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Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements , but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have...

The part that I find interesting is the “Grandma’s linux is called Mac OS X” bit. Not because it’s likely to be controversial but because I’ve come to the same conclusion over the past few months too. I have the belief that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all OS. For the most part Windows continues to dominate, although it’s hard to say how much of that is due to the fact that it fits most of the people most of the time and how much of it is down to people assuming that Windows is something that comes with...

Dino Dai Zovi, the New York-based security researcher who took home $10,000 in a highly-publicized MacBook Pro hijack on April 20, has been at the center of a week’s worth of controversy about the security of Apple’s operating system. In an e-mail interview with Computerworld, Dai Zovi talked about how finding vulnerabilities is like fishing, the chances that someone else will stumble on the still-unpatched bug, and what operating system — Windows Vista or Mac OS X — is the sturdiest when it comes to security. Friday, the vulnerability was first identified as within Safari, but by Monday, QuickTime was...

For the performance of Clovertown you'll have to wait a bit longer as we're not allowed to disclose it just yet, but we wanted to let you know that so far it's looking like you'll be able to upgrade your Mac Pro to 8 cores in the not too distant future.

In terms of performance, it's good news—with a caveat. While the fully-buffered memory, the screaming-fast Xeon 5150s, and the 1333MHz FSB are all great, Apple's video card choice is most definitely not. It's like having a can of Schlitz with filet mignon, or having an oompah band play Oktoberfest at Carnegie Hall. It doesn't fit, and it detracts from the overall experience. The ATI Radeon X1900XT offered as a build-to-order option would have been a fantastic choice, but given Apple's desire for a $2,499 price tag and high margins, that was not an option. Still, one of the GeForce 7600s...

The great experiment I was going to write up a big thing to post here. I was going to be all crazy eloquent and whatnot… then Chris wrote this as a draft of what he’d like to say. And his words cut to the point incredibly nicely. So here is what Chris has to say (and he speaks for both of us): You have ruined this for us.

Apple's newly acquired OS, NeXTstep was built on the Mach 3.0 kernel, the same microkernel used by GNU/Hurd. Though by then the Mach kernel was largely abandoned, another kernel, Linux, was gaining support and seeing rapid development. The project at Carnegie Mellon to develop Mach had ended in 1994, two years before Apple acquired NeXT. As early as 1991 papers were published documenting performance issues with the Mach kernel. At the time there was much debate over kernel design, 1992 marked the now famous flame war between Linus Torvalds and Andy Tanenbaum over monolithic vs. microkernel design. Even though Apple...

Familiarity breeds contempt, right? So it stands to reason that anyone who uses a product extensively can find fault with it. I’m no exception—my work requires me to use Mac OS X every day, all day long, and although I am generally thrilled with its capabilities and reliability, some things about it really drive me up the wall. Take a gander at my list of pet peeves; then share your own by posting to the Macintosh Weblog.

Apple can alter its business plan slightly and become the well-liked dominant force in the technology market. Everything Apple needs sits right in front of them for the taking. We're just sitting here waiting to restart global innovation and take the PC to the next step.