Do you remember how it was back in those quieter times? You could have any telephone you wanted, so long as it came from Ma Bell, and, aside from some local carriers in smaller communities, they also provided your telephone connection.

You also paid an arm and a leg in terms of the percentage of your income that was devoted to phone service. If you wanted to call someone long distance, the price could be in the dollars-per-minute range. Yes, having one source for your service may have delivered great reliability, but at what cost?

When they finally allowed you to buy your phone from another company, rather than rent it at some insanely-high price, you still had to provide the carrier appropriate information from the handset so they knew what you had and how it would impact their network.

Today, of course, you have loads of options for basic phone service, and some of them use the Internet for most or all of their connections. A decent wired handset can be had for less than $10 and you can save money if you choose the same provider for telephone, Internet and TV. Such a deal!

Yes, it’s true that if you’re in a decidedly rural section of the U.S., your options are not nearly as wide. You may be tethered to a single provider for landlines and the Internet. Yes, you may be able to use a satellite dish for the latter, but that is a poor solution for Internet phone service.

The wireless carriers, however, each consider themselves the equivalent of Ma Bell. One of them, of course, AT&T Wireless, is the direct descendant of that original telephone company that spread through the length and breadth of the country.

Although the wireless companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into loosening their stiff account requirements, the basic package is still the same. You buy both the service and the handset from a single carrier, and moving to another carrier generally entails a complicated configuration process, or just buying a new phone.

Now Apple and AT&T have gotten some pretty bad press about tying your iPhone to the latter. Maybe it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, because the setup is no different than the one you’d encounter if you bought a Motorola RAZR or a BlackBerry from AT&T. You might regard this attitude as hypocritical, but you also have to respect the fact that the complainants are absolutely right on.

Indeed, you should be able to buy the phone you want, and then choose the carrier you want, just the way it’s done in Europe. To make matters all the more complicated, there are two competing wireless systems in the U.S. One, GSM, is mostly compatible with the rest of the world. It’s used by AT&T and T-Mobile. The other system, CDMA, is embraced by Alltel, Sprint and Verizon Wireless.

It really doesn’t matter which protocol is superior. But it does put your phone into two distinctly separate and incompatible camps. Within those camps, there is movement to allow you to move from one carrier to another, but you are still locked into a service contract of one or two years. If you break that contract after the initial 15-day or 30-day trial period, you are legally obligated to pay an early termination fee.

Now the logic behind the fee is questionable, but at least the carriers are starting to pro-rate the charges, so if you’re near the end of the deal, you might be able to get out from under this arrangement for a smaller ransom. Usually it’s $175 at the beginning, but it is approximately $60 just before your contract ends, according to the latest terms of service from Verizon.

There are, however, sites that allow you to sell or pass off your contract to someone else for a modest fee, but that is surely a clumsy workaround for a process that makes little sense, other than to enrich the carrier.

Yes, all these companies claim they are losing money on a customer as the result of early termination, since they usually subsidize the purchase of the phone, and there are other fees that are allegedly associated with configuring a new account. In practice, a company that can’t deliver a level of service that you find acceptable deserves to lose your business and take their losses.

I mean, I pay a monthly fee to my local cable TV service for my landline phone, Internet and cable TV. If I decide to go to another company — and there are options here — I just cancel and all I have to do is return the cable TV set top boxes and we’re done. No extra fees involved. The only way they can retain my business is to earn it. Period.

If the growing complaints about the iPhone’s lock-in with AT&T bear fruit, maybe the wireless carriers will at last enter the 21st century. Maybe there will even be a widespread development of low-cost phones that support both CDMA and GSM, so you will, at last, have the cell phone freedom you deserve.

The conventional wisdom has it that Mac OS 10.4 was Apple’s most reliable system upgrade ever, with millions of users depending on Tiger for work and play. The combination of performance, useful features and stability placed Tiger at the pinnacle of Apple’s operating system achievements.

As for Leopard, the jury is still out. There remain rampant reports of early teething pains, and it may take another maintenance update or two for things to settle down. Already, in fact, there are rumors that a 10.5.2 is cooking and will be fully baked some time early in 2008. But I won’t go there. You see, as I’ve said before, we don’t truck in rumors here; we prefer the real thing. But you have to expect Leopard will be undergoing development and improvement until its successor is at hand.

At the same time, those of you who are regular visitors to The Night Owl know that we happily post comments from our readers expressing widely varying points of view. One post may express an strong positive opinion about something, while the next will present a diametrically opposite point of view.

