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You are a forgiving user, but it should not be the way while dealing with a paid product. Simple: they must not publish misbehaving products, it results in losses for many.
Releasing an OS to the public while knowing it contains plenty of bugs - is just unacceptable. Having competitors that perform worse is not an excuse.

Edited 2007-11-30 19:54

"You are a forgiving user, but it should not be the way while dealing with a paid product. Simple: they must not publish misbehaving products, it results in losses for many.
Releasing an OS to the public while knowing it contains plenty of bugs - is just unacceptable. Having competitors that perform worse is not an excuse. "

I think this is totally the wrong way, to wait until you know that your product is bug-free. Nobody is going that way (not Linux, not Windows), why should Apple go that way? I think there must be a reason for that :-)

Every product ever made has problems that happen after the initial sale. CPUs, semi conductors (ship with errata docs), Cars, DVD players, TVs etc. and some that are known before hand and are not considered critical or show stoppers.

I strongly suspect you are not involved in any soft of product development with such a narrow view.

I agree with u, but again we living in the world which not always as perfect as we think. In reality, take example of Ms XP and it is very mature product, but still having plenty of bugs...the worse things is Microsoft soon to discontinued XP product and forcing the Vista to go market which making business partner not quite happy, but this is reality.

At the end, as user, we all know what is the errors/bugs, but since you depends on them (OS X, XP/Vista) therefore you just need to wait for patches and bug fixes. but as the vendor of product, they need to put the product to market and gain some profits from it and put the bug fixed later in few weeks...

Sorry for bad english...

It's not about being a forgiving user. Most people simply don't have any problems whatsoever with Leopard. I haven't had a ton of experience with Vista, but I have had some and I know a lot of people who bought it. It just isn't that great of an OS. I know a lot of people who are bailing on Vista for Linux, XP, and OS X. You simply don't see that with Leopard.

The only people trying to make a "suckiness" comparison between Windows and OS X are jaded Vista users; it seems.

You are a forgiving user, but it should not be the way while dealing with a paid product. Simple: they must not publish misbehaving products, it results in losses for many.
-and what do you know about keeping a large codebase bugfree?
besides, or rather to the point, the only way to ensure non-misbehaving tools is to make them yourself.
that doesn't mean I want to encourage you to take on a life as programmer, only get you to notice that perfection is a hard to reach goal that can never be achived in a complex product. at least not if it has a deadline to meet

Releasing an OS to the public while knowing it contains plenty of bugs - is just unacceptable. Having competitors that perform worse is not an excuse.
-well, it's working good enough for us to build large databases and complex networks and those work just as well on tiger, panther, leopard, gnus, hell even on windows. so what's the fuss about?
if you want stability use a stable os like freebsd who doesn't care about meeting a profit margin.
if you want "the coolest new thing" try leopard or use windows, but don't be disappointed at crash. they happen. in a system that has billions of bytes to calculate with a huge number of subroutines, somewhere there's GOT to be glitch. and if the glitch is in plain sight you've looked the horse in the mouth and ought not to buy it. simple as that.

so try to get a grip
software isn't everything, hardly perfect and certainly not worth buying. not. ever.

// I can run almost anything in Leopard I could in Tiger. Can't say that for Vista.//

Such as ... what? Examples?

- Older Office Versions
- VS 2006 without SP1 (SP1 changes the compiler and breaks some code)

This are just the two I had problems with. Remember that there is still lots of old Software out there. Especially in companies.

"- Older Office Versions
- VS 2006 without SP1 (SP1 changes the compiler and breaks some code)"

Firstly what the hell is VS 2006? We have Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, and I don't think by 2006 you mean 2005 SP1.

In my personal experience I've had zero problems with VC++ 2005 under Vista but that is basically what I use Vista for, no idea about other software.

And back to Leopard, three of my problems:

1- VLC while playing videos full-screen, brings system to a halt, more frequently if I press Next/Previous, the keyboard/mouse stop working and I have to hard-reset; that didn't happen with Tiger.

2- Newer issue is with sleep on my MBP, in fact waking up from sleep, the trackpad/mouse starts acting weird, the pointer, instead of moving smoothly, it just jumps from one point to another, the only fix I found is to restart the machine. It doesn't always happen and as much as I tried, wasn't able to find out what's the source of the problem. Anybody has a similar issue?

3- I frequently get disconnected from school's wireless network and have to turn airport on and off to re-join, no such problem with Tiger.

There are other issues, but so far not troublesome enough to make me go back to tiger, especially since I can't live without Spaces.

Edited 2007-12-01 00:56

I think it's safe to assume he meant VS 2k5. However, both of the apps he mentioned will run just fine in Vista. The only issues I'm aware of aren't compatibility, but privilege issues, depending on usage (IIS ASP.NET debugging in VS 2k5 RTM, for example, IIRC). Simply running the app as admin solves those issues.

