Leopard as the New Vista? 734
ninja_assault_kitten writes "There's an interesting rant from Oliver Rist up on the PC Magazine site. He compares the catastrophe that is Vista to the recently released OS X Leopard. While clearly one is a lion and the other a cub, there do appear to be some frustrating similarities. From the article: 'A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times. That's six cold reboots for Oliver. Apple isn't even honest enough to admit that Leopard is crashing: The OS just grays out my desktop and pops up a dialog box telling me I've got to reboot. Like the whole thing is my fault. I even snapped a picture of it. After all, I HAD PLENTY OF CHANCES!'"
Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
I never upgrade until the widespread opinion is the product is mature...
Not a problem here (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a single crash.
Upgraded to 10.5.1 - still all good.
But I'm just one guy - and come to think of it - so is this guy.
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen tons of mac laptops with cosmetic damage, but it's pretty rare that the operating system on a new mac is unreliable.
If this report represents a widespread issue, that's significant. And partly because macs are supposed to work without any problems. And frankly, there's no excuse for them not to. It's like that Halo 3 and the XBOX 360 lawsuit... it's all Microsoft, so there's no excuse for failure.
With my thinkpad, there are parts from several vendors interoperating and dealing with windows and ubuntu and even my playstation when I stream movies on TVersity.
With a mac, it's all Apple, all the time, so the operating system programmer has far less work to do... at least in my mind. Apple has a very interesting business model that ought to be reliable and usually is, so I think this incident somewhat shows why apple fans are so cocky (I'll stick with my thinkpad).
Because PC Magazine is an authority? (Score:2, Insightful)
My guess is that this PC Magazine guy is running some piece of software that's causing his system to go nuts. I have done this myself in the past. After a few crashes, I looked at the kernel log and it was a 3rd-partybeta mouse driver I had installed. I got rid of it and my system was golden.
Some of his other points are fine. I don't think the new features are particularly fantastic. I didn't think so with Tiger either. But I don't think this is an alarm-raising Vista-level catastrophe.
No, it's not (Score:2, Insightful)
Never crashed for me either, but what do I know.
Re:Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
Vista release: Jan. 30, 2007. Vista SP1 release date:
Leopard (10.5) release: Oct. 26, 2007. Leopard 10.5.1 release date: Nov. 15, 2007.
Sit around and bitch about new software having unfound bugs if you want, but don't compare Apples to
Agree and disagree (Score:2, Insightful)
That said, those issues will be gone in 6 months.
Vista's issues are architectural -- they made bad design decisions that make it really, really difficult for business users to migrate. Even Microsoft reps aren't excited about Vista.
Re:Is this idiot for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I upgrade to Leopard, if it doesn't crash, then I'll know this guy is a loser, because us 1337 Slashdot users know that there couldn't be any differences in the hardware or software or use that could cause one computer to crash and another to be stable when they're both running the same operating system.
This article is more than a bit flawed. (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the rest of his article, it seems pretty bullshit to me.
Vista Similarity #1: He claims that it's unstable. Most people disagree, a small but extremely vocal group agrees.
Vista Similarity #2: He whines about graphics overload, but then references things that work on even ancient low-end Macs with shitty graphic cards, and claims that everybody is showing them off. I don't think they are.
Vista Similarity #3: He tries to draw equivalence between putting basic network settings three menus deep and Apple deciding that if the dock is on the bottom, that it should have a subtle reflection. Then he complains Apple's new "Cover Flow" is good enough for him, and thus Quick Look was unnecessary. Perhaps he could try not using it, then. To each their own, y'know.
Vista Similarity #4: He claims that Leopard drops packets and loses connections. I have a bunch of Leopard machines on both wired and wireless networks and have seen absolutely no evidence that this is true. He also claims that SMB shares come and go. Again, I'm on networks with SMB shares and have seen absolutely no evidence that this is true.
Vista Similarity #5: He tries to claim that time machine is awful, because it does file-level, not block-level incrementals, it doesn't work on network shares by default, and it defaults to backing up the whole system. Time Machine could use improvement, but it's useful and it will get a *lot* of people backing up their machines for the first time in forever.
