Reader Comments

A smattering.

Get It Try It

Hear hear! Sock it 'em Boss. And from a company with more money in the bank than god. Buy me an MPB and put me on the salary. I'll test your software. Even use my own PPC to cross check architecture. Let's see - I could put you down for every other Friday at 1:30 for 3 hours.

No argument. I've said it before, I don't know why there hasn't been a class action suit against Microsoft for providing a defective product. All the weasel words in the world ('no consequential damages', 'sold as is') can't divert attention from the fact their software sucks. Not that Apple shouldn't take note either.

I have been describing Leopard to people as the 'lowrider bicycle' of the computer world.

Right-O. Yes I think they do want you to pour a nice warm mug of Shut-the-F-Up for the winter and come out of hibernation in Jan/Feb when 10.5.2 is out - which ** NDA ** will address numerous bugs and issues ** End NDA **. But no not all of them - just pump 'em into the black hole, have 'em merge with existing bugreporter numbers that are unable to be read - you are unable to contact that author and collaborate with them, all critical mass is lost, much like the Apple Developer Connection which lacks any private forums where we can discuss these sensitive things that Apple calls NDA. Instead we resort to posting in semi-private forums with 10.5 beta screenshots along with admonitions to not spread the pics for fear of Apple Legal™ - if we are supposed to test and fix Apple's stuff but can't even discuss the bugreporter (any responses to it are NDA) I don't see how this can work - lots of people holding their breath turning blue in the face, only to explode in red faced anger.

So in essence they're stating that as long as their machines don't become accepted in the IT departments they're totally safe. Great. I guess some people won't be exchanging HP-UX-64 servers that provide file mounts and shells for 50,000 students over to Apple. What a shame.

It's an industry like no other. Granted, the computer is a multi-purpose tool and gets used in combinations unlike many others, but still... if the pieces work separately, they ought to work together. I keep coming back to the 'it's a management issue' point of view. Apple seems defensive about things. OK, they don't seem defensive, they ARE defensive. Wrong attitude. They should be saying 'thank you' and proceeding to make things right. The absence of a different attitude is because they are more focused on marketing (featuritis) than on quality (people will buy this stuff because it is good). And it's not the grunts who set that course. Makes you wonder how NeXT could get it so right and Apple can get it so wrong - yet the same person ran/runs both. It says something about the people Jobs teamed up with at NeXT and how they were able to influence the direction they went. Clearly influences are different now. Timidity in the ranks. 'Yes, boss!'

The Apple reps at the stores are all a bit lost. My mum asked what the difference was between Tiger and Leopard (she was going to make a joke about 'spots and stripes') and the guy said 'well the main thing that's different is the Finder, how you get around your computer, they've arranged it like iTunes, you can save searches and it has Cover Flow'. That's it.

Pretty disappointed with the Leopard? Me too. For many reasons but mostly for this stupid tendency to replace good stuff with broken half-assed surrogates. Moving stuff to trash freezes the Finder for a good 3~4 seconds, the progress bar of 'Empty Trash' counts down to a certain number of remaining items and then it gets stuck there while the trash is already empty. Only a relaunch will get rid of this frozen progress bar. And so on and on. It's all over the place and it's terribly disappointing - and it's also very frustrating knowing that most of the broken stuff won't be fixed anytime soon.

See Also
Red Hat Diaries: No.