In the case of Tiger, there are some who say flat out that they’ve never been able to get it to function reliably, not ever, from 10.4 and all the way up to and including the recent 10.4.11 update. One of our readers spoke of ongoing drive directory corruption, with problems recurring every few months or so.

The Mac troubleshooting sites have been documenting Tiger issues from the very first with months and months of reader reports to cite that appear to demonstrate something may be wrong in Cupertino.

I suppose it’s also easy to blame such rampant ills as artifacts of failed installations, or peripheral conflicts. One of the installation voodoo schemes has it that you should disable all external components before doing any Mac OS X installation. I suppose that’s all right; that is, unless you intend to restore data from an external drive, but the device could be reconnected after the installation has concluded, so that’s no big deal.

If you want to go the whole hog, you could, of course, backup your drive and wipe it clean whenever you do a major system upgrade, and then restore everything. We’re talking of spending the better part of an afternoon here to accomplish this task, but compare that to the time it may take to diagnose system anomalies later on, and it makes a whole lot of sense.

To be fair, that’s precisely what I did when I installed Leopard on my desktop Mac. However, since it shipped with Tiger, all I had to do with the latter was simply to install the maintenance updates as they appeared. Even here, the cautious approach has it that you should always download and install the sprawling combo updaters (which contain all the updates from the initial release up to the present), to ensure that every necessary component is appropriately replaced with the newest versions. Some system corruption might be addressed too, although it would seem to me that if you aren’t tinkering with the system in Terminal or courtesy of a third-party interface fixer-upper, this shouldn’t be an issue.

In an earlier column, I suggested that defective RAM might be the real culprit in some instances of erratic crashes and data corruption. That makes an awful lot of sense, and, unfortunately, there’s no overt warning to clue you in on whether or not such a problem exists. Unless the RAM issue is drastic, in which case your Mac would refuse to boot, subtle issues may go undetected.

If anything, I continue to suspect that many of the lingering Tiger issues, and some of the early reports of troubles with Leopard, are hardware-related. If not the RAM, maybe an impending logic board failure, or a failing hard drive. And don’t assume that hard drive failures are always obvious. In the end, the drive may not mount, or it may operate slowly with frequent clicking and clacking to signify imminent failure. Other than those extremes, however, you may not notice that anything is wrong until it is too late to salvage your files, except by visiting the data recovery center.

Or reverting to your backup, which I hope Leopard’s Time Machine may at least encourage you to create and maintain. Of course, even having a ready backup won’t help if you restore your data to a hard drive that’s in its death throes.

So is there any reliable method to protect yourself against some impending failure? Well, servers use ECC RAM, which uses an error checking and correction algorithms to make sure all your data is intact. But Apple doesn’t require or support that sort of memory on most of its hardware, and it’s questionable whether you’d be willing to pay extra for that added increment of protection.

You can, of course, run Apple’s own Hardware Test and/or Micromat’s TechTool Pro periodically to make sure that your hardware is performing at its best. For your Mac’s internal drive, you can consult its S.M.A.R.T. Status in Disk Utility on occasion as well, and even start up from another drive to check your startup device’s condition and repair minor directory damage.

In such cases, of course, you’re dealing with an overt act to make sure your Mac is functioning at peak efficiency. What about Apple? Can they — or perhaps a third party — deliver a feature that’ll perform some background integrity checking to alert you of impending problems before they occur, beyond the simple directory issues that drive repair utilities usually support? I’m talking about automatically checking all of your hardware for evidence of trouble that’ll require a visit to the repair shop. Certainly such a tool wouldn’t force you to remember to run your maintenance utilities.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t some “X” factor at work in all those reports of lingering Tiger issues, and early Leopard defects. I do not doubt that Apple may deserve part of the blame here, but I think there are other factors involved, and I’ve covered just a few here. What do you readers think?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had mixed feelings about Mac rumor sites. Yes, they often make for  an entertaining read. Sometimes they even get the facts correct, or mostly correct, and clue us in on a genuine new Apple product or service.

Now up until a few years ago, Apple accepted the existence of such sites grudgingly. When they got too close to the facts, or published the wrong screenshot (at least to Apple), they’d get a cease and desist letter. The sites would generally take down the offending content, so as not to have to hire high-priced intellectual property attorneys to defend themselves.

Behind the scenes, you might expect that Steve Jobs wasn’t as sanguine about such things as he appeared in public, where he even joked about it from time to time. But you had to feel the sound of his teeth grinding.