Honestly, #5 is the only complaint that has any air of authenticity to me (I've had similar complaints), but it's not like it's a horrific detriment.
There are two options here:
Option 1) This is Ziff-Davis MSFT flamebait.
Option 2) The author of the piece is an idiotic fuck who screwed up his install.
My money is on Both.
Re:as an apple user... (Score:5, Insightful)
* Yes, Leopard *is* more than a point upgrade. It's a major upgrade. Don't get caught up on the numbering... there are BIG changes under the hood between 10.4 and 10.5. As there were between 10.4 and 10.3. A "point" upgrade is 10.4.3 to 10.4.4. I don't have any crashes with Spotlight but I haven't installed FC Studio 6 yet. Even if I did, I couldn't give it a fair shake as I'm not a video editor.
* The GUI for the Firewall is totally different than it was in Tiger. And it's really confusing. What's goofy is the Firewall GUI in Leopard is for the *application* firewall, which is completely new, and which does some stuff based on application signatures. It has no control whatsoever on the ports-based firewall, IPFW. IPFW still actually exists and be configured using ipfw rules if you're so inclined (it's straightforward, but non-trivial for those who aren't command-line fans and who don't want to learn about ports, port state, in/out, and UDP versus TCP). This change is very poorly documented. IMO you should leave the firewall GUI off for now.
* Disk Utilitiy can and does repair permissions. There are a couple applications and things it's not fixing right now, but this is a very small percentage (probably 0.5%) of things. And it's really not much to worry about. The silly thing is that Mac users have come to see "Repair Permissions" as a magic bullet and it's really not. It doesn't fix all that many things, but this is a case of religion (or voodoo).
* Java isn't screwed, but true you're limited to Java 5 (er, 1.5) for now. How many things do you do which are actually Java 6 only commands? Most apps I use still use 1.3 and *maybe* 1.4.
Sure, there are bugs. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's 10.5.1. These things take some time, as the betas are tested by tens of thousands, and the GMs are used by millions (soon enough, tens of millions). They'll get fixed, but if you aren't prepared for a couple inconveniences it's ill advised to upgrade to an OS in the first few days or even weeks of its release. It's called "the bleeding edge" for a reason.
Also perhaps you didn't install 10.4.0. It had similar issues.
Quicktime 7.3 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a power user, and I really just use Quicktime for porn, but it definitely took a major step backwards in this release: the select/copy/paste functionality has been removed from most movie types. Also the A/V controls (brightness, contrast) no longer work on many formats. These were things that _worked_ in 7.2 and have been _disabled_ in 7.3. I don't know what they're trying to do, but it seems like they're trying to make Quicktime completely useless. Those little features were the only reason I used Quicktime at all (instead of VLC, for example).
Poking around online to try and find a downgrade path, I found that a lot of Final Cut users were totally screwed by this update as well. And the downgrade path is to reinstall the OS from scratch and selectively update around Quicktime 7.3.
Meh... Apple is doing a lot of things right. And they're doing a lot of things wrong. I'd like to see them understand which is which, and hold on to the right things and work on improving the wrong things. Is that really too much to ask?
Bugs and such I understand, but who the hell thinks it's a good idea to disable existing functionality?
Cheers.
I don't think this guy has used Leopard or Vista (Score:2, Insightful)
Every time I restart Vista at least 2 of the Media Center services crash on startup. After restarting them 2-3 times each they tend to stay running until the next time I restart Vista.
After years of trying Microsoft has successfully destroyed Windows Explorer. It doesn't update directory contents regularly. It doesn't have a "up one directory" button. Seriously? It's a file manager not a web browser. Let me have a up one dir button, please. Vista networking is slow, unreliable and the smallest configuration task is hidden behind 20 levels of pretty glass bars.
