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iTunes 2.0 Installer Deletes Hard Drives
Cheviot writes: "It seems Apple's new iTunes 2 installer deletes the contents of users' hard drives if the drives have been partitioned. I personally lost more than 100gb of data. More information is available at Apples Discussions board. (registration required). Apple has pulled the installer, but for hundreds, if not thousands, the damage is already done." The iTunes download page has a nice warning about the problem. Ouch.
A budget for a Quality Assurance tester team is 100% NOT WASTEFUL spending.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Hmm
Also, the 'read the code and fix it yourself' argument is starting to wear very thin, as both Linux and MacOS X can quite easily be found in the hands of non-techies these days.
To whoever mod'd this down as a troll
You have an obligation to take reasonable precautions to protect the data on your computer. That means making backups of any valuable data. Are you going to sue Western Digital if your hard drive fails? What if it gets fried by a lightning strike? Even if Apple was found to be grossly negligent, they shouldn't be held responsible for data that was lost due to the negligence of the computer's owner.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How many of those hundreds of NDAd beta testers had a drive with a name that either started with a Space or ended with one (but not in the middle of the name). None. Yup, the error was stupid (like most shell script bugs), but not really easy to find.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Granted, System 10 is more stable becuase of memory protection and has better task scheduling, but my 9.2.1 is heaps stable (as long as I don't run MS apps, generally). But I use Macs becuase they're a pleasure to use, and all the little things count. Quartz is loverly and I wish that GX lived on, but they don't improve my work. Pissing around trying to work out how the hell to get 10 to connect to my AFP server and other simple things which seem impossible wastes my time. 10 may have it's own nuances, but they're nothing like 9. What exactly is the big win changing all the subtlities of the UI in an arbitary fashion? Believe it or not, stability and memory protection are incremental improvements for your average user, delivered at great expense of it's usability.
On the subject of the earlier systems - they were fantastic. Why wouldn't they be when the only alternatives were DOS and a very broken early Windows.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Having been the author of a 3rd party product bundled and shipped on Apple hardware, I can tell you that the extent of their QA process doesn't go much beyond making sure the software installs and runs on an out of the box system, followed by some mediocre mashing of buttons and menus. They really don't understand or implement the concept of actually testing on live, deployed, end user (like) systems. They have racks of off the shelf machines with standard software loads. If they install and run and stay up over the weekend, it's shippable.
We would get reams and reams of complaints about how dialog boxes weren't formatted just so, etc., but their QA department never caught a single defect that most would consider a bug in the code. And there were certainly bugs to catch.
This is a chronic problem that most commercial software houses have. They tend to put junior people with little product experience in the QA organizations and assume that by acting like reasonably competent users, they will somehow uncover logic flaws, data errors, and other engineering foibles. The only time I ever saw QA done right was on a NASA project with life critical software systems. The project was staffed with the very most senior engineers running the QA department and all of the junior engineers were slinging code.
It was up to the gray beards to make sure the junior guys wrote code that was to spec, integrated properly, handled all of the possible input scenarios, and actually performed in a live environment. These senior guys were also the architects of the system, so they knew what the software was supposed to do, how it was supposed to be constructed, and what it should take to break it. I doubt that 1 in 100 commercial shops today have an engineer working in the QA department that actually understands the code they are testing down to the module level. When was the las time you saw a QA guy in a design session, learning about how the system he's going to test is going to be architected?
This is so far from the current practice in commercial industry today as to almost have the flavor of a fairy tale. Apple's no different than any number of other companies who are rushing to ship software on a too short schedule. They pay lip service to QA and rely on their early adopter users to find any lingering problems. In this case, they totally dicked over their customers by not doing their job. However, they're only partially to blame since I think the development of iTunes is still done by Casady and Greene under contract to Apple. I'd be surprised if they weren't ultimately responsible for creating everything, including the installer. Regardless, Apple should have tested this before sticking it on-line on a Saturday night.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Apple posted the initial update either late Friday or early Saturday (I'm not sure exactly when). It was pulled by late in the morning Saturday, they posted a warning shortly afterwards, and when I got up this morning there was a fixed installer online to use.
The Classic version (which most Mac owners are still running) was fine, and the bug seems to have only hit people who didn't follow Apple's instructions that said "remove the old one first" and/or had multi-partitioned drives (multiple partitions aren't nearly as common among Mac users as they are among Windows and Linux users).
So Apple made a gross mistake on one hand, but on the other hand they owned up to it quickly, pulled the offending installer, and fixed/reposted it less than 24 hours later. Most Linux vendors respond about as well, Microsoft usually doesn't (though they were very good about pulling, fixing, and notification with their recent RDP fix that knocked people's Terminal Server systems off the network entirely).
