To sleep, perchance to dream? OS 10.2.8 - ay, There's the Rub

It's called Tiger :)

At least upgrade to Panther. I had the same problem on my rig - went away with Panther.

There's caution, and then there's caution...

=:~)

It's called Tiger :)

At least upgrade to Panther. I had the same problem on my rig - went away with Panther.

There's caution, and then there's caution...

Chu

Are you really asking why software sometimes has bugs? And why sometimes new bugs that weren't in an older version appear in a new release of software and are squashed in a yet later release? If that's really what you are asking, it is a larger question than can be well addressed here.

-(

I'll assume this was more in the nature of a rhetorical sigh than an actual question. Perhaps the smiley on the next line was also supposed to apply here. That would make sense.

Take a look at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/default.html There are a number of excellent ebooks on this and other Mac subjects.

FWIW, I noticed a significant improvement in capability and stability on moving from 10.2.8 to 10.3.9. I wouldn't care to go back!

This is on a 733MHz G4.

John.

Yes, I've noticed. I don't much care one way o another (yet, anyway) about 10.3 vs 10.4. This machine is 10.4, while my one at work is 10.3. Not much difference that I care about (yet - though I'm suspicious that the app that wouldn't run for me a few weeks ago at work was built for 10.4 only - haven't checked that hypothesis).

But 10.2 to 10.3 was huge and fundamental for me. Namely the addition of a supported X11 in 10.3. Using 10.2 just is not viable at all in my case. Yes, I know about the other options for X11; none of them are viable for my purposes. I have many apps that won't work with them. And the old Apple beta X11 distribution license has expired so I couldn't legally run it at work anyway (and yes, it matters at work).

No, I didn't notice that, because... OS 9 was simply of zero interest to me. Make it less than zero, because Mac users kept pestering me for Mac versions of my programs and I had to explain to them why it wasn't going to happen. I (like quite a few other engineers) come to Macs from a Unix background (which is why X11 was so critical for me). To me, the Mac is a better done Unix box than the Linux and Sun ones I was using before. WIthout OS X, I wouldn't have a Mac at all.

Well, I worked up update by update from about 10.2.2 to 10.2.8 and by and large every one saw an improvement. Certainly 10.2.8 seemed to me to be better than its predecessors.

OTOH, 10.3.9 seems much better than ANYTHING 10.2.x had to offer; the Find is more effective (and Sherlock can be disregarded, because it only looks for things I'm not interested in); the irritating Favourites system (which broke at one point altogether, the only time I've had to reinstall 10.x) has been discarded.

Mail and Safari are both more potent and more stable than those that go with 10.2.x; and applications in general (and Office 2004 in particular) seem happier.

This may be because I use a minimum of gadgetry; Default Folder and ASM are pretty well the only "extras" I use. It's possible that if you like a lot of haxies the answer would be different :-)

I don't have a DVD drive, so it looks as though I'll never be able to compare 10.3 with 10.4; but reading the blurbs and the newsgroups, it seems to me that 10.4 offers a lot of features that I wouldn't want and might get in the way.

John.

It's a heart-shaped icon in the finder windows. Qiuite iliely you've never bothered with it - I didn't find it very useful and went right off it when it went wrong.

Is the OS getting bigger, how does your 733Mhz G4 cope speed-wise?

It is probably getting bigger - the System folder on my machine is 1.03 GB (as distinct from the Classic System Folder, which is only 268 MB). The Library at Root level is another 1. 29 GB (though this will of course depend on what is installed - I've made no attempt to exclude unwanted languages, for example). The Library at User level is 583 MB - this includes all my Mail files and uncleared caches. So we are takling almost 3 GB in total here.

But 10.3.9 is certainly no slower that was 10.2.8 as far as I can remember. It may even be faster here and there.

John.

Previously, John Hill wrote:

looks for things I'm not interested in); the irritating Favourites system (which broke at one point altogether, the only time I've had to reinstall 10.x) has been discarded.