Leopard on the other hand is faster and more stable than Tiger ever was. The networking picks up windows, linux and afp file shares more reliably and faster than Tiger. Spotlight is faster and seems much more responsive. The user interface does have useless new features. New features that you're free to ignore. Stacks is a waste of time. Time Machine doesn't have a tremendous amount of value to me. The dock and menu bar are translucent now. Obviously, these new features draw value away from OS X.
What draws value away from Vista is the fact that tons of software and hardware still doesn't work with Vista a year after it's release.
I'll take useless new features and system stability over bad hardware/software support and the dumbing down of user interface components.
panic.log (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is this idiot for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me repeat: ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS CRASH
It all depends on what you're doing.
Got a fresh install of Windows ME that you only use to play spider solitaire, and that isn't connected to the internet?
Crash free.
Got a not so fresh install of Linux / BSD / Solaris where root has done something really stupid?
Crash prone (and possibly unrecoverable if it's REALLY stupid).
Anything in between is going to be based on what you're doing.
Install the wrong drivers / kernel modules / other software that accesses hardware and you'll make any operating system crash prone.
And since you have many Linux boxen and an crash-free windows box, it's safe to assume you're a power user.
So, you don't count!
You probably know what you're doing, and don't do anything stupid.
The real test is how often does an inexperienced user's computer crash? And, if we gave the author of this article a PC with Windows on it, would it eventually crash more or less? And, since other people don't seem to have this problem, what is causing the crashes (he might be blaming Apple for the work of a bad board for example).
Re:Not a problem here (Score:3, Insightful)
I use a wide variety of applications on these systems ranging from off-the-shelf games to command line utilities installed through MacPorts. Therefore, and expectedly, there were a small handful of applications I had which did not work immediately after Leopard's release. However, they have all been updated in the meantime and are now working great. In my case, none of these apps were remarkably critical; all of my most important applications worked just fine throughout. As a side note, gaming on my Macs seems to have received a noticeable boost in performance since moving to 10.5, which is really great.
So, make that two. Or, well, five.
Anecdotes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
You may be right. next time I'm over there, I'll check out those options.
There are quite a few blind people migrating to the Mac. A lot seem to really like it. I have used Voiceover extensively. My school has a computer lab filled with Macs. It is pretty difficult to get things done, although this may, of course, have been do to me being unfamiliar.
Reading the manual did help quite a bit, but the product is, in my opinion, not yet mature enough to be used at work, for example. I listened to a demo of Voiceover and the Dashboard, and it was obvious that Voiceover was tripping up. There is no accessible spreadsheets application, and the only useable word processor is TextEdit.
I commend Apple for their accessibility efforts. However, contrary to what you may hear, Voiceover is not yet quite ready for primetime. With Leopard, it did get a bit closer, though.
Re:What will be interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
Isn't it more accurate to compare the time line of Windows XP to Mac OS X? Both were released around the same time, both are their respective publishers most popular desktop OS, both are currently supported, etc. Yet one has received free updates since release, where as the other has had four $129 software updates since release. Since both companies stopped supporting the older versions of their OS, which would you go with? The OS with free updates, or the OS that has cost you over $500 to stay updated?
Re:Anecdotal evidence is worthless (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Is this idiot for real? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have had exactly one blue screen using XP, and that was caused by a bad driver. Other than that, 100% uptime across the board. I've had programs crash but the OS remained up.
On my macbook pro with tiger, I've had 3 crashes, 2 spinning beachballs of death, and one ice screen (frozen plain blue screen) in the past year. Most seemed to have been cause by open source programs (X11 based apps seemed to be particularly flaky), though one instance was caused by a mac update and the other by powerpoint.
So what does this mean? Squat. There is no conclusion that can reasonable be drawn from this. I don't think macs are crash prone pieces of junk. Nor do I think XP is the pinnacle of stability. Unfortunately, there are no standard "stability" tests to speak of.
The number of lockups and crashes (or uptime %) are pretty much irrelevant unless you know the context. If you're a developer, there's a good chance that you'll end up crashing a system from time to time. If all you do is answer email and surf the web, you really shouldn't see any crashes. The same goes for someone running a website that only gets 4 hits a month.
