will pay for great machines for graphics crap. (same for sound).

 

[Ebola]

Its not really new. IIRC singularity is based on managed code much like .net and is a very small project with about two developers on staff. Channel 9 did a interview with them a few months ago that was pretty cool. The developers were uncertain if it would ever take off because replacing the current windows core would be a bit of a nightmare.

I think the next version of windows (server) is codenamed blackcomb and has nothing to do with singularity.

 

[Captain Newbie]

Apple's tech support _is_ great.

Part of the reason (admittedly) why OS X is so stable is because Apple has complete control of the hardware that it's running on. Microsoft could probably do the same thing, if they decided "Okay, this is the hardware you MUST have to run Windows, no clones, no upgrades, no substitutions. Deal with it."

Steve Jobs == rich yuppie But, seriously. Apple has far more...uh...'culture' than most other computer companies, excluding Google, and since they're (relatively) down the street from one another, this is to be expected. Steve Jobs directs a company that builds products that are hip (iMac, iPod, PowerBook, iBook), that look good, and do exactly what they're meant to do. Thus, their niche success.

 

[MRD]

OSX is so stable because it's based on BSD. BSD is the most stable commonly available OS. It even puts linux and solaris to shame in that department. It was written for simplicity, readability, security, and stability by a bunch of academics at berkeley. It consistently dominates all the lists of web servers with the greatest uptime.

Mac OS 9, 8, 7, etc. were not nearly as stable as OSX.

 

[onx]

OSX is so stable because it's based on BSD. BSD is the most stable commonly available OS. It even puts linux and solaris to shame in that department. It was written for simplicity, readability, security, and stability by a bunch of academics at berkeley. It consistently dominates all the lists of web servers with the greatest uptime.

Mac OS 9, 8, 7, etc. were not nearly as stable as OSX.

To be fair though, for the average user this is irrelivant. Most users are not worried about if they will be able to leave their pc on for months, or even years, at a time, and shut them down regularly for whatever reason (most users should shutdown their home pcs when they go to work or bed or w/e just to save power) For the average user windows xp provides a level of stability that is perfectly acceptable, and it is not uncommon for an xp user to never experience a full system crash (being a BSOD or equivelant...ie not programx crashing or something. Hell even if explorer.exe crashes it isnt a big deal).

I really doubt osx being x86 compatible will really be much of an issue for microsoft, expecially because a lot of users get used to the way windows works...take away their taskbar, alter the way the filesystem is organized, and they dont know wtf they are doing. I highly doubt the singularity project was started directly in response to OSX, M$ isnt that stupid, it would take years (5-10+), as we know, for singularity to ever turn into a product microsoft would ship as a desktop os. Instead I would imagine singularity to be more of a research project for microsoft which might result in some of its features being implimented in future OSs.

As far as the lack of G5 laptops, it's unfortunate, I know quite a few people who would have really liked to have a g5 laptop instead of a g4...when you have to wait several minutes for mathematica to do a thing, a bit of extra power would be welcome.


edit: I suck at posting