Slashdot Mirror
Major Snow Leopard Bug Said To Delete User Data
inglishmayjer was one of several readers to send in the news of a major bug in Apple's new OS, 10.6 Snow Leopard, that can wipe out all user data for the administrator account. It is said to be triggered — not every time — by logging in to the Guest account and then back in to the admin account. Some users are reporting that all settings have been reset and most data is gone. The article links to a number of Apple forum threads up to a month old bemoaning the problem. MacFixIt suggests disabling login on the Guest account and, if you need that functionality, creating a non-administrative account named something like Visitor. (The Guest account is special in that its settings are wiped clean after logout.) CNet reports that Apple has acknowledged the bug and is working on a fix.
Would I be a bad person if I were to suggest that this would be a perfect time to upsell Time Capsules to worried Snow Leopard customers?
... and I'm prone to alzheimers!
This is Apple! Steve Jobs can do no wrong! I spent $2100 on this machine! Windows sucks... Omg omg omg!!11!!!!1! I need justification... Absolution... Microsoft sucks! I love Apple!
to all early adopters for beta testing Snow Leopard for me.
...the average user is not very likely to get hit by it, fortunately. Hopefully they'll have a fix out quickly nonetheless.
Having said that, I'd like to ask the affected people why they weren't backing their systems up. When your system comes with a backup utility that you can literally turn on and forget about until you need it, it's pretty damned stupid to not use it.
~Philly
... and I'm prone to alzheimers!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
This is the bigger part of this story.
So I've come to accept that maybe Macs can get viruses. Possibly.
But see it doesn't matter because Macs don't NEED viruses! So there!
How does something like this make it out of the door? Is this happening on machines that have been upgraded, on fresh installs, or across all platforms. It seems like someone somewhere in the R&D and beta phases should have come across this a lot sooner.
from the article
"Snow Leopard has been plagued with bugs since its release, including problems with the Finder hanging or crashing, incompatibility with certain apps, and the AirPort connection dropping"
wonder how many 100s of posts flaming MS we would get if this was a vista article.
and that's a fact jack
...it's incredibly rare that it strikes, and it has a relatively high threshold of pre-requisites that need to be true before it even has this very low chance of happening at all.
John C. Randolph, I hear that you no longer work for Apple, but I think that you can deliver us some badly-needed facts.
John, why has Snow Leopard been plagued with so many bugs? We didn't see this with earlier releases of Mac OS X. What has changed to make the recent release so buggy? And these aren't minor issues, either. This bug in particular is quite serious.
... and I'm, uhh... who are you again?
I can see the fnords!
I know there are many data recovery options you can use with Windows drives... but as a Windows user, could someone tell me if theres anything for Macs?
Does it also delete the smug?
I'm in the process of recovering all my data after I had both the drive I was working with and my backup disk go at once.
I was playing with my primary drive, maybe a little rough, but I figured my time machine backup was solid and I had just updated it before delving into this project.
Long story short, the time machine backup was erased because the volume was picked up by another OS X installation and when asked if I wanted to use it for Time machine I said no. Then I went to use the backup and it was gone.
Right now I'm running r-studio to try to recover the data.
Anyone know any other HFS+ undelete tools?
Well since the only apparent critics are anon cowards I'll just assume that they are all MS fan boys out to get their cockroach bites while the getting is good.
I don't think it takes a Microsoft fan boy to be critical of a production OS bug that results in complete data loss.
by default, so you have to go out of your way to enable it. I would not do it, if really wanted to allow someone limited local access to the machine, I would create a limited account for that purpose alone.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I'm not a fanboi of any particular OS and use all the major ones at home (Win7, Macbook Pro, Ubuntu, Debian, BSD, etc.). They're just tools and they all have their strengths and weaknesses.
But this is a serious bug, and based on the past I'm certain there would be many posts from smug Apple fanbois if it had been a Windows bug. I don't use my Guest account either, but that doesn't mean it would have sucked major ass if I had lost all my data because I did. The user could not possibly predict that just using the Guest account would incur this kind of risk.
It doesn't make sense to be an apologist. I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them. It's not enough to point out that the other developers have problems, too. Get pissed off and help them be better next time.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
It's explicitly noted that it doesn't happen every time. It's very likely they did test it, and just missed it. It's not necessarily an excuse, but bugs do happen, and this has not been reported during the beta – meaning it's either exceptionally rare or a very recent bug. I'd bet on the former.