The other mitigating factor was that there aren't that many Mac users relative to the installed base who were affected by the bug - but unfortunately the people who were likeliest to be affected (users who are already running 10.1 as their base OS, have multiple partitions, and don't read the instructions thorougly because - after all - "it's a Mac, who needs instructions?") are exactly the kind of Mac "power users" who swarm Apple's servers constantly looking for new stuff and install it the second it's posted.
I run 10.1 on my TiBook 667, and I downloaded the update. But I deleted the old iTunes version beforehand and only have a single 30GB partition, hence the install went fine..
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not trolling.
:( ) I am yet to see one in Mac OS 10.1.
Mac OS X is based on UNIX, a design which, if you'd noticed a previous story today on slashdot, is now 30 years old, much older than Classic Mac OS.
Mac OS X has a carefully redesigned UI that actually works really well. Believe me, I haven't used Classic Mac OS in about 4 weeks now, and even then it was for DVD playback due to an oversight in Mac OS X. The new UI is just as carefully designed, and just as carefully planned as the old one. It has one disadvantage however:
It's new.
That means that there are going to be kinks for a while yet (ever used Mac OS 1.0? I have, and believe me, it has more UI kinks that Aqua does now).
That said, I can't go back to Classic Mac OS for two reasons: Protected Memory and real Multitasking. Between the time that my Centris died, and the acquisition of my iBook Dual USB, my primary computer was an Intel system running Debian Linux. I can happily say that I was able to put up with KDE's quirks (it's nice, but it's got a long way to go before it gets close to Mac OS for usability), simply because the system NEVER BLOODY CRASHED!. Seriously. The only reboots I perform on it are for power outages and kernel upgrades.
Mac OS X is just the same. While I got a few kernel panics on the older 10.0.x series (3... all of them while in public for some reason
The point is, I would happily live at a commandline if it meant the OS wasn't going to freeze up at least once a day, or if I could happily run as many applications as I wanted without worrying about memory (No more memory size settings! YESSSSS!). And that's not even mentioning the fact that the system actually MULTITASKS. Whoa! Who'd have thought that a Mac would ever be able to multitask and provide memory protection? They've only had an MMU for what? 10 years now?
I love Macs, always have, always will, but the old OS was kludge upon kludge upon kludge. It's old, It's broken, it's been replaced. Stop using it, please. And Aqua takes all of 5 minutes to adjust to from Platinum. It's harder to jump to windows from Platinum than to Aqua.
I mean seriously... would you go on using Windows on an Intel system if you knew that a newer and better operating system was available that didn't have all of Windows bugs?
life is a canvas/and the paint is hope and promise/the world is ours/no one can ever take it from us.
For this to come up you need to have multiple partitions, one of which is named 'Applications.' This is not too common, but it is done.
I knew a guy who did graphic design who did this, I always though it was kind of dumb back then, since apps not running on the boot volume in Mac OS 8.1 - 9.x took a performance/VM hit. It doesn't have that impact on X, but I still don't see much benefit.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
You have an obligation to take reasonable precautions to protect the data on your computer. That means making backups of any valuable data. Are you going to sue Western Digital if your hard drive fails?
People regularly sue if hardware is made faultily. Toshiba paid billions to settle a lawsuit with floppy disks that never showed up in the field and couldn't be reproduced. I personally have lost track of the number of class action lawsuits I've seen for faulty computer products.
What if it gets fried by a lightning strike?
Being struck by lightening is an act of nature which is completely different from human negligence. Please get your analogies right.
Even if Apple was found to be grossly negligent, they shouldn't be held responsible for data that was lost due to the negligence of the computer's owner.
Why shouldn't they be held responsible? If attaching your DVD player to your TV blows it up or your fax machine shreds your documents, are you also liable in such situations? Quite frankly I am disgusted with the attitudes of most people in the software industry that assumes that shoddy work is inevitable (all software has bugs? WTF?) and then blames customers when their shittily written software fails to behave as it should.
Programming is less difficult than building a bridge or an airplane and yet software companies have hoodwinked the public into making it seem that badly made software is a fact of life. One day people are going to realize that the software industry has been shamming them all this time and the lawsuits will start to pour in. This is probably when software companies will finally go back to using techniques developed decades ago to improve and measure software quality but by then the damage will be done.
Really, in the current economic climate, all the monkeys should have been thrown out of the high-tech jobs, leaving only clueful people.
/. link when Jobs returned to Apple.
Well, what you said is the working theory, anyway.
