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Mac OS X 10.5.2 Update Brings Welcome Fixes
jetpack writes to make sure we're aware that Apple's OS X 10.5.2 update is available and that it contains plenty of improvements and fixes that users have been asking for. Macworld enumerates some of the big ones, saying that the update "shows Apple listens to users" (sometimes). A couple of the new features simply restore Tiger (10.4) capabilities that Leopard (10.5) had inexplicably withdrawn. You can now shut off the much-maligned transparency of the menu bar, and organize your Dock stacks hierarchically and display them as folders. And Apple has provided welcome access to common Time Machine functions in the menu bar.
No, but at least AirDisk drives work correctly again, at a usable performance.
10.5.2 is what 10.5 should've been in Apple didn't rush it at the expense of QA.
I still double click my title bar expecting the window to vanish, leaving the title bar there, beneath my mouse, so I can say 'thanks' click click. And be back to where I was.
We were so amazed when Windows 3.0 taught us to "minimize" and still have ***another application running*** (back when DOS was neato) that we didn't ask "ok, so, why do I have to reach to the very farthest point on the screen to get my window back?"
Yes, Exposé might be a cool way around that, and some Vista maven may say 'aeroglass', but click-click... click-click is about as simple as it can possibly get. And no motion sickness!
Hmmm... parent is modded up, this post is modded troll. Go go Slashdot moderators!
I had just discovered the awesome 'split' feature in Tiger's Terminal about two months ago. Click on the icon in the upper right portion of the terminal window, and a bar appears. You can drag the bar to split your terminal in two. The upper portion is the scrollback, and shows your terminal history. The bottom portion is your 'live' terminal. It's awesome, and it saves me from having to open two different terminals in many cases!
:(
Of course, after upgrading to Leopard, this innovative feature has been removed! I couldn't believe it!
Now I'm back to opening up two Terminal windows...
This is like SP1 in Windows land. Basically, 10.5 is the GM, 10.5.1 is where they fix other things that emerged in the several weeks between GM and public availability (along with a couple of critical bugs that turn up in the first few days of wider public release), and then 10.5.2 is the first release based on public feedback and issues. That's also part of why this version enables you to turn off the menubar translucency (and makes the menus themselves more opaque) - users hated it so Apple tweaked things for them.
Windows is freakin' huge - hence the year to Vista SP1 - but Microsoft's releases also go much wider, have more hardware to test with, and have more public pre-release cycles as well. So it takes them a year to do a service pack, where Apple only takes about 3-4 months.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Having my friend walk over with his 160GB iPod and give me his entire music collection, facilitated by Apple themselves? Yeah, I can see some issues with that.
As Apple have no idea whether the songs are still under copyright & what license they're under, I don't see what business Apple have in preventing you copying your data around.
The only reason Apple impose this artificial limitation on customers is at the behest of their real customers - the RIAA, et al.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
IN general apple tends to remove old features/ ports/ connectors when it adds replacements or equalivalents. Apple is a first mover in many areas: parallel ports? ADB, Floppy disks, ....
Then it adds them back if there are howls.
It's a good strategy in many ways. First, it allows one to keep the idea that there is one-primary-way-for-novices-to-do-something on most mac. When you go to another mac, it behaves the same. (e.g. Life is a box of chocolates with linux. when you sit down at someone elses terminal, focus might follow the mouse, it might auto-raise, god knows what happens when you launch emacs (xterm or text, context colored or not, etc...) Uniformity is viewed as good mac land because ultimately by not having to think too much or memorize short cuts you can just focus on getting the job done and the computer is more appliance like than tweaker box like. It's not that you can't customize a mac, it's just stupid to try in general.
It also allows them to introduce new lower level mechanism that break old higher level mechanisms. Such as the clean/dirty file tracking used for Time Machine.
I don't know why they deprecated your MP3 file moving. My guess however it was the opposite intent. they were trying to put in speed bumps--apples view of the best DRM seems to be to simply use invoconvience rather than prohibition when they can. I rather like that approach philosophically.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The reason that it's "unauthorized" is because beta testers discovered problems with data corruption.
It'd suck to need to restore from your backups only to discover that they were pooched.
Well, it has been for the last two months and I doubt they disabled it.
Just compare how long Vista has been out with how long Leoptard has been out, and it becomes even more apparent which company released a functioning product, and which one required a desperate emergency update.You're 100% correct. Leopard is down to the point that they're fixing cosmetic issues that customers complained about, while Vista still isn't sure if you can listen to an MP3 while downloading from a local fileserver. That desperate emergency update, aka SP1, is about a year long in coming. It must irk MS to no end that Leopard just needs the final spit and polish while Vista languishes.
Typed on Linux. I don't really care one way or the other, but there's no way you can say that Leopard is as troubled as Vista.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
* Restore the ability to have folders remember their views.
* Run each Finder window in a separate process, so it doesn't lock everything up when one window gets busy. Particularly when hitting network shares.
* Restore the pre OSX "staggered" icon layout option.
* Give us an option to completely eliminate the sidebar without having to go back to "spacial" windows.
* Move the "FTP" support from Finder to Safari, so we don't have the overhead and security issues of file-system-like operations when accessing remote high-latency servers.
* Bring back the Shelf from NeXTSTeP.
* Add "Cut" as well as "Copy". There's a "Cut" option in the edit menu but it's always greyed out. If there's some obscure option key that will enable this, well...
* Make it OBVIOUS when there's an option/command click 'advanced' operation, instead of making us guess. And that goes for the rest of the software on the Mac.
I administer an apple x server at work, and I haven't been impressed.