It would be useful to come up with a standardized stability test for some unbiased numbers. But until there is such a thing all reviews should be taken with a good chunk of halite.
~X~
Re:What will be interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember back in the N64 days before patching? What the hell was a crash glitch? 99% of the games weren't capable of just locking up or writing garbage data over your whole memory card. They couldn't fix the games later so they released them so close to perfect that they were acceptable. And now today we have the original Xbox's Splinter Cell whose online play had so many glitches it was a crime against gaming. But the "just release it so we can get money now, we'll patch it later" crap is unacceptable! Programmers are getting lazy or worse yet, sabotaging programs so they're ensured work to do later fixing it. I say put in some damn effort and release software that's actually good!
Worthless chatter (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux geeks still tend too much to attack the newcomer, or shout "Read the friggin' man pages!" Still as a community they are maturing and learning to help people rather than flame them.
Make a complaint about an Apple product though and you run headlong into a wall of denial a mile high, with everyone either claiming that your problem does not exist, that you're an idiot when you point out some of the more bizarre UI choices Apple makes, or most frighteningly, arguing that any deficiency, no matter how severe, is somehow actually a wonderful feature.
I think that Apple users are doing themselves a disservice by not holding Apple to a higher standard. By pretending that hardware or software issues don't exist, and by attempting to shut down those who raise legitimate complaints, they allow Apple far too much latitude to do the same.
This will of course be modded as troll or flamebait by the first fanboy who reads it.
Complete opposite for me (Score:3, Insightful)
I had messed up my Keychain config many versions and computers ago, which was faithfully migrated from Mac to Mac. Leopard broke it (basically, my keychain was named for my user shortname, not "login"). I renamed the keychain, logged out and back in, and all was well.
VPN configs didn't migrate the authentication info properly because Internet Config is no longer the tool that manages the connection. Not a problem for most, but I have 23 different clients I use VPNs to connect to. Easily fixed.
I didn't use any InputManagers other than Saft/PithHelmet, so that was no biggie. And that combo works now.
When the Mac first wakes up and is scanning for a network connection, the mouse is kind of jerky. It lasts a few seconds.
All in all, I've seen remarkably few bugs for a
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:2, Insightful)
The difference is that Ubuntu is free, of course. And compared with Vista, the next level of Ubuntu isn't as great a drag on my system (I need to use Office, so I'm screwed anyway).
I agree. 2007 had better be better. It's a great time for computing and I forsee massive changes in the operating system market. 90% of what people do with the internet is use the internet. If we start seeing internet applications that don't suck, the compatibility argument that macs and MS rely on becomes weaker. If a system can do flash, it's going to be a valid system for the marketplace.
So as the internet takes over, I see Windows becoming less and less relevant. Hell, I see the PC becoming less and less relevant. If an internet appliance can handle my applications, entertainment, and communciation, I don't need windows anymore (especially if I'm an idiot who is too challenged to run adaware).
I think we'll see iPhones and google devices and PS3 (that are more versatile) take over the living rooms, and the PCs will be left behind. Even offices are better served by internet terminals that leave documents safely on servers and out of the hands of laptop thieves.
That's why Apple is investing in their TV and Phone devices. That's why Microsoft has pours billions into their XBOXs and will start another very soon. Where is that development money coming from? OS development. Vista is not the kind of leap XP was because it would be stupid to keep investing in a model that is on the way out.
I don't think 2008 will see better OS products. But in several years, it won't matter.
Re:What will be interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
Sucks to be him. (Score:1, Insightful)
From the rant:
"Okay, the (Time Machine) screen looks like Star Wars. That's cool in an I-want-to-stay-a-virgin kind of way. But 'easy to use'? Which groupie said that? Try putting a new Apple user in front of this app and see what happens."
Mmmmkay. Try putting a new Windows user in front of Windows and see what happens.
