Newsletter #422 Preview: Are Chronic Leopard Bugs Getting a Fair Hearing?
December 30th, 2007The other day I heard from a long-time friend, a former member of a forum I managed on AOL way back when. He has an engineering degree, and worked for many years as the chief sound engineer for a famous singer (now deceased), so he definitely knows his hardware.
He’s also a Mac loyalist, and has earned his stripes by working with Apple’s hardware and software from the earliest days. In all fairness, some of his experiences are stellar, which is why he continues to use Macs. But he’s had his share of problems too, and lately he’s been keeping tags on Leopard’s rough edges.
Rough edges?
Didn’t I say in an earlier column that my experiences with Leopard have been terrific? Indeed I have. And, despite the fact that Apple’s own discussion forums and those Mac troubleshooting sites are littered with hundreds of reports of anomalous behavior, system crashes, and performance issues covering a host of setups, little has been nailed down so far.
So what are we to suppose here? I have been suggesting that many of the problems may be traced to third-party products, both hardware and software, and their interactions with Leopard. Either way, application and driver updates ought to set things right, assuming that Apple doesn’t have to do its part as well.
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.
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Well, I can mention a couple of outstanding Leopard bugs, at least if you include the suite of applications that come as part of the package). One is that before the release of the 10.5.1 upgrade I had experienced at most a couple of Safari crashes. Since installing the upgrade I experience several crashes every day, at least for me it has lost its usual rock-solid stability. Another is that the reason why Time Machine’s ability to back up to a networked server is currently disabled — there are a couple of freeware utilities that switch it back on, use them at your own risk — seems to be a reported bug that destroys all your saved data when your backup medium gets filled up. So, yes, there seem to be a few rough edges. Let’s hope that 10.5.2 addresses them. One thing we can all do to help is that when something goes wrong a crash report page comes up, we should take the time to submit them to Apple.
The “third party” could be always a huge issue but I am running completely clean (erase and install) Leopard here and just figured something going on from Fans, when I saw the activity monitor, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
bash process inside Terminal.app (yes, stock Terminal) flooded 1 gigabyte of real memory.
When you see something like that you really feel awfully stupid to upgrade to Leopard even with clean install hassle. When you see Mac users STILL blaming APE etc. while it is not existent and openly calls your Quad G5 workstation as something “outdated” without a clue, you go nuts.
I am still living this torture just to report issues and I haven’t heard from Apple any sign of life. I think they got “mad” at me because of reporting bugs in a polite, just like their guidelines manner?
To wrap my issues:
1) systemlogd goes nuts if anything (including Apple coded apps) bugs console too much (console.log doesn’t exist too)
2) OpenGL performance is 30% slower than Tiger 10.4.11 on very same hardware, same card
3) Apple’s own core applications are raising some error messages that can be only explained by quick and dirty coding.
4) While booting, you see awfully alerting messages like “Dec 31 17:01:52 localhost kernel[0]: Extension “com.apple.driver.AppleSMU” has immediate dependencies on both com.apple.kernel and com.apple.kpi components; use only one style.”
All of these are reported using the guidelines at bugreporter.apple.com , as a person who gets developer feedback in 10 minutes about a $35 shareware application, I haven’t heard anything.
I have also figured for some reason, while I never visit there, discussions.apple.com BANNED my IP.
As a person who purchased a top end workstation, iWork 08, iLife 08, Leopard family packs, this is the treatment I get.
So, Mac fans may spare me from blaming for OS X errors I live and enjoy their good functioning Leopard. Leopard also works perfect here, on a G4 Mini and PowerBook G4. It DOESN’T work fine on my main work machine, Quad G5. This is a rushed OS and we can only thank those OS trolls for it. If Apple postponed it just 1-2 months for extra tests, nobody would have to live this.
To add to the list, for an acknowledged Leopard bug involving iDisk synching, see this Knowledge Base notice: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306904
this bug is bugging me at the moment, programming a java app, outside of the xcode development package since im after a cross platform solution which i am in complete control with.
to check functionality i use the system.out.print (writes a line to the console) on every required event and this makes my mac suffer almost 100% processor usage for a short while
lets just hope its fixed, as im rather proud of my program and so far have it working correctly on window, linux and mac. just as any java app should.
sorry forgot to mention that i am experiencing the systemlogd bug within terminal