pc or mac?

[vinrex7]

Whats the difference? which is better?

[fo3nix]

The Mack: Mac OS X is for Apple Macs only. You can illegally download and install a hacked version on a regular PC though.

Leopard is due May-ish time. Maybe until very early June (the WWDC is in June, which is when major things are revealed officially).

Do you really need RAID 0? Both XP and OS X support RAID.

[The Mack]

is there no retail version?. Apple people who upgrade must be able to buy it? and then apply the hacks.
have you tried it on pc?
bet you cant wait for May, get in line early i hear they que down the street for the latest release.
come on dude, Raid 0? of course, i think they use raptors in the g5's. Vista scores mine at the maximum 5.9
if you have not already get yourself online find your fave e-tailer and get a couple (16 meg cache ones) so many people neglect the hardisk and it can be a common bottleneck. some of those Raid cards �600 now that is excessive

[fo3nix]

Most people don't need to use RAID setups at all. It's much better for most to have an external regular hard drive configuration for backup.

RAID0 means that if just one of the two drives fails, you lose the lot. Not great. RAID5 is a better idea perhaps, if you must have RAID at all.

There is a retail version but it's still for Apple Macs only. And yes I did hack a version together to test on my old computer but it didn't work great (they only supply drivers for certain stuff they support obviously, and I had a computer with all sorts of non-standard stuff).

[Gromit]

The Mack

Don't know if you have seen this or indeed are interested, but here is a sneak peek at OS X 10.5 Leopard.

http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/leopard/

It may be out earlier (even next month). Jobs and Gates are doing a show together in May and I'm sure Leopard will be out before that.

http://biz.yahoo.com/pz/070220/114073.html

http://www.macrumors.com/2007/02/09/mac-os-x-1 0-5-leopard-ilife-07-and-iwork-07-in-march/

I will find the Time Machine useful because Mrs Gromit is terrible at backing anything up even though the external hard drive sits on the desktop.

[Gromit]

Er, sorry to back track a bit here, but I have only just realised how expensive VISTA is. Is this for real?

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/editorial/vis ta-ms_vista

Tiger is �70.

http://www.macwarehouse.co.uk/catalogue/item/M ACOSX24

[The Mack]

im just a speed junkie. in a world were future proff is an urban myth they are the closest i have seen in some years. 3 year old technology still "havin it" today. know what you mean Raid 5 safer but slower (and requires 3 Drives how much money!! :). would defeat the object of the purchase. i have had this setup for just over a year and hard reset on many times never let me down once.
You said old computer so im sure your right. i will give it a go when i have core 2 etc i will let you know if it works

yes gromit you are right its a lot but 5 million lines of code, code not instructions.
i think historically apple os have been around the �100 mark each new release assuming the 10.1 or .2 indicates a completely new version. Great value for the user.

i must admit i am becoming more interested in os x and will try to trial it properly and give it a proper chance

[fo3nix]

The Mack: the vista code isn't all new. Most of it is already in XP. And yes, Leopard will likely be �100. But at least there's only one version, not like Vista (with about 36 different types).

[The Mack]

recycling, very green of them :)
ms have offered different versions of the same thing for a while now. Whats new is that they are all in one install.
its not unfair to offer different qualities of same product. insert car analogy
are you buyin' leopard?

[fo3nix]

Perhaps after a while, yes. Depends what features it has (some have yet to be revealed). I'm hoping for true ZFS support, and if so, I'm there!

[The Mack]

dude, you come across as more die hard than that. Come on... support your fav software

[fo3nix]

I'm not die hard at all. I support free software as much as I can as that's what I believe in (free as in freedom, not price). I only use non-free stuff like Mac OS X instead of GNU/Linux because I don't have the time to spend messing about configuring things, I want stuff to work easily and also appreciate good interface design, something the Mac excells at beyond all others.

ZFS is amazing, and that would be a major reason for me to upgrade. But typically 10.x.0 is a bit unstable; it's better to wait for 10.x.1 or 10.x.2 before upgrading if you can help it. The same with Windows.

[The Mack]

zfs = compression?
the 10.x.1 10.x.2 do they mean buying again? or are they like a free service pack?

[fo3nix]

No its their service pack stuff. Tiger, current version, is 10.4. The current release is 10.4.8. It's not decimal though, the dots are just there are dividers. Periodically they fix security problems or little bugs and release them, and every few months they come out with a more complete fix list of the core OS, in the form of 10.4.9 or whatever.

ZFS is the zettabyte filesystem, developed by Sun. It's a hot new thing, and not many people are using it. But it has some amazing features that make it great (plus it's open source).

- storage pool. Unlike current filesystems, you can connect another drive (internal or external, whatever), and tell it to join the storage pool. The filesystem will now span that drive too, so you instantly get more room to store your stuff on. No transferring stuff across or anything like that, it's all automatic.

- compression. you get great compression on your stuff automatically -- it's totaly on the fly.

- integrity checking. with other filesystems your data is stored there and its as simple as that. with ZFS, it checks to make sure that your data isn't corrupted, and if it is it can automatically fix it for you

- snapshots. this is what gave hints to ZFS from Apple initially -- their 'time machine' system is perfect for this. say you have a word document, and change one sentence then save it again. it can be made to make snapshots of your files, so that the original file is stored, plus another one with the new sentance and where it's supposed to go. if you try and open this new 'snapshot', it'll automatically grab the old file, substitute the new sentence in, and display it for you. because of the compression, your disk isn't always full either.

in short, lots of great features, but there are plenty of articles on it. as a RAID user, you may be very interested in it.