I haven't had a kernel panic since Puma. Maybe I'm just lucky, but then again, I don't use a lot of random
no problems here (Score:3, Insightful)
Leopard is buggy and Apple has few excuses (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, you do realize that Microsoft has been releasing Vista fixes for months now via Windows Update, right? Fixes don't have to come as SPs or
But you're right, I don't see the similarity either. Vista has to work probably 3 orders of magnitude more configurations than OSX does, yet Leopard is still very buggy, even with 10.5.1, BTW.
And make no mistake: The author's complaints are not an isolated case.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/update-leopard-problems-apple,review-1028.html [tomsguide.com]
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/11/14/ive-been-attacked-by-a-leopard/ [robhyndman.com]
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/caught-in-apple-restart-hell/ [scobleizer.com]
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/17/the-brand-promise-of-apple/ [scobleizer.com]
http://www.digg.com/apple/MacBook_MacBook_Pro_owners_suffer_keyboard_freezing_with_Leopard [digg.com]
And check out the Apple discussion forums (though Apple has seen fit to lock many of the threads that complain about Leopard's problems, so check out MacinTouch and AppleInsider.com forums too).
Apple's "Vista is crap" ad campaign and using BSOD icons for Windows network shares in Leopard makes this all the more embarrassing for Apple. And comedian Baratunde Thurston has publicly called out Apple on its unjustified smugness (even before Leopard was released).
Baratunde Thurston: I Hate the Smugness of Apple [youtube.com]
Re:And Microsoft always admits problems? (Score:2, Insightful)
I support developers testing the limits of XP every day. On their Dell D820 laptops they will run two 1 gig VMWare Workstation dev environments off of external eSata drives via their PC Express card eSata adapter. Running simultaneously Outlook 2007, Communicator 2007(read bloated), streaming media with winamp, browsing the web(firefox), and finally using heavier microsoft intranet apps like Sharepoint. These power users easily use every bit of their 4gb of memory and fill up their 120gb internal HD's with random programs and media. they have local admin rights and know just enough to be dangerous when customizing their OS. Yet, if they have a reoccuring crash, they will instantly complain to me about it because I will offer to build a replacement laptop and let them swap out, minimizing their dev downtime. This is a very, very rare occurrence, and when it does happen it's usually bad hardware(hard drives almost always).
Furthermore, I just got a D830 for myself(one of three) and we chose to install Windows Vista x64. It tooks some time to locate all the proper drivers but I've been using it for 3 weeks now and it hasn't crashed once.
I'm no Microsoft fan by any means as I support plenty of their woefully half-baked, re-branded garbage in my company's environment. But I can' help but view these OS bashing claims of infamy as largely people who prefer alternative OS's and are frustrated by MS's dominance in the area of available apps. Windows XP and Vista are simply not that unstable.
Re:Comments and articles are all ridiculous. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vista is like MacOS 9, but does not work as wel (Score:2, Insightful)
I used OS 9 for a few years, and while it was mostly OK, that annoying little sad Mac popped up once too often when working with Photoshop and PageMaker 7 for my liking. It's plain enough that you never used it.
Maybe it was more functional than Windows 95, but it was closer to it from a platform perspective than to Windows XP, so whatever failings XP had or has, OS 9 is still a full generation behind it. In reality it wasn't until OS X that Apple had a real operating system, much like NT4 for Microsoft. Your comparison is completely off the mark.
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy - people scream at the idea of google reading their mail just to give them ads. What happens when they're storing all of their documents, photos, music, videos on someone else's server? I wouldn't be willing to do it. Nothing would convince me that employees of the company housing my data wouldn't be able to just go in there and check it out whenever they pleased. I believe Facebook is a classic example of this. Private profiles aren't private if you're an employee.
Power - I recently spoiled myself with a OC'd 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, two 150GB Raptors in RAID 0, two 640MB 8800GTSs and a 64 bit OS to make sure I'm taking advantage of my RAM. Games look beautiful on this beast. You'd have to have a heckuva server and a ridiculous internet connection to provide both me and other people (I say other people, because if I'm the only one using it, why is there a server / thin client set-up?) the same gaming experience I can get from my machine on my own. Not every piece of software will happily work using the thin client model. There are other examples, but games are the first thing that came to mind.