On a different note, the CNET article takes a very sensationalist approach with using the phrase "plagued with bugs". There's a few bugs, reported by a vocal minority of users (one of which they list – incompatibilities – isn't really a bug, just a consequence of being a new OS version with new features, changed features, and a few removed features*). I've been using Snow Leopard for the past month-and-a-half, and have experienced only a tiny handful of non-damaging crashes. One kernel panic, about three or four Safari crashes. It's around the average number of problems I've experienced on most OS/version combinations.
* One such removal is a relatively undocumented 'hack' called "InputManagers" which loads code into every Cocoa application that starts up. These no longer work in 64-bit applications, and such plugin functionality has to be re-implemented using either an application-specific plugin format (where available) or as a mach_inject background process.
Since when is Win7 (a yet-unreleased OS) considered a "major OS"?
I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them..
Never underestimate the power of shiny.
Leopard and Snow leopard are like Metallica's Load and Re-load: you know it's gonna suck when they start running out of names. I wouldn't be surprised if they named 10.7 "Def Leopard".
to be a PC. :)
Life without walls.
Hi, I'm a PC and ready for Windows 7
And I'm a Ma... what were we talking about?
Because their marketing department runs the rest of the company.
They did say that Snow Leopard frees up an extra 7GB for you...
Because cognitive dissonance is far superior to actually facing problems. There are no issue with Mac, OS X or any apple product and anyone who says anything to the contrary is a lair and a drunkard who wears women's panties.
Guest or permission limited accounts are necessary for anyone who take security seriously. I use them on my Linux and Windows home boxes and at work if you cant qualify for a permission limited domain account you dont get on. The point of a guest account is to limit the amount of damage a user can do, frankly if you're not using a guest account then you're doing it wrong, especially if you let others use your machine. No matter on what OS this is it is a pretty serious bug.
It never ceases to amaze me that Mac fanboys can never admit to a bug no matter how serious (I guess it does contradict the "just works" thing but still) and yet continually berate MS and Linux for the tiniest of errors. Bugs happen and need to be fixed, no-one is immune to this and you only make a problem 10 times worse by denying it. But I've no doubt the Mac fanboys have labelled me a "hater" and "MS fanboy" and are furiously typing in their replies whilst trying not to get spittle on their keyboards.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Unix, Linux, Mac, even Windows lovers all agree that the biggest security hole in any operating system is the USER! Delete the worthless user, and the system will be much more secure! Mac needs to capitalize on this feature.
"Your users are compromising your security? Can't get a handle on all those backdoors? Now, you can delete the user, AND his data! Upgrade to OSX 10.666 now."
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If one thing has been burned into my brain as a programmer, it's this:
Crash all you want, but never, ever, ever harm, corrupt and by all that's holy, NEVER delete the user's data.
The data is sacred. The data is life.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
We can't get a virus or trojans or....hey, where did my data go?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"anyone who says anything to the contrary is a lair and a drunkard who wears women's panties."
Wait - do nerds no longer enjoy life's finer pleasures? I always enjoyed luring drunks to my lair so that I could get them out of their panties. In fact, they didn't even have to be very drunk. What's up, junior nerds? Don't tell me that ALL of you live in your mama's basements!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm waiting for OSX 10.14 ("Common Housecat").
True, but I can imagine how this happened. The guest user account is designed to erase itself after you log out. So there must have been some screw up to where the "erase user after log out" code got applied to the real user instead of to a guest user. It's a real shame that this wasn't caught in testing before it could burn an end user, but I can see how a bug like this could slip through the cracks.
Still, the team in charge of the programming guest user account at Apple must feel like absolute crap right now for letting this major bug through.
Crash all you want, but never, ever, ever harm, corrupt and by all that's holy, NEVER delete the user's data.
Except that if you are going to guarantee that you'll never corrupt or delete the user's data, then you have to guarantee that your program's behavior is well-defined. And usually programs that crash are crashing because they contain errors that lead to undefined behavior.
So if you want to be sure not to corrupt anything, you pretty much aren't allowed to crash either. (note: even if your program never writes to the disk, if it's buggy it might be vulnerable to a code injection attack that would cause it to write to the disk...)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When will software/computer/IT companies be held to the same standards that other engineers (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical) are? If a bridge is built and it collapses due to a poor design, or a gadget catches fire or brakes are poorly designed, people head to their local courthouse and sue.
