Wednesday 1 June 2011

ABOUT LATEST OS

An Operating System is a software program or set of programs that mediate access between physical devices (such as a keyboard, mouse, monitor, disk drive or network connection) and application programs (such as a word processor, World-Wide Web browser or electronic mail client).
Some characteristics of an Operating System are:
Whether multiple programs can run on it simultaneously: multi-tasking
Whether it can take advantage of multiple processors: multi-processing
Whether it has built-in support for graphics.
Whether multiple users can run programs on it simultaneously: multi-user
Whether it can reliably prevent application programs from directly accessing hardware devices: protected
Whether it has built-in support for networks.
Some popular Operating System's are:
Unix: multi-tasking, multi-processing, multi-user, protected, with built-in support for networking but not graphics.
Windows NT: multi-tasking, multi-processing, single-user, protected, with built-in support for networking and graphics.
Windows 95/98: multi-tasking, multi-processing, single-user, unprotected, with built-in support for networking and graphics.
DOS: single-tasking, single-processing, single-user, unprotected with no built-in support for graphics or networking.
Windows 3.x: single-tasking, single-processing, single-user, unprotected, with built-in support for graphics but not networking.
NetWare: multi-tasking, multi-processing, single-user, unprotected, with built-in support for networking but not graphics.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard (version 10.6) is the seventh and current major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers.

Snow Leopard was publicly unveiled on June 8, 2009 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. On August 28, 2009, it was released worldwide,[2] and was made available for purchase from Apple's website and its retail stores at the price of US$29 for a single-user license. As a result of the low price, initial sales of Snow Leopard were significantly higher than that of its predecessors.[3] The release of Snow Leopard came nearly two years after the introduction of Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5), the second longest time span between successive Mac OS X releases.

Unlike previous versions of Mac OS X, the goals with Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint. Addition of new end-user features was not a primary goal. Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to fully take advantage of modern Macintosh hardware. New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications. This is also the first Mac OS release since System 7.1.1 that does not support the PowerPC architecture, as Apple now intends to focus on its current line of Intel-based products.[4]

Snow Leopard will be succeeded by Mac OS X Lion (version 10.7), which is expected to be released in mid 2011.[5]

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