Favourites is still there in 10.4.x, but it is now optional. To use it, just make a folder named "Favourites" ("Favorites" for Americans) in your /Users/<You>/Library/ folder, then drag that folder to the bottom of the Finder's side bar (Make sure the drop target is a blue horizontal line, not a blue lozenge.) You'll get the familiar heart icon. Put any aliases you like in it, and they'll be there when you want them.

Then that's fine for you. It isn't for me.

No, I don't. And I don't particularly need "worship". I need standards-oriented computing platforms. OS X reasonably fits that need. I won't say perfectly, nothing being perfect, but it fits reasonably. And maybe in 10 years or so, something else will fit it better. If so, I'll move on (well, if I'm still programming then), and it won't be hard because I won't have tied myself overly to a single platform. I've been in the computing business for 35 years. In that time, I've been through several changes of my favored platform. If there is one lesson that I've learned, it is that things will change. I have no reason to suspect that I am now using the one-and-only, ultimate, perfect system, never to change again. I see people with that attitude. I even see a few people over in my most usual "hangout" on usenet (comp.lang.fortran) who seem to have gone through that same attitude for about 4 or so different systems (well, compilers in that case). Those people seem a bit slow at learning.

Yes. The newer hardware from Apple seems to not want to boot to an actual OS 9 partition, but Classic works fine if you have a System Folder somewhere. My SO just bought an iMac and wanted to play Alpha Centauri to get some down time. After some poking around, I just dropped the System Folder from my G4 into the iMac and AC fired up, first time.

Previously, Ray Laughton wrote:

It may be cynical, but I get the impression bugs are slipped into OS-updates just before a major (meaning $$) version change. I'll never forget the way OS 9 was slowed and unstabilised compared to 8.6 to soften us up for the "jump" to OS X.

I suspect that is a bit paranoid. Given that slipping bugs into the code base is still engineering work, I would be really surprised if they bothered.

More likely, to me, is testing and focus. I was running Tiger full time as of last November, as were many developers I knew. Any bugs in releases of 10.3 that came up during that period would not be spotted by me. I know other developers who were in the same state.

Scott

I think 'deigned' is not the proper word. Porting some of those apps would have been a heck of a lot of work, and it is not clear whether the payoff would have been worth it. Not just money, but time - if I write a second platform version of an app, I cannot write a different one.

I worked on porting a major econometrics app over about ten years ago, and while I liked the OS 9 coding environment better, it was not a fatro of three or four better, which would have been needed to justify the work. The amazing pain of near, far, and huge pointers did not make me happy, but I got by.

Cocoa, on the other hand, appears to have some legs. I now can see productivity boosts of the three and four range, which can justify the work. Similarly, if I instead use Java, I get GUIs, network stacks, threads, and so on, that are very similar between any platform I use, and thus can justify a small amount of additional work to get a new platform. Finally, if the upcoming Web 2.0 stuff takes off, then I can write server side, and serve people on whatever platform they want. All three of these make the 'support the mac' equation much better than it was ten years ago, despite the lower market share nowadays.

Worship is not required, but a decent payoff to the work is. I think Apple has a pretty compelling package nowadays, and I hope they keep running with it - we have not seen the perfect platform as yet.

Scott

Are you suggesting that OS 8.6 was faster than the current versions of OSX? You're almost certainly right on transitional 8/9/X machines. Not on new ones.

Files of unknown origin all over the place. Only slightly more stable than pre OS X too.

The files you should concern yourself with are pretty much in the same place with one layer over them and start with Library. You shouldn't concern yourself with /Library and it isn't trivial to change it. All your personal preferences like in System/Preferences in pre OSX versions are in Library/Preferences( no / in front of Library). Everything to enhance or destroy your system is accessible via the terminal. The terminal just sits there until you learn some UNIX commands. I'm still learning the file system after knowing it in RedHat Linux. There are new commands, but the old important ones work fine. Current versions of OSX are far more stable than OS9 and earlier. Period. You crash applications, not the entire OS.
Geeze, I jumped on my soapbox and perhaps missed the point.

leo

A simpler explanation is that most of the programmers had been redeployed to OS 10 by then, so OS 9 got only the bare essentials of support, as befitted its soon-to-be legacy status.

Joe Gwinn