News - Apple details Snow Leopard Up-to-Date Programme

[HEXUS]

Buy a new Mac before Christmas and you'll be eligible for a cut-price upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, says Apple.

Read more.

[ShALLaX]

It'll only cost $29.95 off the shelf anyway (providing you already have a copy of Leopard). Go Apple! Though I guess they realised no one would pay full price for just a maintenance release.

[Steve B]

But it's not really just a maintenance release...?

[ShALLaX]

It absolutely is just a maintenance release. There's next to no new functionality that the user will see (Quicktime X is all that springs to mind). They have basically rewritten applications to run more efficiently on the Intel platform (ditched PPC code) and added Grand Central to allow for easier programming of parallelism.

Their tag line is even "The world's most advanced operating system. Finely tuned." It's just Leopard, but optimised. Just in the same way that Windows 7 is essentially Vista, but with various usability changes (the kernel code is almost exactly the same).

[TheAnimus]

kernel in windows 7 has changed quite considerably.
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going...ide-Windows-7/
it is still a 'toc' release, rather than a 'tic'

But look at the changes in the toc release of snow leopard, its a service pack, GCD should simply be a free download for older versions too. Asking a developer to use what is little more than a library that manages a thread pool (because on all OSes thread creation is expensive, on BSD/Linux espesually so, as they are encombered like proccesses). (compare this to something like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions)

OpenCL is a more intresting technology imo, but again in the same way with Cuda, do we really want to explain these problems in a C like syntax with C like thinking!