Somethings Fishy Generations Mac OS
- Something's Fishy Generations Mac Os 11
- Somethings Fishy Generations Mac Os X
- Something's Fishy Generations Mac Os 10
- Something's Fishy Generations Mac Os 7
A commercial ZFS solution is (still) coming to Mac OS X, thanks to former Apple filesystem and OS engineer Don Brady (who previously worked on the abandoned internal Apple project to port ZFS). Brady and his company, Ten's Complement, just launched a limited private beta in hopes to have the software polished and ready for a summer launch this year.
Ars spoke with Brady, who has a long history engineering filesystems for Mac OS and Mac OS X, to find out a little about his previous work with ZFS at Apple, and what Mac users can expect to gain from Ten's Complement's port of ZFS.
ZFS versus HFS+
ZFS, aka Zettabyte File System, is a 128-bit file system originally designed by Sun in 2004. The main advantage of 128-bit is that it is possible to have files as large as 16 exabytes on total storage volumes up to a theoretical 256 quadrillion zettabytes. A zettabyte of storage might be hard to comprehend—it's equivalent to over a billion terabytes, or roughly enough space to store 251 billion single-layer DVD movies without further compression. ZFS creator Jeff Bonwick noted that filling a 128-bit file system 'would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage.' So ZFS is designed with massive future capacity in mind.
Every major version of Mac OS X macOS has come with a new default wallpaper. As you can see, I have collected them all here. While great in their day, the early wallpapers are now quite small in the world of 5K and 6K displays. If you want to see detailed screenshots of every release. This is the MAC OS X version. Click here for the Windows version! Version 1.7.1 for MAC OS X 10.3 or higher - UNIVERSAL BINARY VERSION By Robert Bennett. Please note: NEVER link directly to the files listed below, always link to this page. These files will move due to bandwidth restrictions, but this page will always have the latest. In 1999, Apple released a slew of new features with Mac OS 9, calling it 'the best internet operating system ever.' The idea was to unlock the full potential of the turquoise plastic iMac G3—the. Of course, Mac OS X will not run smoothly on a first-generation Apple TV and you can’t do much on it, but it’s amazing to see everything in action, not to mention the nostalgic feeling behind it. So if your MacBook belongs to that generation, we advice you to do little research on this before you rush to install Big Sur. MacOS Big Sur compatibility. If your Mac’s model is on the list of “officially supported” Macs to run Big Sur, you will definitely be able to upgrade it to the latest OS.
But ZFS also includes a number of features designed to simplify disk management and maintain data integrity. All disks can be assigned to a single pool of storage, and ZFS keeps track of where all data is on the physical hardware. The storage pools can be arranged as mirrors or RAID-Z groups with data redundancy. Each data block written to a device has an automatic checksum which can be examined for data integrity. If any data gets corrupted, which can happen 'silently,' ZFS can use redundant mirror or parity data to repair the corruption without any user intervention or lengthy rebuilding.
To prevent the sort of errors that can happen during write operations, ZFS (like BtrFS and others) uses the concept of copy-on-write (COW). This means that a copy of the filesystem structure is made when in the process of writing new blocks. If a drive failure happens during the write, the original data is still accessible and the file system knows that the write operation didn't complete. Because of COW, the file system can automatically make snapshots of files as they are created and edited, recording only the changes for more efficient performance.
AdvertisementThough ZFS was originally developed for Sun's commercial Solaris operating system, it was made open source in 2005. Now part of Open Solaris, it has been ported to other UNIX-like operating systems, including Linux and FreeBSD.
The current file system used on Mac OS X is HFS+, an evolution of the original Hierarchal File System designed for the original Mac OS. HFS was 16-bit, which at the time of Mac OS 8 in the late '90s was becoming a critical constraint on the hardware team. Larger, multi-gigabyte hard drives began to exceed the capacity of HFS. A next-generation file system was planned, but HFS+ was designed as a stop-gap measure until that project was finished.
Brady was the technical lead on the original HFS+ team. 'The initial HFS+ was primarily about addressing the block count problem,' he told Ars. 'Since we believed it was only a stop gap solution, we just went from 16 to 32 bits. Had we known that it would still be in use 15 years later with multi-terabyte drives, we probably would have done more design changes!'
The HFS+ team had about six months to re-write HFS in C from the original 68K assembly code before adding changes. Besides the increased file capacity and ability to access larger disk sizes, the team also added in Unicode support at the behest of engineers on the international team.
Brady later worked on the Mac OS X team, and was involved in much of the work to bring HFS+ to Mac OS X. 'Since Mac OS X was Unix and HFS+ wasn't, I had to start adding all the missing features—symlinks, hardlinks, POSIX conformance—and in a way that was backwards compatible to Mac OS 8,' he said.