> waking up from sleep, the trackpad/mouse starts acting weird, the pointer, instead of moving smoothly, it just jumps from one point to another, the only fix I found is to restart the machine

Same problem on my 17" mbp 2.4 Santa Rosa; a co-worker has it as well on his 15" 2.4 Santa Rosa, whereas our two co-workers on first-gen MBPs do not have the issue. It was an issue in Tiger, Leopard, and 10.5.1. We have tried to come up with some sort of reproducible pattern but have yet to identify one.

Occasional super-long wake-up times (1 to 2 minutes) are the only other nuisance I have had with Leopard. Other than that, it's been a painless in-place upgrade from Tiger, and system was/is rather heavily customized. I was on 10.5.1 when I had my permissions seriously wonky, crippling a bunch of apps, and no utility I had could properly fix them (I'm sure the issue was caused by a failed attempt to use the boot camp assistant) and had to do an archive/reinstall from the Leopard Disc. Twenty minutes later, I was back in business, all my apps worked fine, and all data was intact; didn't have to touch my backup. That was rather impressive to me.

//// I can run almost anything in Leopard I could in Tiger. Can't say that for Vista.//

Such as ... what? Examples?//

Obviously not anything in Classic mode. (I still have some games that need it).

Also, Tiger isn't exactly bug-free. As I type this, my desktop wallpaper is randomly changing every two seconds. I have the 'change wallpaper automatically' feature set to OFF, and no third party desktop-enhancing software.

Edited 2007-12-01 10:01

Comparing Leopard to Vista is laughable -- I can run almost anything in Leopard I could in Tiger. Can't say that for Vista.

I gotta agree with you! But then again, I also agree atleast with the point made by the author about Time Machine.. The most obvious place you'd look for preferences would be inside the app. And the strange Star Wars effect? It's rather confusing and not in the least intuitive. Atleast that's my opinion, haven't made any real-world study about how even less technically experienced people would feel.

Operating system have so many users/groups of users that you simply can't take ones experience(in this case yours). Because there will always be some claiming that he as no problem.

Many of his points are good. The problem is that he make the link by looking only at the flaw of OS X against Vista. To make a valid match, he would have better take the sum of goods and bads of both system.

I've had Vista on my HP pavilion dv9000 since three weeks after launch, and have yet to have the OS crash. The only serious stability issue at the moment is firefox freezes up an astonishing amount, but my guess is that it is firebug mucking with ajax sites.


I am a freelance developer, and as such I am constantly on my pc using professional software packages. The only bug in Vista I have really been affected by is that in some open dialogues, the order of my favorite links sidebar gets messed up. This is a minor issue though, and I'm certain microsoft will fix it over time.


This is really the first version of Windows I have ever actually liked. During the XP years, i used Java based platforms for my development so I could work in linux, and would dual boot or use WINE for the few things in windows that was part of my workflow. Now, I am fairly happy on it, I find it to be the most problem free environment by MS I have ever used.



I have Office 2k7, Adobe CS3 Web Design, Visual Studio 2k5 standard, and SQL Server 2k5 developer installed, and all my professional applications work flawlessly. In fact, I have yet to run across a single app that doesnt work after applying compatibility settings.

Comparing Leopard to Vista is laughable -- I can run almost anything in Leopard I could in Tiger. Can't say that for Vista.

AFAIK making Vista compatible with Tiger was never a priority for Microsoft.

I have a Macbook Pro running Leopard and have no issues. I've installed Leopard on several Macs without an issue.

The software used on my personal one is: Adobe Web Premium CS3 (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, etc), OpenOffice v2.x, Filezilla, Eclipse IDE for PHP, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Firefox 2.0.0.11, XAMPP with (Apache, MySQL, PHP5), Opera 9.x, Joost, GCC, etc.

Vista isn't too awful. I can use it without an issue (just need 2gb ram). However, I hear a lot more bad things about it than good from customers.

Customers keep wanting to go back to XP and the most common complaint: Why does it keep asking me questions every time I want to play with the settings (control panel for one)? UAC you are a pain, but I understand your existence, but dang!

1. Wait For a Service Pack
I agree with JaredWhite. I've been using Leopard since day one on both a MacBook Pro and an old Mac Mini. I have been running apps like Nisus, Scrivener, Final Cut, TextMate, PostgreSQL, Subversion, Ruby on Rails, Photoshop CS3, several Omni Group products, etc. I have not had a single issue on either machine (with the exception of Adobe Photoshop's retarded requirement of a case-insensitive filesystem -- way to go Adobe developers!)

