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Leopard is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off

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nontroppo:
Crashing: Leopard is as stable as Tiger here (my sample is smaller than his, two weeks and a bit). Number of crashes requiring reboot since my switch nearly a year ago: 1 (in Tiger, probably caused by Parallels as other users reported the same issue with that beta build). I don't have a meta-analysis study of crash frequency of Tiger vs. Leopard, but neither does he. it is a rant so I don't think he is claiming objectivity.

Similarity 1: it is common OS-agnostic advice to not be an early adopter, it is hardly something unique to Vista. Yup, the move files across drives bug should have been fixed before 10.5.0. ever surfaced, but the fix at least came quickly. Ideally bugs should not exist in any OS. Tiger also had "issues" when it was 10.4.0, requiring several bug fixes to get more stable. To claim that Leopard is now like Vista, but Tiger was different is revisionist ranting.

Similarity 2: OS X has shipped with transparency effects since 10.0.0. This is a non-similarity, and weak rant material (note the utter lack of sharp comedic wording here).

Similarity 3: Apple really pissed off a lot of users with the change of the Dock and the opacity of the menu bar. Reflections in the Dock actually do have solid perceptual benefits (symmetry detection aids visual search), but the blue lights to indicate an open app really are too low contrast. The old arrow was neither ideal (arrows indicate toggle state normally, so the metaphor is misconstrued). This was fixable a few days after Leopard came out via changes to preferences. But the depth of antagonism of such small changes was pretty spectacular on forums, and a chunk of that really was "This looks different I don't like it". Nevertheless, Apple would have saved a lot of bad blood by having a UI checkbox:

[ ] Old dock style.

But the change from Tiger->Leopard is pretty minor overall visually (note Leopard got slammd elsewhere for not being radical enough!), and the largest valid criticism is 1 PNG image whose contrast is reduced. This is not the case about XP->Vista. I must iterate also that Leopard draws to screen as fast/faster on the same hardware as Tiger (including old hardware). This *really* is not the case for Vista at all. Personally? I like the new dock, but have simply edited the offending PNG image to enhance its contrast and change the colour.

Similarity 4: Windows networking sucks irrespective of OS! Machines appear or disappear on Network neighbourhood depending on the menstrual cycle of humpback whales as far as I can tell. From Tiger->Leopard, I've lost one named machine, but gained another on our work network (a draw). I gave up long time ago looking for named shares (in XP pre-switch) and have used IP addresses since, that way networking works identically on XP, Leopard and Tiger. What that has to do with Vista I'm not sure.

Similarity 5: Haven't used Time Machine, I'm personally happy using bootable clones. The fact they don't do block-level is the major technical limitation (probably they hoped to use ZFS for this then hit roadblocks). I think apple pulled the network sharing at the last minute (as it was advertised then just vanished). Apple could have delayed the whole OS until whatever bugs got worked out, and then pundits would have cried how "Leopard is the new Vista". Irony huh? But as Darwin points out, comedic gold was mined best for this similarity so I like this one best!

Leopard == Vista? Nope. Apple should have properly described the application firewall on release (stopping the  confused Heise report coming out), and should have found the data loss issue in testing. They should have not underestimated how many people would have moaned that the dock looks different (even if a block of it was really just aesthetic subjective conservatism). They absolutely should have tested with logitech drivers (which had old versions of a a heavily-discouraged kernel hack) to stop the upgrade freezes wrongly linked to the BSoD. There are serious issues that have surfaced that need quick fixes still (wireless is flaky in 10.5.1 and 10.4.11 for some users). I'm pretty happy to see Apple get slammed, but this rant wastes energy on making comparisons that don't really fit.

nontroppo:
Are big operating systems reaching exponential levels of complexity? I'm beginning to wonder.-zridling (November 30, 2007, 04:12 AM)
--- End quote ---

This is a fascinating point I've oft discussed. Being a brain scientist, complexity and non-linearity is a given for my system of study. I wonder what software engineers can do to model system complexity to predict where weak points and non-linearities will appear? Imagine a testing framework in which random permutation in a large-scale virtual machine tested every concievable conjunction of possibilities. Legions of non-linear virtual users would download software in all manners of ways, surf malware sites, plug peripherals in and out, turn off machines at the wrong time...

nontroppo:
Oliver Rist wrote in August (before Leopard, emphasis mine):

But Apple users ... make a big point out of how OS X and its applications "simply work" and "never crash." Sorry, but that's crap. Not only have I crashed both Mac apps and OS X, I've watched when Venezia did it. On the crash issue, the question isn't whether it can crash; the question is whether it crashes more often than Windows. ... I've crashed more Vista apps than Apple apps, no doubt. But post-shrink Vista has locked up on me a grand total of once in six months, while OS X has died on me twice
--- End quote ---
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/29/does-mac-os-suck-35OPenterwin_1.html

Yet in his rant 3 months later:

Let's see, Tiger crashed—oh yeah, NEVER. Ten months and I'm installing everything from production-level Office for the Mac 2004 to 0.x releases of VLC, Seashore, and Ecto—even betas of Firefox and Parallels. Whatever my nerdy little heart desires. I've had those early apps crash, but Tiger never faltered.
--- End quote ---


Hmm, does it smell as if his narrative depends on what his argument is?

Darwin:
Heh, heh, nice bit of detective work, nontroppo  :Thmbsup: Anyone else watch the video rant as well?

Ralf Maximus:
Truly, if "how often you crash" is THE golden measure for operating systems, then Unix wins hands down.  I mean, geez... if it crashed every day, that'd be something to bitch about.  But twice a year?

Personally I accept the fact that computers are complicated (and getting moreso) all the time, so the occasional crash is expected.  It's all designed and maintained by humans.

My point: jumping up and down about this metric as if it's the only one is kind of silly.  Focusing on value, usability, performance... those are all more meaningful to me.

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