In the computer world, people just accept that "All my photographs, resume, music, documents, tax returns, whatever" being lost forever is par for the course.
How do you measure the value of data? You can't assign $/KB of data, as one couldn't equate a 20MB Stephen King unpublished manuscript to be equivalent to 4 hi-res pictures of my wife's flower garden. However, I'm not a fan or Stephen King, but my wife loves her flower garden.
Should computers (or electric devices in general) with persistent storage carry a huge warning label on them that says,
"Not guaranteed to maintain data integrity, always back up your data. Use at your own risk."
Still, the team in charge of the programming guest user account at Apple must feel like absolute crap right now for letting this major bug through.
Yes, if there is one thing that the software industry has taught me, it is that the QA teams take their jobs personally...
I imagine now would be a really great time to start advertising OS X UnDelete! Recover Deleted Files! Great opportunity for either a systems tools vendor or someone pushing malware.
it's simple. you're not a nerd. you're just an extravert with a geek affliction.
If their data had been in the cloud this wouldn't have ... oh damn never mind.
That's how it frees 7 GB of disk space
Yeah, they're definitely doing the guest user account wrong. They should be using tmpfs (or whatever OS X equivalent is) for the guest account. Then they don't have to delete anything, it disappears automatically.
I used to use tmpfs for guest accounts on my ubuntu box for just that reason. That along with encrypted swap files with random keys generated on loading makes "deleting guest data" irrelevant (and lets you resize the temporary device on the fly arbitrarily high by adding more swap if you realize you're going to exceed your available physical ram or allotted space)
You can populate the guest dir from a new-user template, or use unionfs type dealies.
What I did was probably all wrong, but my point remains that you shouldn't have to delete stuff when you're done with the guest account. At the most, you should only have to forget a temporary encryption key, which ought to happen automagically in the event of a hard reboot.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Besides that, you didnt really want all that data anyways.
You will be much happier without it.
And all you people who didnt back up, its your fault, you hear me?
You get this great software for free and you expect it to be bug free.
Disclaimer: I am Apple user and have been since my Apple IIe in 1984. I began using Macs in 1991 and have a lot of experience with them. In other words, I'm not your average user and I'm extra careful with my data and my setup. I create a bootable backup before upgrading, etc.
When I upgrade to Snow Leopard I installed Rosetta because some of the software I depend upon cannot be run without it. While using this piece of amazing and somewhat buggy software my screen went blue and I was "spontaneously logged out." I encounter this problem only in the buggy software but I am not the only one experiencing such problems. Apparently there are scores if not hundreds (thousands?) of users affected by this "spontaneous log out." No amount of backing up is going to completely protect you if your computer goes tits up for no discernible reason at all.
I love me some Apple products but I also recognize some of those products have serious QA issues which are not only unaddressed but Apple has not even acknowledged them. Such bugs are not the fault of "extraordinary" users even if we can understand how a very esoteric and hard-to-replicate bugs may not show up in the testing phase.
blog
I feel compelled to correct your signature:
I believe it's "for all intents and purposes", which would make more sense too.
People were talking about how much hard drive space you could free up after installing Snow Leopard. Well, it's even better! It continues to free up space long after being installed!
Snow Leopard, never again run out of space (TM)
Agreed!
T-Mobile Sidekick user data got deleted as well.
I cannot stress this enough, back up your user data often. Even back up data on your mobile devices and cell phones for they can be deleted as well. Even bugs in Mac OSX can delete user data, and even on a Mac it can have a hard drive failure and wipe out your data. Backing up user data should be a part of everyone's daily if not at least weekly routines.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Since it has a greater market share than Linux. (It does. Really.)
They move on pretty quickly after apologising. Well, okay, they don't actually do the apologising themselves. That's left to the fanboys. And nothing was learned.
...and I'm Mac OSX. As you know, Mac OSX is the most stable, safe OS around, isn't that right, Mac Data?
Yes!. All I want to say is LNJHBKJQ*&*&O$_!#HNKJDLW
More like:
Mac OS X 10.7 Liger
"It's pretty much my favorite animal."
- Steve Jobs
Of course you can't make the entire program crash proof, but you can pay particular attention to the parts that might lead to data being deleted, making them the number-1 priority.
