Tuesday, February 26, 2002

Bill Bumgarner responds to my post earlier today about OS X stability. Writing an OS, and drivers, is hard, I don't doubt it, and I don't claim I could do better because I haven't tried. However, what I complain about mainly is that OS X does not have the quality of OS 9. Nothing I see makes me think that the time has been spent to do a really good job—not the kernel, not the drivers or SDKs, not Project Builder, nor command-line tools, and especially not the Finder, the poster child for "unfinished, slow, flaky and buggy" in OS X. That I have to restart the Finder on average 10 times a day is not acceptable. This is, in part, because time that would be spent in a new 9.x release on fit and finish has to be instead spent implementing basic features that were in System 7, or FreeBSD 3.0, yet haven't been ported to X yet. The MP3 driver I'm using shipped with Mac OS X, I have a Creative Nomad II. This player is still sold, although not the exact model I use (DAP-0001). The plugin bundle in iTunes says "Copyright Apple Computer, Inc. 2001", so I assume it means Apple wrote it and should be supporting it—like they're not. In fact the usability of my Nomad has gone down in iTunes 2.x, unlike in 1.x I can no longer drag files onto it after files have started uploading, so I have to either wait for the upload to complete, or create a playlist as a temporary storage area before dragging it to my Nomad. In the flakiness department, I often have to connect and disconnect the player 2–3 times before it registers in iTunes (and pray that it doesn't crash). A robust, stable OS, or applications software (iTunes) does not require that I try something multiple times and work around crashes. 9:45:31 PM | reply [] AccordionGuy :: CodeCon (Stagette): Very funny story. 2:21:33 PM | reply [] Today, once again, I plug in my MP3 player, and my Mac crashes, like it does about every tenth time I plug in my MP3 player. This bug has been around for over a year, no change. This time it managed to trash my iTunes Music Library file. I hope it didn't cause directory corruption. Because OS X does so many more things at once, its filesystem is actually more prone to corruption than Mac OS 9 ever was. I'm definitely going to get my swap files moved to another disk today. There used to be no problems with my computer that bothered me day in and day out, as recently as two years ago. Now there are hundreds of outright bugs in the OS. Windows don't activate when they're supposed to, they don't update properly, I get unexplained crashes and lengthy hangs, everything is slow and cumbersome to use. And OS X still crashes once every day or too. The standards of quality in OS X, currently, are atrocious. On the other hand, Apple is doing very well with fixing the other bugs I've reported this year. So I hold hope for the future as OS X moves past the "immature, new OS" stage. The public Darwin bugs web site hasn't been updated in two weeks, with no indication of when it will be back again. 1:15:20 PM | reply [] Adam Curry has some things to say today that really resonate with me. "I remember 1993, trying to explain to MTV that the net was going to happen, they didn't believe me, had their own initiatives. Look at the 'official' MTV, then look at my mtv. I like mine better. Its honest, no smoke, no mirrors. Of course I don't have JLo either, but I'll get over it." I don't mind the compromise! Early this morning I was walking home in the fresh snow, listening to an hour of KPIG I had recorded on my MP3 player. Most of the music I hadn't heard before, or even the fake commercials, but I was singing along because it was good, and I was really happy, exhausted, going home, thinking about what I was going to do tomorrow. And the RIAA would have me deprived of free (or listener-supported) Internet radio because it wouldn't be possible for the big guys to squeeze everyone else out and feed everyone a steady diet of repetitive drivel. An ignorant consumer is a willing customer, anyone else is a criminal... or something, the way society seems to be evolving. 10:37:41 AM | reply [] Finally finished writing Multi-Status parsing code and sent off an alpha of the WebDAV upstream driver to one lucky contestant. 1:17:44 AM | reply []