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Mac OS X 10.5.3 To Fix Over 200 Bugs, Coming Soon
An anonymous reader writes "MacScoop reports that 'Apple has seeded several builds of its Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3 update to developers during the past few weeks and just seeded yet another one numbered "9D34" earlier today.' The update fixes over two hundred bugs, weighs almost half a gigabyte and should be available soon."
OS X 10.5 is, in many ways, a big step up from 10.4, but it was clearly rushed to market. I've been using it since the official release, and it's felt like a beta OS for all of that time - random pauses for a few seconds, crashes every month or so, occasionally taking two or three attempts to resume from suspend and so on. It's really hard to tell whether the improvements with 10.5 outnumber the regressions at this stage, and so this is a very welcome update (although, really, this should have been 10.5.0 and the previous ones should have been betas). In general, these don't contain new features, although occasionally they will, but they will be minor improvements, while the big changes come in the major releases (the 10 isn't really part of the version number, it's part of the name).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Will they fix Spaces? Make X11 usable?
Once upon a time, you could buy an Apple product and expect it to work. Then the common wisdom became "as long as you don't get revision A, it should be okay". Now I'm to the point where I'm not even expecting the fucking fourth revision to work properly.
Having used Apple machines much of the time since 1987, I have long ago stopped rushing to the newest OS version. It's almost always best to wait six months to a year after a new point release, it will usually take that long to be really ready. I dislike that, but my experience with FreeBSD, Debian, and even Windows tells me that's pretty much the way they all do it.
Caveat Utilitor
They might be replacing binary files that they can't run a patch on, or maybe there's some other reason... but regardless you can be reasonably assured that they won't just put 500 Mb download for no good reason.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Windows Server 2003 is a different line of product, as is Mac OS X server on the Apple side. Why bring it up? As for XP/Windows 2000, How many apps written for XP didn't run under 2000. I personally never came across any. That's because there were hardly any changes to the API, and the few major changes were backported to Windows 2000 anyway.
On the other hand, just try running software written for Leopard on Tiger. Under the bonnet, these two version of Mac OS X are massively different, with the introduction of Core Animation, the Time Machine APIs, the Objective C 2.0 runtime, with it's garbage collector, the Scripting Bridge so that Ruby and Python programmers get to be first class citizens. There really wasn't a corresponding change between Windows 2000 and XP.
Are you kidding? This is an unsupported interface tweak-- the command line is just a quick way to make the change. There are several ways to make this change, including downloading a freeware utility that lets you tweak your system.
Personally, I think this is *exactly* the way things like this should be handled. Give people an interface for making the most common tweaks, and expose the more complicated tweaks in such a way that 3rd party developers can come up with other ways to handle it. That way, you're not cluttering your default interface with every little setting, but you're also not preventing anyone from changing the setting. If the tweak is popular, then there will probably be a few different programs that will make the tweak for you.
Anyway, the system is entirely functional for "normal users" without this tweak. And if someone really wanted to make this change, all they have to do is copy/paste the command into their terminal window and hit enter.
Of course, I don't recommend that people run random commands they see on the internet in terminal without understanding what they do. Otherwise you'll be in deep the first time you see "cd /;sudo rm -rf *" posted online.
The biggest improvements and changes in Leopard are all under the hood which lead to the marketing problem of "How do we sell it?" Time Machine was the answer, but it's hardly the best new feature.
Beneath the skin you have real 64-bit support and resolution independence in the system libraries, plus actual POSIX compliance. These are huge things that obviously took a lot of work and the kinks are still being ironed out.
Unfortunately, the benefits of all this forward looking support won't be realized until developers write applications to take advantage of it. Leopard was a necessary step to get us to a not too distant future of 32GBs of memory and 300 DPI monitors on the desktop and in our laptops.