I'm running ubuntu on a PC, so I can't use the server admin, or workgroup manager tools. Also, apple doesn't come with a standard VNC server, instead it uses VNC with some proprietary shit built in, so I had to install vine server to get a remote desktop. Of course, vine server sucks as well, because I can't get it to start on boot, without logging into the server with either the native server admin tools, or locally with a KVM. Oh wait, the X Serve doesn't play nice with a standard KVM. I have an extra mouse and keyboard setting in my rack just for the X Serve.
Once you manage to get in the damn thing, if you have any sort of complicated setup at all, you simply CAN'T DO it using the server admin tool. I've usually had to bust into the config files just like any other Unix system. Take a look at the SQL section of the Server Admin tool, its a fucking joke. Also, even if you do start to do some things by hand, shit still doesn't work right.
See one of my bug reports here.
http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-server/298314-samba-shares-hfs-extended-attributes.html
The mailing list / blog / colander stuff is also less than impressive. Why the FUCK should I have to wait 15 minutes for my changes to take affect. It this 1982 or some shit? Some changes seem to take much longer than that as well. I waited a whole day for one of my groups to show up. Why is it that the "recent changes" section of each group shows group emails, even if I turn the mailing list feature off?
Oh yeah, last but not least, the server crashes. It responds to pings, still responds to local terminal input, but anything that requires authentication is dead in the water. So that leaves mail, netbios, ssh, server admin, work group manager, etc etc all dead. I think the LDAP server is crapping out, but I haven't been able to prove it yet. I've had to hard boot the server half a dozen times in the last two weeks.
My last rant. WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THE QUICK TIME UPDATES, AND THE REQUIRED RESTARTS. Jesus christ, it's like I'm working with windows NT.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Huh? What does the original target date have to do with it?
Whether it was released early, on time, or late is one fact. Whether it was rushed or released when good and ready is another fact. Whether it was shipped in a Monday or a Friday or some other day is a third fact. Despite the fact that all there of these facts are related to time and the release date, they're pretty much independent of one another. Knowing the release date will tell you the third, knowing also the original target date will tell you the first, but neither tells you anything at all about the second, since the second fact has nothing to do with either the first or the third.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
True, true, true, but at the end of the day there is reality. And in reality the recording industry are like wizards - they are too powerful for their own good and very easy to anger. Look at the situation Apple are in with non-DRM'd songs on iTunes. Except for EMI, the rest of the big 4 would nearly rather put their stuff on the Pirate Bay, than allow Apple to sell it and the only reason is that they don't quite like Apple having ~75% of the online distribution market (something Apple had achieved through products and services better than everyone else's; i.e. they rightfully have that big market share). Imagine if Apple refused to cave in at RIAA's demand to disallow syncing back from an iPod - then Apple might as well close the iTunes store. This does not excuse Apple, but at least they are not doing it just to spite you or to create lock- in.
Incidentally, 10.5.2 does contain drivers for both the USB Ethernet dongle available for the MacBook Air and also the USB-connected SuperDrive. The ethernet dongle works just fine (plugging it in prompts you to open the System Preferences to configure the new Ethernet port) but the SuperDrive does not. It seems that the SuperDrive device driver gets loaded but chooses not to fire up the rest of the Mass Storage device stack :-(
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
It's all about revenue claim. After Apple got bit by the whole 802.11n driver thing, they've started claiming revenue for their laptops and iPhones in a staggered way - instead of all at once. This allows them to justify releasing significant new features on those platforms (as opposed to merely bug fixes).
My guess is that Apple never intended to release those new apps for the iTouch, and was caught off guard by all of the backlash and bad press... Unfortunately for them iPod revenue is probably claimed in entirety at sale.
Time Machine is meant to fill up. It will start dropping off the oldest backups after it fills. When I first installed Leopard, I had a 160 GB external drive free so I used that for my initial Time Machine testing. Since I was using ~ 110 GBs of my MBP's hard drive it didn't take too long to fill up the Time Machine volume. I would get a warning message telling me that the drive was full, but it kept chugging along.
I agree with your second point, which is why I have since upgraded to a larger drive for Time Machine.
How to use your iPod to move your music to a new computer. Instructions for moving music from computer to computer. Using an iPod.
Directions from Apple. With screenshots.
The iPod is designed to be synced with just one computer. That is the nature of the iTunes sync component and the iPod itself. I have never heard of this bidirectional sync "optional plug-in" the original poster was referring to. Also - I have been bidirectionally syncing devices (Palm, PDAs, phones, etc.) for years now, and have supported people who have done the same. One thing I have learned? Bidirectional syncing will delete information given enough information and enough time. It will break eventually. Restore from backups, erase a device, and resync. Annoying, but it is a fact of life when doing syncing. On the other hand I have never had issues with one-way syncing. So maybe Apple just made that decision to make things easier with less support needs.
So Apple gives clear directions for moving your music library from computer to computer, even using your iPod.
The only reason Apple impose this artificial limitation on customers is at the behest of their real customers - the RIAA, et al.
Yes, it is simply that black and white. A company either screws their customers or does everything for them.
Have you no idea of balance? A company says "Hey, we can do more for our customers (and therefore sell more product) if we make these small concessions to other big companies?"
For example - "Hey, if we include DRM on our music store, then get so big that we have enough power to push the distribution companies into allowing us to sell non-DRM music, that will be to the long-term benefit of our customer (with the benefit being that we will sell even MORE music."
No, according to you the company should never bend slightly, and instead should never give in, even if it is to the detriment of both the company and its customers.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Isn't this kind of like saying the police shouldn't pull anyone over for speeding because the only reason anyone would speed is an emergency, therefore all speeders should be assumed to be having emergencies?
No, it's more like putting a device in the car that prevents you from speeding under any circumstances.
Do you think that would be a good idea?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.