When Apple filed lawsuits against Apple Insider, O’Grady’s PowerPage and Think Secret, you had to feel they had just gone way too far. Sure, Apple has the right to protect their trade secrets, and certainly take appropriate measures to clamp down on their employees and contractors of they break their nondisclosure agreements. Indeed, if a site got such information via questionable means, maybe they’d have a case.

Instead, Apple attacked these bloggers on the pretext that they weren’t actually journalists and thus weren’t covered by the various shield laws that allowed them to protect their sources.

In the end, Apple lost its case against Apple Insider and Jason O’Grady had a huge weight lifted from his shoulders as well. But the Think Secret matter persisted, until the other day when an unexpected settlement was announced.

According to Nick Ciarelli, the Harvard undergrad who runs the site:

Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret’s publisher, said “I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”

Of course, beneath this simple paragraph, there are a wealth of implications. Ciarelli started Think Secret when he was a mere lad of 13, and grew it to the point where it attracted Apple’s close attention. That’s a very big deal, even if that attention caused ripples that eventually rose to the level of a lawsuit.

In the wake of the lawsuit, Think Secret toned down its act, and new articles were few and far between. To some degree, they seemed to be echoing Apple Insider in terms of predictive content. Did Ciarelli lose interest, or was he just holding tight, expecting a settlement that would settle the matter once and for all?

Another question: Did money change hands? Did Apple pay Ciarelli to close shop and get back to schoolwork? Certainly, the details of the settlement are confidential, so we’ll probably never know. I expect, though, that Ciarelli probably didn’t want to begin his career with a lawsuit from Apple Inc. on his record, and that could certainly have dissuaded potential employers from offering him jobs until this albatross was lifted.

Or would Ciarelli’s notoriety, his fifteen minutes of fame, open him up to unexpected career opportunities? I don’t pretend to know, but I am troubled by how it all went down.

I can see where Ciarelli may have been sorely tempted to put this episode behind him as painlessly as possible. After all, getting a college education is monstrously expensive, and getting that education at Harvard is a six-figure expense. Sure, maybe Ciarelli’s parents are well off. Maybe they set aside a smaller sum for his education early on, and it grew over time. Maybe he has a rich relative, or, like many other students of modest means, he found a way to earn some money, from his site and other pursuits, and collected scholarships, grants and took out college loans to cover the rest of his huge bill.

If Apple said they’d take care of that bill, rather than leave him saddled with huge college loans to pay off over the next 20 years,  that would be a tempting incentive to take the money and run.

On the other hand, freedom of the press played second fiddle here. I can perhaps forgive Ciarelli for cutting his losses, and maybe he lost interest anyway in maintaining the site with the press of his studies and other matters taking up more and more of his spare time. But Apple has set a dangerous precedent here, because it means they can use their huge cash reserves their legal power to buy off and shut down bloggers they don’t like. That is the most troubling issue of all.

Once again, I don’t know the fine details of this settlement. Maybe it’s all very benign and simply closed a door that nobody wanted opened in the first place, no harm done. But the next time a site runs afoul of Apple’s alleged trade secrets, would Apple use this tactic as a weapon against the next innocent would-be infringer?

If that’s the case, then I am truly saddened by this development. I wish Nick Ciarelli well in his pursuits, and he will, over time, no doubt survive and conquer the journalistic world in some other fashion.

I just hope that Apple doesn’t get some nasty ideas, though, of what they might do next to halt press coverage that they don’t like.

The alleged holy grail of a properly-coded browser is full adherence to prevailing Web standards. The developers of these applications all tout their performance and rendering accuracy, but we all know it’s not necessarily true.

Internet Explorer, for example, has long been regarded as a major and chronic offender. In large part, this is attributed to Microsoft’s purported desire to dominate the tech industry via its proprietary technology, as much as it can. But in the real world, the end result can be utterly chaotic.

You have a popular site, for example, grabbing visitors from all computing platforms. But making it look good on all or most browsers can be one huge headache, simply because there are different roads to perfection, or alleged perfection.

That means that the source code has to have little entries to accommodate, say, the needs of Internet Explorer as opposed to Firefox or Safari.Worse, in making a site fully functional with Microsoft’s browser, there’s the risk of having it become inaccessible when other browsers are used. That, of course, wasn’t the issue if you wanted to ignore Macs and the site was built when Internet Explorer held over 90% of the market.

With the rise of Firefox and Safari, and Internet Explorer’s steady decline, the world has turned upside down, for the better.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.