Yes, any bug could lead to deleted or corrupted data; but most don't.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
OSX 10.14.2 (Fat Cat)
OSX 10.14.23 (Heathcliff)
OSX 10.14.4 (Garfield)
...That many people pirated betas of an operating system? Wow.
Steve Jobs clearly intended for this to happen, as it's called iClean and is a service whereby the clutter of the Administrative account is eliminated. You do not need any functionality or data beyond which Apple already supplies, so in an effort to keep your computer healthy iClean will auto-scrub your account.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Whoooosh.
Oh, and you must be new around here.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
GP also misuses the phrase "begs the question".
They are either a complete and utter fuckwit, or making an ironic statement.
Fanboys aside, Apple certainly isn't getting a pass from users that are being affected or the general "community" at large. Lots of them are pissed. There just aren't very many of them that got affected as far as I can tell. Fanboys, on the other hand, are fanboys, and I'm not sure if you can say one group of fanboys is more annoying than another. As one using Linux predominately, Linux fanboys annoy me more than any other, but obviously it's a highly subjective matter.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
I don't see any evidence of apologism or Apple getting a free pass. Whenever Apple screws up, they're instantly on the front page of Slashdot, Digg, etc.
whoa there cowboy.
Maybe I'm completely mistaken, but unless you're still using fat, a program should never be able to corrupt your filesystem such that it's not recoverable. Even more, in Windows since Vista, no program will crash the computer -- driver errors yes, but userland programs? nope. Now, I've seen many a mac crash from buggy software over the past while, but no Windows program. And if they do, corruption cannot happen, because the filesystem should be recoverable -- be it mac, linux or windowz.
Still, the team in charge of the programming guest user account at Apple must feel like absolute crap right now for letting this major bug through.
Apparently this team was not the regular Apple programmers, Apple invited that team as guests to write the guest user code for them. Unfortunately all the source got deleted after the guests left, that is why they have such had time in reproducing the bug and fixing it.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
1) USB flash drives use FAT16 or FAT32 not a Mac OS X filesystem. They are implemented as filesystem plug-ins. USB drives ARE slow; especially when on a slow USB BUS. Me, I have whole USB bus for a time machine SATA drive and it runs as fast as one can expect from that configuration- no complaints.
2) Encrypted "volumes" are disk images; handled in userspace I believe... they are slower; but then they are software encrypted... I get good performance from not using sparse images; the sparse ones are slower (sparse images split the disk into 8MB files for easy resizing.) Sparse files have hash overhead fetching image files, open/closing overhead for those files, HFS+ auto-defragging, the 8MB segments is likely not optimally allocated (linear,) and I think it is quite likely the disk cache working twice.
3) WebDAV generally sucks (iDisk) and I never was a fan of it. still prefer FTP. FTP and WebDAV are both filesystem plug-ins which causes more trouble than they are worth-- not to mention loads a ton of code into the kernel; risking stability and security. Userspace would make MUCH MORE SENSE; especially since the network is the bottleneck not the userspace.
4) HFS+ is a fine filesystem. Sure it is old and based on decades old HFS. It works quite well and is stable. It is simple and highly flexible with easy hacks for adding new features. Its biggest problem is the wasted space for small files; but 10.6 fixes that with a hidden database (everything in HFS is a file, including internal structures.) It can be better; but it is not bad simply because it is old and feature laden.
--
Lets petition Apple to include FuseFS officially in the OS! (then they can move FTP and WebDAV out there and add HTTP, SSH...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Where do you think they got the panties?
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
They're not giving Apple a free pass, go look at some Mac news sites today to see.
It's also available through MSDN and MSDN Academic Alliance, which means that they're giving it out to developers and at schools for free.
It's more like Microsoft users report an issue and Microsoft release a patch when they get around to it.
Apple users never report issues because they won't admit that their Mac is anything less than perfection to "justify" the amount of money they wasted and not be proven morons. Apple themselves try to find a scapegoat.
As long as it isn't "Deaf Leopard"
10.04 Lucid Lynx! Now with ASLR, execute bit disable, better WebKit and SquirrelFish integration, vendor neutral OpenCL and GCD, 64 bit support for non-pro macs and macs with 32 bit EFI, built in support for many Windows applications, an app store, and support for various computer systems you can actually afford!
Man, that Apple. Always Innovating.