Security - This is the trust issue all over again. The "paris hilton cell phone" hack comes to mind. Her phone wasn't hacked, the server that housed some of the data that she stored on her phone was hacked. Aaaand naked pictures of her ended up everywhere and every poor sucker that knew her got called until they switched numbers. That was just crap from a phone - not the entire contents of someones computer. Everyone thinks it's funny when it happens to a celebrity but how would it be if your intimate videos ended up on the net for co-workers to watch? Personal letters? Photos? Angry rants about your current boss? The list goes on... The fact is I don't think any system will ever by "hack proof" but my little box under my desk is a much smaller target than say a server housing thousands or even millions of other people's data.
I'm not trying to crap on your parade, it just seems like ever since the .com boom people have been saying it more and more and I just don't see it as being a good idea.
Re:Leopard is buggy and Apple has few excuses (Score:5, Insightful)
So what icons does Windows use for representing Apple filesharing protocol shares?
Re: Nobody? Guess I am nobody then (Score:2, Insightful)
My coworker just bought a new MacBook with Tiger pre-installed. Nothing crazy added. Trying to set up BootCamp for her was a huge pain. Easy as pie in Tiger, but Leopard made things really difficult. Took three attempts to get the Windows partition formatted correctly, and now it works but she cannot choose to boot from that partition using the Option key - the system fails to recognize the partition exists until after booting into Leopard. She has to wait for it to fully load the OS, then choose her preferred startup disk in Preferences and reboot if she wants to run Windows. As a new Mac user who needs Windows for a lot of work-related tasks, she is understandably upset. I cannot understand why the BootCamp beta works better than the final release.
As for the networking, you should have heard me swearing bloody murder at my Mac last week while trying to back up files to my home Windows system. The computers sit three feet away from each other hooked to the same router, but it took fifteen minutes, complete disabling of the firewall and a reboot of the Mac to get it to admit that my Windows box existed. That's an improvement? NTFS read-write would have been an improvement, but the current state is not.
The inclusion of an up-to-date Apache build and PHP 5 is an improvement. Adding pointless eye candy, breaking hardware that used to work properly, borking networking, and screwing up BootCamp is not an improvement. The "vocal minority" are vocal because the things that broke are crucial to the work we try to do on our computers.
Re:One man's opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
I've used Win95, 98, 2000, and XP. Though I hated the aesthetics of XP, I had problems with none of them. I've used Linux, and it too did what I wanted, minus being able to install some software on some distros (probably attributable to my own igorance). I've had a MacBook for ~6 months, with no problems. But during all of this time, I've heard and read complaint after complaint about all of these operating systems, about how this or that is garbage, unsuitable for serious users, and so on. I'd guess about 10%, if that, have viable complaints. Most have unreasonable expectations, or just like to bitch. Add that to the fact that people get emotionally defensive about a decision that has no bearing on what kind of person you are--what OS you use--and we're doomed to keep hearing this crap.
Between the bare metal and the end user experience are tens of millions of lines of code, all typed by people of different abilities, outlooks, and so on. I'm amazed that this thing even works at all. Yes, I wish it worked better, faster, more intuitively (but for whom?), but overall I've been happy with my experience on all of these operating systems. Currently I prefer OS X, though I haven't upgraded to Leopard yet. When I do, it may delete my data, catch my MacBook on fire, and send a squad of goons to my house to beat me up. I'll say "that sucks!" and go on with my life. I'll probably still use Apple products the next day, because I like their stuff.
Azureus (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This article is more than a bit flawed. (Score:2, Insightful)
Your experience isn't that impressive to me. Try googling a bit and you'll find lots of peopla having issues with Leopard. For example: :)
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1215730&tstart=60 [apple.com]
I have the same problem myself. Just installed Leopard over over Tiger on my new Mac Mini and iMovie crashes every time. There are no extras or strange things as I have done to it as I have *never* been able to start iMovie. Add to this that iTunes has been having problems importing my music (it just didn't show up in the list for no obvious reason) and other small issues and it makes me a quite disappointed new apple customer. Luckily it was easy to partition the disk and make room for ubuntu
It's called the APE syndrome (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not that Apple is infallible, but comparing Leopard to Vista is a bit much.
