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John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

arstechnica.com

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Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#71

Post by primatology »

blinkingled wrote: post #59
rhizome wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3GB, my word, son...crucial.com is your friend!

The machine supports a maximum of 4GB, and believe me it only gets marginally better with the added 1GB. I guess Crucial also sells SSDs and Apple sells new MBPs with 16GB RAM :) - but at this juncture I hate to spend money on anything when the other supposedly more bloated OS named Win 7 works just great with 3GB - that seriously ought to be more than enough for browsing, email and occassional Word/PPT stuff. As for…

Agreed. I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my 4GB MBP to 16GB of memory. Officially unsupported, but it works like a charm.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#72

Post by masklinn »

agumonkey wrote: post #57
masklinn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GeForce GTX 680: 20 pages http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-re... Ivy Bridge: 21 pages http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core... I'm sure there are others. The SSD series were not technically review but went well beyond 20 e.g. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/ is 27 pages.

You're right. It probably felt shorter because of the game testing parts.

Yeah, not all pages on anandtech reviews clock in at a thousand words, usually, and the number of graphs (especially for GPU reviews) make flying through much faster, almost slideshow-like in some cases.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#73

Post by abruzzi »

My biggest pet peeve with 10.7 (besides the loss of arrows on my scroll bars) is the dumbing down of the Network control panel. In 10.7 you couldn't configure your WiFi to connect to 802.1x networks (i.e. WPA Enterprise.) You had to download the iPhone configuration utility, build a config file, then import it. 10.6 would let you set the configuration in the network control panel. Even iOS doesn't require ICU to connect. I didn't see anything about it in the review so I assume 10.8 is still set up the screwy 10.7 way.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#74

Post by masklinn »

keithpeter wrote: post #63

I've suggested this before (and not done much about it), but that is not going to stop me suggesting it again. How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review of Ubuntu 12.04? Or Debian Wheezy, or Fedora (large integer, preferably 18 because that is the version that RHEL 7 will be based on)? Or the safe and conservative CentOS/SciLi/PUIAS version 6.3, now being targeted by Oracle. Or your favourite GNU/Linux, or BS…

> How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review

I don't think a crowd-sourced review could ever be that, as it most likely won't be a cohesive work and will have a hard time finding talented writers (which I hold Siracusa to be). And will probably fail to balance the emphasis (at all) between features of differing importance and levels of interest. Furthermore, Siracusa's reviews are also the result of more than a decade of writing these things.

Don't aim to write "Siracusa-style" reviews, aim to write in-depth reviews which are not complete dreck. That will probably work better. Or work at all, for that matter.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#75

Post by trotsky »

rhizome wrote: post #56
mdonahoe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone here tried any of the macbook air clones? http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/models/aspiresseries

This isn't really the right place for that question, but all of those have bad resolution screens, as do all of the linux-able ultrabooks. I'm not saying that they should be Retina, but 768 vertical px is unacceptably regressive.

The Asus zenbook prime 11" and 13" are shipping with full hd ips screens.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#76

Post by masklinn »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #48
masklinn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His point about long scrolling web pages isn't actually valid. His point is perfectly valid, it's about mnemonics. > The way to do it is to have a table of contents, and fragment identifiers for each section. Considering his reviews have both table of contents and fragment identifiers, I'm going to go ahead and assert he knows about those. That does not help remember where you are in the article.

How is remembering "I was on page 8" easier than "I was on section 8?"

I would expect Siracusa to have read books in the past. Possibly more than a handful. Books tend to be indexed by page, teaching readers to remember their position through pages when not using book marks for whatever reason (or when said book mark falls out)

This would lead Siracusa to have an easier time remembering his position through page number due to his personal experience. Note how that's exactly how he worded it, that he preferred page breaks because he can remember it better? At which point "MatthewPhillips" asserted Siracusa was plainly and simply wrong?

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#77

Post by masklinn »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #47
masklinn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His point about long scrolling web pages isn't actually valid. His point is perfectly valid, it's about mnemonics. > The way to do it is to have a table of contents, and fragment identifiers for each section. Considering his reviews have both table of contents and fragment identifiers, I'm going to go ahead and assert he knows about those. That does not help remember where you are in the article.

I can remember I'm on section 13 just as easily as I can remember that i'm on page 13.

Good on ya mate, I'm sure you're really proud of yourself. How does that pertain to Siracusa remembering pages better?

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#78

Post by masklinn »

jacoblyles wrote: post #68

I just want to know if it will be easier or harder to compile ruby and python libraries with native extensions that depend on, say, libxml2. I upgraded to Lion and it took 8 hours off of the installation process for lxml. But nokogiri was still nearly impossible.

> I upgraded to Lion and it took 8 hours off of the installation process for lxml.

Am I misreading this? It took 8 hours to compile libxml2, libxslt and lxml?

Surely that's not possible and I missed something, I just tried making a full static build (to ensure I'd have to build libiconv, libxml2 and libxslt as well) from the current HEAD, on 10.6, using the stock gcc 4.2 on a 2.4GHz 2010 MBP and it took 3:48 total including downloading the tarballs for libiconv, libxml2 and libxslt and cythoning lxml.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#79

Post by johnthedebs »

blinkingled wrote: post #59
rhizome wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3GB, my word, son...crucial.com is your friend!

The machine supports a maximum of 4GB, and believe me it only gets marginally better with the added 1GB. I guess Crucial also sells SSDs and Apple sells new MBPs with 16GB RAM :) - but at this juncture I hate to spend money on anything when the other supposedly more bloated OS named Win 7 works just great with 3GB - that seriously ought to be more than enough for browsing, email and occassional Word/PPT stuff. As for…

I'd strongly recommend getting that extra 1GB if you're looking for a cheap way to boost performance (even if you have to buy 2x2GB sticks). It's not marginal by any means if your OS is swapping - it will probably be a dramatic increase in performance!

Also, regarding doctoboggan's comment about SSDs: SSDs are still an order of magnitude slower than system RAM. The reason they're so nice is because they're an order of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs, but that doesn't mean you can get away with skimping on RAM.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#80

Post by agumonkey »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #34
agumonkey wrote: post #18

Definition of a review, by ArsTechnica : http://imgur.com/RdohV

While they aren't usually quite this long, Ars Technica is known for its excellent reviews and feature stories.

Excellence indeed. I re-read some of Jon Stokes (http://arstechnica.com/author/hannibal/) reviews, low-level architecture (ppc970, ps2,..) ones especially.

edit: http://archive.arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/ppc970/ppc970-0.html with the glorious old design

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