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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

#81

Post by keithpeter »

masklinn wrote: post #74
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…

"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"

OK, challenge still stands, even this would be an improvement in what we see in Linux reviews

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

#82

Post by adamrt »

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.

Could you elaborate on your issue? I've not run into this and am interested.

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

#83

Post by astrange »

doctoboggan wrote: post #65
blinkingled wrote: post #22

TL;DR "In some ways, Mountain Lion is a refinement, enhancement, and yes, a major bug-fix for Lion . But the changes and additions are significant enough that they will inevitably come with their own set of bugs. Let's not forget Snow Leopard, which promised no new features but still brought plenty of bugs in its 10.6.0 release." I hope they fixed memory management - Lion is too swap happy and slow on a decent 3Gb RA…

I am not an expert but I would guess Apple doesn't care too much about repeated memory swapping because they are trying to switch to SSDs. I have a SSD in both my personal and work computer and I have no problems with memory management.

Repeated swapping to an SSD wears it out faster.

Mountain Lion does in fact swap less than Lion due to some VM improvements.

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

#84

Post by alxp »

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?"

Your browser history doesn't update itself when you scroll to a new section in a long page.

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

#85

Post by rsync »

vdm wrote: post #61

TL;DR full screen with multiple monitors is still broken http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#full-scre...

How is this even possible ?

Do I even understand this correctly ? If you have multiple monitors, and an application goes full screen, the other two monitors go grey ?

I am still on SL on my mac pro, so I have yet to see this ... what the fuck do people working at apple (with multiple screens) do ?

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

#86

Post by duaneb »

da_n wrote: post #29

Epic review as usual from John Siracusa. Dan Benjamin volunteered to do a reading of this for release in audio format, but I think John Siracusa ruled it out. Understandable as I think too many problems to overcome (images, footnotes, licensing etc), so just a dream really. Would happily have paid for that though. Hope they can sort out the Kindle release, definitely going to purchase that.

> Hope they can sort out the Kindle release, definitely going to purchase that.

Whatever for? It's interesting, I'll give you that, but why don't you just spend $20 on the OS itself?

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

#87

Post by morsch »

malandrew wrote: post #51
masklinn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the thing he used in his table of contents and in every fucking section title of his review? You should avoid blaming him for your own misreadings.

"I actually like [pagination] for very long articles because it helps me keep my place across multiple reading sessions. I can remember I was on page 8 instead of remembering my exact position in a very long scrolling web page." Tell me why 'I can remember I was reading the section "A Cloud In Three Parts"' doesn't work? There is a reason that sites that actually understand the medium put a mouseover on Section Title…

The same reason it's easier to remember that something in a book was 3 pages ago rather than 14 paragraphs... or even sections. It's cognitively useful to have a physical measure for distance rather than a more abstract one; clicking a link on the web is (metaphorically) understood as a physical act of moving. Scrolling is physical, too, but it's more fluid while paging is sort of "integral".

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

#88

Post by morsch »

masklinn wrote: post #50
agumonkey wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it's a reference, but I don't recall 20+ pages reviews. (Both had very well executed website redesigns too)

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.

The GTX 680 review clocks in at about 15k words, fwiw.

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

#89

Post by wtallis »

astrange wrote: post #83
doctoboggan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an expert but I would guess Apple doesn't care too much about repeated memory swapping because they are trying to switch to SSDs. I have a SSD in both my personal and work computer and I have no problems with memory management.

Repeated swapping to an SSD wears it out faster. Mountain Lion does in fact swap less than Lion due to some VM improvements.

If a machine is at all usable with a mechanical swap disk, then there's not enough swapping happening to worry about the effect on the longevity of an SSD.

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

#90

Post by rhizome »

trotsky wrote: post #75
rhizome wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's nice to see, thanks, but at a 50% premium over an MBA (including Windows tax).
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