Re:panic.log (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
Remind me to never come to you for any sort of consulting. This is just plain negligent.
You're not an average computer user (Score:3, Insightful)
You and I are outnumbered by people like our aunts, their friends, brothers, mothers our friends who find computers to be a form of black magic. I am quite happy for them to use a thin client. In fact, I encourage it.
Ultimately it'll happen, you'll see it more and more as bandwidth increases.
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words... not every person thinks that an xbox or PS3 is a viable solution.
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:2, Insightful)
True, though I think there's still a difference between emails, and every private document you have, including personal/private material that they wouldn't email.
Also, one hopes that in most cases email is not kept around - yes we can't guarantee it, but this is likely if only because of the costs of doing so.
Consider the opposition to suggested Government laws about requiring ISPs to store email, or Google's "your email is never deleted".
If your concerned about privacy, don't use internet/telephony service provided by someone else, or at the very least encrypt all your communications. The trouble with this is, you'l have a very limited subset of people you can talk with!
I only have to tell the person I want to send encrypted info to download PGP or whatever, and thankfully the people I want to talk with aren't complete muppets, and can manage to do that.
Also, this is another argument about why email is different - people take the risk of using email despite privacy concerns, because there isn't much choice if you want to talk to people. But it doesn't then follow that you should put all of your information online, when in that case, private alternatives do exist.
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:4, Insightful)
Woah... trusting web app employees is VERY different than trusting desktop app employees. There's a huge difference between trusting someone not to look at MY data housed on THEIR servers than there is to trust that someone didn't write some kind of back door code that allows them to see the contents of my hard drive. Firewall, virus protection, and various other monitoring tools all give me the ability to know exactly what's happening on my computer. I don't have that on their servers. I can't see if someone is trying to look at my files on their machines.
Additionally, any desktop company releasing a piece of software like that (Sony rootkit anyone!?) would immediately get slammed by the public. The evidence would be right in the code - you can't hide from that. That's much different than an employee at some data center casually browsing through everyone's files. Good luck proving they did it and good luck getting the company to admit it even if they know that they did it.
three words... (Score:1, Insightful)
Solved all my Leopard problems.
Re:Clearly you're mistaken (Score:4, Insightful)
I have three machines running Leopard and I haven't experienced any panics. Chances are good that one of the following is true:
In either case, if the article's author wants to get the panics fixed, the best thing he/she can do is to post the panic logs so that people can scrutinize it and tell him/her what is wrong. Instead, he posted a rant, which tells me he is more interested in making Apple look bad than in fixing his issues. *sigh*
Re:I'm using Leopard right now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vistard can kiss my shiny Java ass... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's funny because you describe something that I recently saw. I don't have a Mac, but my sister has a powerbook and upgraded to Leopard. She wanted some help with her website and had it all designed out in Illustrator. The quick way to make a site out of it was to make an imagemap but that required Photoshop. As soon as she opened Photoshop, it crashed. Sure, CS3 is Adobe software not Apple's but with all the fanfare and claims by Mac people I was expecting a pristine and awesome experience on OSX.
Another annoying thing I found was the stupid file browser or application browser thing. A third of the window is given to an itunes-like view of the program's icon with all the other programs stacked like a jukebox disc off to the sides. It was completely useless and only offered "bling". For a second I thought it was designed by Microsoft.
After that I was convinced. There is no such thing as a "perfect" computing experience--you know, like the "it just works" marketin...err...idea. Anyone that claims so is full of shit and/or trying to sell you something. There are only "better" computing experiences. I won't deny that Apple might have the best game in town or have better products than competitor "M", but people need to stop bending over to Jobs and friends. All you're doing is inflating their egos and it shows in their TV commercials.