MS's next action should be to compile a version of Windows that works on the Mac platform, then market it as Windows Data Protection Edition.
har har. yeah yeah yeah. It's late.
You have a kernel panic every 6 weeks on average? Sounds like some of your hardware is buggy.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them. It's not enough to point out that the other developers have problems, too. Get pissed off and help them be better next time.
Wait a bug that has affected about 100 reported users is on the front page of Slashdot and a dozen other tech news sites and that's what you call being given a free pass? Are you insane?
Seriously it sucks that this bug exists and I'd be pissed as hell if it happened to me but I don't understand how you can claim this is a major bug and Apple is being given a free pass. This affects users who are in the 20% or so using snow leopard who are also in the subset that they upgraded from Leopard and the further subset that had a guest account enabled under leopard and the subset of that that had a crash while using a guest account and rebooted and opened an admin account. And for that small subset, it does not even happen consistently. That's a pretty unusual and edge case bug, only notable because the results are so devastating. It's probably a lot less common than people who lose their data because of a catastrophic hard drive failure. And it's being billed as a major failure an Apple's part. That's just one of those bugs that QA is unlikely to have found, even if they're being thorough. Getting pissed at Apple won't do much good other than to make Apple developers decide users and the press are unreasonable and there's no point in trying, since any weird edge case bug will be get them as much bad press as if they had a major easily detectable bug.
A couple of years ago a I was doing some work for a government departments publishing division. They had both macs and windows, I was in there to fix a windows problem and they were complaining about how they wished it was more like there macs which were much more reliable and stable as they had to restart windows almost every day. While I was there I saw 2 macs get the old cars crashing on your screen and of course then proceed to restart, I pointed it out to the users in there and they said I quote "oh that, Macs do that every hour or so and after a minute or so the screen comes back". I was stunned and dumbfounded, never underestimate the stupidity of a mac user or the willingness to endure agony as long as they get a pretty shiny picture.
Never underestimate the appearance of someone who actually cares about the products they sell.
When Apple fucks up, they generally get cut a bit more slack than Microsoft because Apple appears to care about their products more than MS, so neglect and other bad qualities don't spring to mind as much when mistakes are made.
I doubt as many people think that this was because Apple didn't care about OS X compared to MS's treatment of Danger/Sidekick.
I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them.
Because it hasn't happened to me or anyone I know?
So this is how they were able to save 6GB on every upgrade. Nice!
Since it has a greater market share than Linux on the desktop. (It does. Really.)
As a fellow Win7 user, let me correct this before a less polite Linux fan reads it literally and flames you to oblivion.
Ever since I got MacOS 10.6 "Slow Leopard" my OSX experience with Safari has SUCKED.
Every so often Safari freezes up the whole system for up to half a minute
Check this syslog:
Oct 12 16:57:51 un2803-09 Safari[18145]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:22.553759, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 5, Did shrink: NO
Oct 12 17:10:35 un2803-09 Safari[18145]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:6.630163, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 5, Did shrink: NO
Oct 12 17:16:29 un2803-09 Safari[18145]: Periodic CFURLCache Insert stats (iters: 369) - Tx time:0.003914, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 5, Did shrink: NO, Size of cache-file: 167206912, Num of Failures: 2
Oct 12 17:40:45 un2803-09 Safari[18145]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:16.382989, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 5, Did shrink: NO
People have been complaining about that for more than a month now. Hey I just supported your asses by getting .. and come to think of it I have gotten applecare protection plans for everything
a $2800 Macbook Pro and I _paid_ for the 10.6 upgrade for my old MBP, what do I need to do to get this fixed,
do I have to buy a time machine or get a MobileMe subscription (WTF should I pay to sync to my ipod touch? Oh did
I mention I got a 16Gb ipod touch a while ago too!)
I bought from you guys, that's a whooping $350 bucks for a macbook, and it's also those little things that count
like you making me shell out an extra $29 for a display adaptor because you chose to go with some weird-ass standard
nobody has heard of before...
You OWE me to fix this bug, buddy.
Hello Kitty!
Only Mac users pay for pussies.
MS managed to ship Win7 and be more compatible with older software than Vista. Apple freed up 7GB on a HDD and break backwards compatibility. Which would you rather have?
I wonder how the guy at Roughlydrafted will explain that this is an excellent new feature of OS X what you cannot find in Vista.
Wait I just saw that he already has an exclusive report !