2. Needles Graphic Glitz
I like graphic glitz myself, but I can see why some people wouldn't. Not liking it sells articles, for instance. However, I don't think Apple has gone overboard, and some transparencies are actually a good thing. For example, when I'm working on a complex BASH script and and referencing a "howto" article on the web, it is nice to have my terminal transparent so I can read the web page through it as I'm typing. Also, today's graphics cards are very powerful. If you're not using it for games, why waste all that power on a Windows 3.1 style interface? Glitz makes your computer fun to use. There's nothing wrong with that.

3. Pointless Interface Fixes
Personally, I like the new dock. It looks nice. I did darken the default to a charcoal gray and I think it looks even better that way because the blue dots show up a lot better, but other than that, it's great.

I don't use Cover Flow much. It is nice, but I just don't use it. I do use QuickLook a lot though. Isn't choice a nice thing?

4, Networking
I don't use Windows, so I have no need to connect to Windows Shares. This may very well be a problem, but if you're using Windows on your network, you probably have bigger issues than not being able to see Shares.

5. Time Machine
"Buried in System Preferences..." What? It's right on the main page. It's one click away. What is the author smoking? System Preferences is where you go to configure stuff. It's called a consistent UI. Duh.

The author's rant on Time Machine actually ruined all his credibility for me. All along he came across as an angry Windows user trying to show that his OS isn't the only one that sucks and shouldn't have been released, but I don't think he spent more than a minute clicking around in Time Machine so he could whine about it in his article.

Time Machine has already saved my butt twice, it works as advertised, and it works well. Also, you don't have to have a working Leopard install to restore from Time Machine. OS X's installer will let you restore from Time Machine during an installation. Time Machine isn't a disk imager, so one shouldn't expect to do a bare metal restore from it. Bare metal restores are a waste of hard drive space anyway.

Conclusion
The author calls Leopard a "popped balloon of disappointment". Nobody who actually uses Leopard says that. I have been a Linux user since 1994, and even I liked OS X enough to buy two machines. The author is just a scorned Windows user. At least that's how he comes across in the article.

You have to admit, though, Vista does have the advantage with the block-based backup system. The author's examples of the Entourage database and Virtual Machines are just two out of many examples where large files would cause extreme loss of disk space due to Time Machine's backup method (and probably performance hits during the copying operation, as well.) The Time Machine method does have the advantage of the files being stored in their original form and thereby being accessible even without using Time Machine, but this really isn't too much of an advantage considering you still need Leopard or a Leopard install disk to get at the files. They could have instead implemented it to look as if entire files are stored in the backup folder, while behind the scenes storing just the changed blocks and the references to the older versions.

I can see advantages and disadvantages to both Time Machine's mechanism and a block-based backup system.

In my opinion, Entourage is a piece of junk, and if you are using it for email, you have much bigger problems than the amount of disk space its backups require. Also, you can exclude Virtual Machines and Entourage database from your Time Machine backup (although I wouldn't recommend doing so for Entourage given its proclivity to database corruption). I keep one copy of my Virtual Machines on an external drive. There's no need to do more than that, so they get excluded.

Also, while you do need Leopard to create a Time Machine backup since Time Machine is new on Leopard, you do not need Leopard to access your backed up files, which is one of the nice things about it. You can take your external drive, plug it in to another machine (running Tiger, for instance), and access the data. My experience with block-level backups is they require the software that created them in order to access the files. With hard drives being cheap and large, I don't mind wasting some space for the convenience of not being tied to a particular software to restore my files.

Also, regardless of the pros and cons of Leopard's backup mechanism (Time Machine) vs. Vista's, you're forgetting one important factor. In order to use Vista's backup utility, you have to be running Vista, and that is a sad, sad situation to be in.

linux-boys are trying to spread a lot of FUD.

What the heck does Linux have to do with this?? No one mentioned the word "Linux" before you, not in the comments or the article! In fact, the author states he's been using OSX for a while now and I got the impression he's been using XP before that.

The post was off-topic flamebait, and should in fact be modded down as such, irregardless of whether you agree with the poster or not.

Note that commenting about moderation is also off-topic, thus your post (and this one) should be modded down as well.

Ugh. -1 for use of "irregardless".

Sorry, English is not my native language and I still make the odd error now and then. Peut-être préfèreriez-vous continuer de débattre cette question en français? :-)

All joking aside, this is waaaay off-topic, and so we should stop now.

Mod -1 for being a grammar fascist. OSNews is a very international site; all you're doing is serving to create a culture of elitism that discourages the participation of people who can't speak English perfectly. Get over it. And stop encouraging the modding-down of people based on their grammatical mastery, rather than the actual points they are trying to get across.

For reference English is my native language. And I will fight to the death for the right of every internet user to abuse and break its grammatical conventions.

