Some of the points he makes are not really accurate.
For example, he states:
"as machines get 4 cores (processors) and then 8 and then 16, apps written for Snow Leopard and beyond will continue to be faster and faster, with no changes, while Windows programmers are going to be struggling to make their apps work at all"
This statement isn't true.
Windows, more specifically the .NET framework (and the associated compilers), has had support for thread pools, and cross-thread dispatch since 2003, and support for closures since 2008. Those features are, effectively, equivalent to grand central dispatch on the mac.
The Apple non-developer docs do indicate that there may be some scheduling improvements that might make GCD more efficient, but without any actual benchmarks between the two technologies, that claim doesn't have any basis in fact.
I'm not trying to be a shill here, but its important to point out that not everything he claims is true.
I think this less akin to thread pools, but closer to .net parallel extensions. A simple thread pool is still rather difficult to deal with, this also more fine grain work.
(disclaimer: I'm not a .NET programmer so maybe I'm talking out of my ass. Feel free to correct.)
One major difference between .NET thread pools and GCD is that the former are used in a high-level, garbage collected language, while the latter are built on top of C. Call me old fashioned, but if I'm CPU bound then I'm going to explore moving the bottlenecks to C first, and THEN look into parallelism if they still aren't fast enough. GCD follows that order, .NET has it backwards. (Although I hear the JIT is pretty good, and VS supports OpenMP which is nearly as good as GCD.)
There's an argument to do things the other way: stay in the high-level regime, make things parallel and buy more hardware, but this strategy is more prevalent (and useful) on the server, rather than the desktop, and in that case going to threads is just postponing the inevitable, you need to go fully distributed.
There will always be value in good, fast serial code, and nothing is going to beat C at that in the foreseeable future.
Sun Microsystems, Intel, AMD and Microsoft have all been pushing multi-core/multi-CPU for years. His statement might be correct from a UI perspective, but it sounds a bit naive from a system perspective. Windows is much more fragmented than OS X in the UI layer. WPF, WinForms, Win32, Qt, Swing, Adobe, Softimage, Maya, Autodesk, etc etc.
I'm all for modernism but their font-size is too damn small. One of the very, very few times I've ever had to use font zoom.
Anyhow, after a few hiccups installing SL on my Mac Pro today (MacBook was flawless) — I can definitely notice some amazing improvements under the hood. It's really shaping up to be a pretty stellar OS.
Had to hard reboot about 4 times. Every time it picked back up with the installation without a problem, but still quite frustrating.
Now I can't login to my main admin account directly. I have to login through my gfs, and then switch over to the admin account. Anytime I login straight to admin, the dock, finder/taskbar, and icons never appear. It just sits there.
I tried removing every app that starts on login, but still no lucky. Fortunately I can still access my main account by going around, but it's definitely annoying.
I rarely ever turn my computer off so it's not that much of a bother, but lingering in my mind that my computer just isn't working right. :(
Agreed, while I experienced no hiccups, thankfully, on my very hickup prone MacBook pro, Snow Leopard is quite spectacular. And all of my software works just fine too. As a college student who hardly ever likes to pay for software, this is something I truly believe is worth it's (low) pricetag
At least Opera has a global default zoom level setting, which I've set to 150%. With the modern screen resolutions, I just can't read "normal" sized text on webpages anymore.
I just finished upgrading my desktop and laptop, and I have to admit Apple wasn't kidding about this being a snappier release -- almost feels like I'm working on a Linux box again, in terms of snappiness.
I'll be interesting to see how the underlaying changes impact me, though, as everything I'm doing right now is on the JVM...
Overall, yes. You'll need to re-install MacPorts (just download the DMG from their site) and XCode (from the CD) afterwards, but other than that, everything (for me) works. Although the Java 6 JVM that comes with Snow Leopard seems to be quite a bit slower -- not sure why, yet.
One caveat -- as I've heard, CS3/CS4 has some problems.
"The reports that Cyberduck doesn't work correctly annoys me more."
You want lftp. As far as I'm concerned, it's the One True file-transfer program. And of course it's available in MacPorts (and even if it wasn't, it builds cleanly from source on OS X anyway).
One caveat with MacPorts. Not everything is building properly. I had problems compiling libsdl (used by ffmpeg/VLC) and python26. There's a compatibility list here: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/snc/snowleopard.
For people upgrading their MacPorts, be sure to not only grab version 1.8, but recompile your ports (if you want) so they're 64-bit.
Things seem to perform about the same for me, but I'm noticing more of a solid overall feel. I think this has to do with polished-up graphic effects, improved animation timing, and fewer lock-ups or periods of inexplicable waiting.
Technically, yes, but in this case really big is REALLY BIG. I don't want to be the next 640k is enough for anybody guy, but a 64-bit address space is enough for anybody.
Don't worry, you won't be that 64k guy. 64 bit gives the possibility of 2^64 bytes of addressable memory. That's over 18 exabytes. The entire digital content of the web is only estimated at about 90 petabytes.
If we go to 2^128 or 2^256, we start moving into numbers really large numbers. I and I really large. The number of atoms in our galaxy in near 2^220.
I just upgraded this afternoon. The install process knocked my laptop out of commission for a full hour, but it worked exactly as advertised. I haven't run across any compatibility issues, however, because I tend to do server-type work in a VM. Things seem about the same with a bit more visual/timing polish and "solid" feel.
For example, he states:
"as machines get 4 cores (processors) and then 8 and then 16, apps written for Snow Leopard and beyond will continue to be faster and faster, with no changes, while Windows programmers are going to be struggling to make their apps work at all"
This statement isn't true.
Windows, more specifically the .NET framework (and the associated compilers), has had support for thread pools, and cross-thread dispatch since 2003, and support for closures since 2008. Those features are, effectively, equivalent to grand central dispatch on the mac.
The Apple non-developer docs do indicate that there may be some scheduling improvements that might make GCD more efficient, but without any actual benchmarks between the two technologies, that claim doesn't have any basis in fact.
I'm not trying to be a shill here, but its important to point out that not everything he claims is true.