Having worked in the corporate world and the academic world this is the furthest from the truth. The people with a clue, ethics, responsability, talent, skills or value customers are usually the first on the chopping block.
After all, the managers making those 5 and 6 figure salaries have to remain employed so they can continue the (vicous) cycle.
Cynical? Oh, yeah, been there, been IT, seen it happen too many times.
Could apple be any different? That is a tough one to answer. I would have to say no, but to a lesser extent, perhaps.
Why to a lesser extent? For the simple reason that Steve Jobs and Lee Iacocoa (sp?) understood two things about running a company/taking over one:
First get everybody on board with a plan to succede/improve morale.
Second (and this is the kickass part) when you clean house *never, ever* get rid of your workers.
Clean up/fire your middle and upper management levels.
This solves 2 problems (imagine a pyramid):
1) when most layoffs happen they happen to the "base of the pyramid". What happens when you weaken the "foundation" of a company/structure.
Yeah, it falls down or does irrepairable damage.
2)Wiping out the middle section brings those "at the top" closer to the base. Most executive understand the "how and what" of a business, but understanding the "who and why" is what keeps thing "moving forward".
If I remember correctly, Lee I was first, and Jobs subscribed to the idea...it may have come from a
Very good interview.
Of course I've always said a "Phd/manager saying 'in theory' is akin to a used car salesman saying 'trust me' ".
I guess in my snide cynicism I found humor in your altruistic logic
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
And there was a /. story about the iPod - and it had nothing bad to say about Apple
Go back and read it again. There's a negative comment by Taco in the initial post.
Slashdot is inherently anti-Apple due to the attitude of editors which is quickly imitated by the troll hordes and flamebaiters. 'cuz everyone knows the easiest way to generate wind is to get a bunch of Mac zealots in one place and say one bad thing about Apple or the Mac OS.
For the record, I'm a long-time Apple customer that got tired of the OS wars a long time ago. I'd much rather be coding in my very nice Mac OS X setup, thank you very much.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
I know plenty of people who program "for the thrill of writing code" and *still* can't code their way out of a paper bag.
It takes more than a love of computing to make a good programmer. In my humble opinion, it takes a fair amount of education. A brilliant but naive programmer can screw things up pretty impressively. I'd prefer to use code written by someone who isn't such hot shit but takes the time to learn APIs, read documentation, and familiarize himself with the idiom of the language and/or operating system in question.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Your post reminds me of a conversation I had with an Apple employee. He shared your opinion of the Unix tools. I challenged him to come up with a replacement syntax for the shell that wouldn't have any problems with spaces.
After I shot down his first half a dozen proposals, he started to gain an appreciation for the difficulty of the problem.
So how would *you* rewrite the shell to get rid of problems like this? Be specific. Remember, in 30 years of unix, no one has found a solution to this problem that doesn't break more things than it fixes. So if you do so, you'll be famous.
I wait with bated breath.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Of course, there are some open source exceptions, just as there are in the commercial world. But remember that 99.9% of open source software is NOT Apache or Linux, and the people developing the rest of this software are frequently more enthusiastic than skilled, and definitely have no resources dedicated to testing. In fact, many open source developers are also commercial developers who prefer to work on open source because they can work alone and it doesn't come with all the "crap" like code reviews.
So, let's lay blame where it belongs--on software development in general, the lack and/or cost of resources, and the general disregard for software quality as something important. None of these things are limited to commercial software development.
The only certainty is entropy.
No, $1foo means "expand $1 and append foo". You, the intrepid Bourne scripter, should realize that $1 may very well contain IFS characters, recognize what that will mean if the string is retokenized, and quote appropriately.
Look at this:
VARIABLE="$VARIABLE $ELEMENT"
This is a common way of building lists in Bourne. The reason this is common is that it is understood that $VARIABLE will be tokenized when it is expanded, and word splitting on IFS characters will occur. It is also commonly understood that if you do not want a string to be word-split, you quote it so that its IFS characters are ignored. Like I said before, not hard.
I'm sorry, but it takes all of ten seconds to grasp the fact that variables will be expanded and their words split. Occasionally you take it for granted that a list will only have one element, and get away with stuff like $1foo. However, it's not something you do unless you have total control over the contents of $1 (as in, say, a function you've defined that only you will call), and even then it's bad practice.
That's not a justification any more than "Windows crashes because it dereferences dangling pointers" is a justification for Windows crashing.
I couldn't have said it better. The problem there is that someone unfamiliar with basics of pointer manipulation went and dereferenced a null one... the problem is not that the language let him have a null pointer to begin with.