'In hindsight, I'm amazed at how we were able to extend HFS+ so much,' Brady added. That includes the extensible metadata used by Mac OS X's Spotlight search, live partition resizing used for Boot Camp, and the Adaptive Hot File Clustering used to reduce seek times for oft-used system files. 'I think the last change I was involved with was the directory hard links necessary for Time Machine. Since then, Apple engineers have managed to add even more features, to my amazement.'
Skunk works: ZFS at Apple
After working on porting and optimizing HFS+ for Mac OS X, Brady was ready to move on to something new. Yet another next-generation file system had been planned for Mac OS X, but Brady wasn't involved in that team. But, he told Ars, 'at the time I had 2 terabytes of family videos and photos, and I was motivated to get a file system that addressed data integrity. So Chris [Emura] and I started a ZFS port as sort of a skunk works project.'
AdvertisementBrady and Emura originally worked on porting ZFS on the side before it became an official project within Apple. 'When I heard of the FreeBSD port, I was sort of motivated to beat them and get up and running first. I think Pawel [Jakub Dawidek] ended up winning by a week,' Brady said.
Work on ZFS at Apple continued even as Amit Singh's MacFUSE project enabled users to load ZFS as a user space module. That eventually lead to read-only support being included in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
'If I had any knowledge of unannounced projects, I couldn't talk about them. But look in Lion—I'm sure you won't find anything but HFS+ in there.'
'By early 2007, people inside Apple took notice,' Brady told Ars. 'We talked about it at WWDC that year. The talk wasn't even advertised in the official schedule, but the room was packed.' Source code for a command line only version was made available on Apple's 'Mac OS Forge' open source repository, and developer previews of Leopard included the code. By the time Leopard launched, it was solid enough to support reading ZFS storage pools, even if new ones couldn't be created or managed, nor could any new files be written. 'We just suppressed the write code paths,' Brady explained.
At one time, there was a lot of hope that Apple might transition from HFS+ to ZFS as a more modern replacement. In particular, ZFS's automatic snapshot feature was believed to be the perfect fit for Apple's Time Machine backup tool. When Snow Leopard was first announced in 2008, it was slated to have full read-write ZFS support, at least in the server version.
But when WWDC 2009 rolled around, all mention of ZFS support was scrubbed from Apple's website. A patent infringement lawsuit was still pending between NetApp and Sun, with NetApp claiming that it held patents on copy-on-write. Furthermore, Sun's CDDL open source license was also believed to make ZFS incompatible with Mac OS X, and that Apple couldn't reach suitable license terms with Sun. (Brady told Ars he was not at liberty to share any details on that particular point.) Whatever the reason, ZFS support from Apple was dead.
Something's Fishy Generations Mac Os 11
(The open source community has continued work on the open source code that was available from Apple before it shut down Mac OS Forge. That project, MacZFS, is hosted on Google Code.)
'As you can imagine, it was tough on the team to have all the uncertainty and not be able to talk about it,' Brady said. So he left the file system group in the fall of 2009 for the kernel group, focusing on core OS features. And those other internal projects for a new file system? 'If I had any knowledge of unannounced projects, I couldn't talk about them,' Brady said. 'But look in Lion—I'm sure you won't find anything but HFS+ in there.'
This is the WINDOWS version.Click here for the MAC OS X version!
Version 1.1DX for WINDOWS - 15/12/2005
By
Robert Bennett
Please note: NEVER link directly to the files listed below, always link to this page. These files will move due to bandwidth restrictions, but this page will always have the latest links.
Click here to download! (DirectX Version v1.1DX)
Click here to download! (UC3D / OpenGL Version v1.1)
Register now to get rid of all the annoying nag messages that pop up!
The full version also lets you install new fish into your desktop aquarium, and it lets you have more than 3 fish swimming around your screen at a time!
There are 2 ways to get the full registered version of this screen saver:
You can register just this screen saver for just US$12.95 and just get rid of the nag-screens from this screen saver, OR you can register UC3D and get full access to all past, present and future UC3D v1 screen savers for the one low price!! Click here for all the UC3D info.
The following fish are currently available for this screensaver. Click the links to download new fish to add to your desktop aquarium. New fish will be added as often as possible, so check back regularly!
Please note: These add-ons only work with the full registered version, or if you are a full UC3D member! Info on registering is just above on this page.
RELEASE NOTES (v1.1)Ok, so this thing quickley became possibly the most popular screen saver I've ever made. I now understand why there are so many fish screen savers, it's because everyone loves them. And the feedback I've had has been amazing! I've had literally 100s of emails from people saying this is now their favourite aquarium screen saver. With so much competition, that's pretty high praise!