Exclusive: Pink Danger leaks from Microsoft’s Windows Phone
Err, never mind....
Yeah, they're definitely doing the guest user account wrong. They should be using tmpfs (or whatever OS X equivalent is)
There isn't one that comes with the OS. (Perhaps somebody other than Apple has done a tmpfs port or from-scratch implementation.)
I think this sort of disaster shows that one simply can't trust desktop computing. You should put your data in the cloud instead, where knowledgeable and careful companies like Microsoft take care of the backups for you!
The RC1 build was also freely available for download; I'm running it at home myself.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You mean Tron had it right??
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The Guest account should ALWAYS be disabled on your Mac and as a matter of fact on ANY OS. It's a matter of security. The easiest way to hack a system is with a guest account.
This is a serious regression in /. community: nobody yet quoted BOFH...
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Well...it just works assuming you don't want to use the built in functionality.
It doesn't make sense to be an apologist. I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them. It's not enough to point out that the other developers have problems, too. Get pissed off and help them be better next time.
They don't. Hence the story about this and all the griping on the forums.
While data loss is a major issue, you have to admit that this is a fairly "random" set of prerequisites to trigger this (serious) bug.
Told.
Oh, and next thing youre gonna tell me is that Windows has a higher market share than Linux?
Actually i dont know if theres any way to get real, hard numbers.
But im sure that a LOT more machines run Windows NT (or even 3.1) than Win7. Quite a lot of vending machines run those OSes. Ive also seen quite a few dart machines running good ol DOS.
Linux seems to have the upper hand in quite a few areas though, pretty much everything thats network-enabled, not just DSL-routers.
make a new plan, Stan
No, he's had 1 kernel panic since installing 10.6 - come back in December if you want to see your if your "average" holds up.
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
Came here for this - leaving happy!
The idea of Snow Leopard was to fine-tune Leopard, not be a completely new OS (thus the cheaper price and name similarities).
sure mock Apple, but what will you say when they release OSX 10.15 ("Long Haired P*ssy") ?
MS managed to ship Win7 and be more compatible with older software than Vista. Apple freed up 7GB on a HDD and break backwards compatibility. Which would you rather have?
Apple broke backwards compatibility with older hardware, not software to any appreciable extent, excepting a short list of a few apps and applications that were built only for the PPC architecture and which did not work with the emulation mode. I'd note, they broke compatibility with a hardware platform MS is not supporting at all since Win2K and which was unusable even then.
I'm waiting for OSX 10.14 ("Common Housecat").
Not me, I'm holding out for OS X 10.15 "Snow Common Housecat".
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"I just want a stable operating system without bugs or hassles! "
They kind of look like assholes now, considering the current situation.
Perhaps we should divert the funds from bashing MS to QA hey boys?
Karma's a bitch...
I did this for quite a while, but my machine is a laptop. When I was using it, I had to choose between 1) being tethered to the external drive or 2) not having Time Machine backing up. If I chose 2), then when I was done with the machine instead of closing the lid and letting it sleep, I had to leave it run so a TM backup could get done. This got old fast, and I bought a Time Capsule.
Your solution is great for a desktop machine. For a laptop... not so much.
The other possibility is that the testing failed to consider what would happen if you still had debris left over from an earlier OS X install. I doubt that Snow Leopard testing considered the case of someone who started with 10.0 and upgraded to every version in between along the way for example.
Apple has really gotten a break that their users accept very little backward compatibility testing beyond a release or two really. It's completely reasonable for application developers to say "only runs on Leopard" right now and still sell stuff, while an app that only runs on Vista would be unavailable to a large chunk of its target market. They've done it with reasonable upgrade pricing, lack of upgrade DRM to make the users who don't want to pay suffer, and by adding useful APIs to every release that developers want to take advantage of. Quite enviable compared to the backward compatibility situation in Windows land.
<pedant>
The data are sacred. The data are life. "Data" is plural for "datum".
</pedant>
Free Martian Whores!
I'd appreciate this more if you bothered to put your name on it. Ac just doesn't carry much weight.
Why bother
From what I remember 10.4 was out when the first intel mac's hit the scene and since 10.6 is now intel only, the most they'd of had to test was an upgrade from 10.4->.5->.6. Which you'd of thought would not be a big deal and a normal sort of thing to check. The actual way the bug is triggered doesn't seem like that random a scenario to envisage.
jaymz
Because cognitive dissonance is far superior to actually facing problems. There are no issue with Mac, OS X or any apple product and anyone who says anything to the contrary is a lair and a drunkard who wears women's panties.