Edited 2007-12-02 12:59 UTC

This deserves to be modded down because it is off-topic flamebait. As someone else already pointed out, this has *nothing* to do with Linux. The original article doesn't mention Linux at all, and the author certainly isn't a "Linux boy", to use casuto's immature expression.

Also, being dissatisfied with Vista isn't "MS hate". This would imply that those who don't like the product are acting solely on an emotional, irrational basis. I find that attitude a bit simplistic.

Just for the Record folks this is being bumped down cause of the part about Linux, as it is off topic this story was about Vista and OSX.

Time machine does not do diffs, and I thought that was a bad thing too (backups take more space for sure, etc.). Until you actually start using it and you realize that the way Time Machine does things is actually ingenious and very useful.

Every backup is a complete copy of your hard drive using hard links, so you can browse any previous state of your system using the Finder without using Time Machine. Also applications such as iPhoto and Adress Book (and any other) can show you previous states in *real time*! This would simply not be possible using diffs. So yes it would save more space, but then again recovery would be slow, impractical and you would have to use Apple's solution to recover file (in the current way, you could restore your files manually or eventually through a 3rd party solution, Time Machine is just a GUI but is not necessary to restore your files because no undiff is needed). It's brilliant and it's the way that personal backups should be implemented (but perhaps not corporate backups). So I give it full points and more.

Except that ZFS can in fact do it differentially and still show you the different snapshots of the filesystem in real time. Hopefully Apple will adopt that approach in the future.

Apple's target market isn't developers. It want's to make things easy. If you have ever used a versioning system, you can understand the difficulty average users would have with merging conflicts should they arise, can't you?

Considering Apple's target market, I can understand why they did things the way they did.

Sorry, but that is not a backup.

//Sorry, but that is not a backup.//

True enough, I stand corrected.

Still, though, I think Windows users need to investigate the features of their OS a bit more. System Restore would have saved dozens of borked systems I've come across. Much like Time Machine likely will. If folks use it.

…and pretty much every experienced (i.e., not first- or second-line support) Tech Support person I've spoken to will tell you not to touch System Restore with a bargepole because it's known to cause all manner of problems with on-disk files being completely out of sync with registry entries.

Unless it's been updated in Vista (it might have been, of course—feel free to correct me if that's the case; I don't have it installed any more to check) System Restore is for a very specific class of problems, it's not a generic rollback tool. That's what Volume Shadow Copy (IIRC) is for

So this is what they call a backup eh, your hard disk fails, what next?

Even Microsoft wouldn't class this as a backup and from what you've said you have no clue what a proper backup is.

Apple market Time machine as the next big thing. They make video, that shout how revolutionary it is. No wonder users knows it's there an what to use it.

Microsoft were so much concerned with sideshow and aero, the never market the backup utility. Windows user just aren't aware there is such utility.

Marketing is often more powerful than technology. But it doesn't withdraw credit from Apple, while it's an crucial feature, it is somehow a marketing/information responsibility that MS didn't take.

Edited 2007-11-30 21:07

"Apple should be praised for making backup available and usable by the average Joe; that my friends is huge!"

Ok, not owning one, but just a guess here. Buy any of those network storage backup device type things, and it will come with perfectly useable backup software useable by the average Joe. And Windows home server will have something similar no doubt.

God why is that whenever Apple does something that it is suddenly seen as "innovative", even though its been done before?

On the Mac...

Buy ANY external USB drive plug it in. A OS X asks you if you would like to use the disk for time machine. You say yes and your done. (Beauty is, even if you had no intention to use the drive for a backup it asks you and gets you thinking about backups)

When you need to restore something, click on time machine icon and find the file in a familiar finder interface. Click restore.

On the PC...

Think to yourself hey I need to backup my stuff and find a USB drive that has backup software. Plug it in. Install the software. Configure what files to backup and set a schedule. You find out the backup software is a lite version, which will not allow you to backup network drives or other computers or requires you to remember to press a button on the drive to start a backup.

When you want to restore from the external drive provided software, you have to remember what was the name of the funky backup software? Find it in the start menu. Start the application. Figure out the 3rd party restore function and, most likely, pick only the last available copy.

Now chances are next time you buy a external drive, you will get a totally different set of backup software or you have to decide I only want to buy drives from manufacture X.

Which scenario do you want your grandma/mother-in-law/cousin/neighbor using? If you say PC than you probably have too much time on your hands or enjoy getting calls on the weekend. Oh and by the way each of your callers will have a different backup program installed.

To make dock 2D go to terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

To make dock 3D
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
killall Dock

Granted it should be a preference item, but why does everyone whine so much about this?

Perhaps because the 3D dock is ugly as hell and apparently there is no way to easily revert to the old dock??? Just a guess...