So I've set to work adding and fixing things that people asked for and complained about, and a few things I didn't get around to originally. The main thing was that people wanted some sort of sound in the background. Personally, I find noisey screensavers annoying, but I can understand that if you're sitting watching the fish you'd like a bit of noise like a real aquarium. Some people wanted just a hum, and some wanted a bubbling noise, so I searched around and found a sound which is kind of a mix of the two. There's a definate hum, and some nice quiet splashing/bubbling. But don't panic if you don't like noise, you can turn it off!
I've also made the fishies eyes move. This is something I decided to leave out, and I wish I hadn't because it looks really cool when they look around as they're drifting past. The problem is it means I have to re-make the fish files. So until you download v1.1 of each fish, their eyes wont move. Only fish that say they are v1.1 will have moving eyes, but the old versions will still work as normal so there's no reason to panic and update all your fish thinking that it'll be broken without an update. Because I have to remake them, it may take me a while to release 1.1 versions of each fish on the website. Please be patient! I have to re-animate some of them to allow their eyes to move so just hang in there. Since no one reads these readme file, I anticipate being flooded with emails asking why this or that fish's eyes don't move. It's a shame no one reads these things...
What else did I do? I spent so much time changing stuff I'm losing track. You can now select not only salt and fresh water fish, but also cold and warm water fish for both salt and fresh water. Someone emailed me saying they didn't want the Turquoise Discus and the Wakin swimming together because of the different water temperature, well your wish is my command, so you can now having different sets of fish swimming and switch between them easily. However, as I said with the eye movement, I need to release v1.1 of each fish for the screen saver to know if they are a cold/warm water fish. So you'll need to update each fish as it becomes available for this option to work, if you've been using v1.0.
On the bugfix front, some people had problems with the background 'splintering' after a certain time. This is something I just could no replicate, but I'm told it's now fixed in this version. Also, the problem with people who were lucky enough to have widescreen monitors and the lighting no going to the edges should also be fixed. I can't remember all the little fixes I made, but I tried to fix almost everything that I could find.
There's also some changes behind the scenes with the collisions between the fish, and I noticed on my machine that the fish all seemed to want to swim together in the middle when you had a lot of fish, so I've tried to make them swim to the side of the screen a little more, but it's all random so it's hard to control the little critters.
Once again, I'm glad so many people love this screensaver as much as I do. Continue to show your support, and I'll continue to add fish and do updates and make more great stuff like this. There are already over a dozen fish available on the website, and it's only a month old! Which I think is pretty damn cool!
Enjoy!
RELEASE NOTES (v1.0)I'm gunna say this right off the bat: I love this screensaver. It's taken twice as long as it should have to finish it because I spent half the time sitting watching it.
I know there are plenty of aquarium type screensavers, but I'd never seen one I actually liked. So way back when I started work on my own, but I couldn't make the fish look the way I wanted so it didn't get very far. Then recently I came across a far more talented artist than I who had some cool 3D fish available, and the rest is history. So I didn't make the fish, I just did the animation and everything else. I think this is the first time I've used someone else's 3D models in my stuff, but I think you'll agree that the quality is so high I'd have been stupid to pass up the opportunity.
So what happens is, the screen fills with water and the fish start swimming around. Sounds simple, but it wasn't simple to make. The effect tho, is well worth the effort. It's far more '3D' than any other aquarium screensaver I've seen because the fish swim in all directions, getting closer or further away and all over the place. Watch it and see!
I added an option to let you choose between tropical salt water fishies and fresh water fish. I thought some fish lovers might find it strange that they're all swimming together. But you can still have them all swim together of course, because virtual fish can all survive in the same virtual water!
Somethings Fishy Generations Mac Os X
I'm going to have additional fish add-ons available for download from the website but they'll only work with the full version. The full version lets you have more than 3 fish at a time aswell, so if you like it, register! I've tried to make it real value for money, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than any of the other underwater aquarium type screensavers I've seen aswell!
As always, if you spot any bugs, let me know!
Enjoy!
VERSION HISTORYv1.1 - 1st October, 2005 - Major Update/Bug fix
Added new options to let you select your own background images, or let it grab the screen as before.
Made the fishies eyes move so they can creep you out as they swim around.
Added background bubbling/humming noise.
Changed the way you select the water level so you can have random, or set it to whatever you want.
Fixed the background 'splintering' bug.
Fixed problem with widescreen monitors not having lighting all the way to the edges.
Added option to let you select between warm and cold water fish, aswell as salt and fresh water.
So many other little tweaks and fixes I've forgotten what they are.
Now over a dozen fish species available for the full version!
Something's Fishy Generations Mac Os 10
v1.0 - 1st September, 2005 - Original Release
Real time 3D fish swim around your desktop.
Select between salt water and fresh water fish, or mix them all together.
Additional fish available for download to add to the full version.