I can't call any of them anything because they are anon cowards. That's what I was complaining about. Your cognitive dissonance seems to be that you assume I was in any way defending Apple I wasn't. I was also questioning the verity of the original article which claimed > 1 months old posts about a product that had only been available less than a month.
Why bother
hi I'm a mac, and I'm a pc.
Hi there pc, what do u have there? *looks towards some guy in a suit with a folder with papers *
some files... and you?
*guy shredding papers* uhm what?
The BBC is also reporting it here.
Pardon?
Cheers, Chris
Here is the operative part of your sentence that I quoted
You assumed that any critics were automatically fanboys attempting to discredit a product, in the process ignoring all other factors in the conversation. You made the correlation that critic == anon coward and that anon coward == MS fanboy without any supporting evidence and not considering other possibilities, that sir is cognitive dissonance (refusal to accept a point contradictory or conflicting with your own beliefs).
Here is the beauty of /., you can. Just make a well reasoned comment with facts and evidence contradicting the points provided by the AC, simply calling them fanboys and complaining doesn't help you prove anything.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Http://www.tntshoes.com
Hi friend, we are a prefession online store, you can see more photos and price in our website which is show in the photos
we take paypal as payment, . shoes Nike jordan1-23 $28-42 free shiping. hellow our website is see our website in the photos attached, we are a online shopping mall, we have all kinds of brand new shoes,clothing, handbag,sunglasses,hats etc for sale, all of our product is best quality but the price is so cheap. You can find the more photos and the price for our product in our website, if interested please email me by we are selling all brand new handbag,
OUR WEBSITE:
Http://www.tntshoes.com
YAHOO:shoppertrade@yahoo.com.cn
MSN:shoppertrade@hotmail.com
tmp content disappears after reboot and this behavior is editable
so Guest login after Guest login without reboot would recover previous Guest data
not a perfect solution either
wasn't trying to prove anything, was trying to get anon cowards to put names on valid criticism. Since no other evidence was available and the only criticisms at the time of my post were anon coward I made a blanket obviously false statement in an attempt to shame the anon cowards into showing faces. You assumed that I was making a false statement for another purpose entirely. At least you put your name on it. Oh and yes I was ignoring all other factors in the conversation. Making well reasoned arguments against anyone that has no face is less that totally satisfying and a waste of time. Much like this thread which should now be dead.
Why bother
I am a fanboi of a particular OS, and as a BSD fanboi I need to ask - what the fuck has Apple done to our rock-solid OS?
All you have to do stick umount /path/to/guest/home/dir in the logout script. It automatically disappears in the event of a hard reboot, which is superior behavior to persisting through reboot.
The set up defines the "default" behavior in the event of unexpected trouble. If everything is working correctly, your logout scripts run fine and it doesn't matter how you set it up.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Turns out the one kernel panic since upgrading was due to faulty hardware. One of my new RAM chips was faulty and is in the process of getting replaced.
As far as the 'average' kernel panics go, one every six weeks isn't quite my normal – but it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility to have one pop up. I did have a significant number (not high, but not extremely low ~1 every month or two) related to the 'safe sleep' (hibernate + suspend) feature in Leopard, and I experienced one of those recently on Snow Leopard (though it was after my initial post, but before I realised the RAM was faulty).
As far as the application crashes go, the Safari crashes were split between probably-bad-RAM-related and not-RAM-related-at-all, but that's been my experience overall – occasional application crashes do happen.
There were a small number of non-PPC applications and a number of plugins that were broken or slightly-buggy after the upgrade. Many more plugins than applications, due to unsupported plugins always getting knocked around by OS upgrades (sometimes even point releases) – the major cause for plugins were the InputManagers removal which I noted. In every case I can think of these plugins simply didn't work (often didn't even try to load) in the new version – not that they broken the system.
Applications were mostly just a bit buggy (and only a handful that I use), and often a fix was released either on 10.6 release date or a few days later. As two examples, Adium has a minor bug in it's release version that causes some preference windows to behave oddly (fixed in the beta, released before 10.6 release date), and Cyberduck wouldn't run in Snow Leopard (also fixed in the beta, which was released exactly on the 10.6 release date).