pure roon

“Developers,” a VP at Electronic Arts once told me, explaining why there were so many me-too Windows applications, “will walk through the desert in their socks to get to an installed base.”

True enough. But it doesn’t quite explain the results of a survey issued last week by Evans Data Corp. The headline was that most developers are still not targeting Windows Vista when they write new apps. Only 8% of the 380 developers surveyed were writing for Vista; 49% were still targeting Windows XP.

I welcome any increase in development of non Windows Software, even if it is mainly an increase for a Macs (which I dislike only slightly less than Windowz).

As a Linux user and LAMP developer I have been very happy to see an increase in software dedicated to the linux environment. Up until the last few years Linux desktop users have had to put up with ported versions of windows software that often requires quite an advanced knowledge of wine to get working, but now dedicated LInux software is emergine that not only competes with Windows based software, now quite often outperforms it on both a funcationality and an efficiency front.

I still think Macs are far to slow to be any real competition to windows though…

Tom Karpik has discovered what appears to be a fundamental error with the directory moving code from Max OS X Leopard. It turns out that when moving files from one medium to another the mechanisms in place to ensure that the transfer occured without error are seriously flawed.

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In terms of pseudo code, moving from/to different volumes might look something like this:

move(source, destination) {
returnVal = copy(source, destination);

if(returnVal == TRUE) { // copy success
delete(source);
} else { // copy fail
message("Move failed");
}
}

This is where the problem with the Mac OS X 10.5.0 Finder lies.

When you move data from one medium to another, generally you would check that the data was ‘all present and correct’ on the target before removing from the host. Leopard seems to have decided that this is unnecessary, maybe in an attempt to save some time? Now there is no check and if the target medium is removed or the transfer interrupted in any way, you will lose your data permanently from both mediums. This bug has been found as far back as Panther, so it’s been around for a while, and q quick search of google reveals a large number of people suffering from this bug.

This is bad, very bad as I can verify from my own experiences. Data transfers sometimes fail, especially when there is a large amount of small files being transferred. On my Vista/Fedora 7 machine at home all of my files are hosted through samba on a fedora 7 file server in my basement, and sometimes I get errors when moving files between the server and my local, but I am always confident that the data will still be in it’s original location.

If you would like a full graphical walk through of the bug please go here

Quite an interesting yet lengthy review of MAC OS X 10.5 Leopard, well worth a read though.
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That was exactly two and a half years ago, to the day. It seems that I’ve gotten my wish and then some. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has gestated longer than any release of Mac OS X (other than 10.0, that is). If I had high expectations for 10.5 back in 2005, they’ve only grown as the months and years have passed. Apple’s tantalizingly explicit withholding of information about Leopard just fanned the flames. My state of mind leading up to the release of Leopard probably matches that of a lot of Mac enthusiasts: this better be good.

Maybe the average Mac user just expects another incrementally improved version of Mac OS X. Eighteen months, two and a half years, who’s counting? Maybe we enthusiasts are just getting greedy. After all, as Apple’s been so fond of touting, there have been five releases of Mac OS X in the time it’s taken Microsoft to deliver Windows Vista.

[..]

That’d be like congratulating someone for extinguishing the left half of his body after intentionally lighting himself on fire.

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Apparently my product code is not valid for vista, so if i need to contact
vista support if is going to cost me £46, even though I have a valid copy of
vista home premium.

I have been benchmarking vista against fedora 7 on hardware (aparently
designed for vista) Intel E6600 with 2Gb DDR2 RAM. Fedora 7 completed its
benchmarks on an average of 43.67% faster than windows vista. That is quite a
margin! Also for anyone that is interested, Windows XP completed the same
benchmarks 39.24% faster than vista.

What am I supposed to conclude from this other than vista is a complete
waste of money. On a software side, there isn’t actually anything in vista
that can’t be done in windows XP or Fedora 7 as far as I can see. Well
actually vista has some better tools for looking after your hard drive built
in, than XP. but that appears to be it!

Anyway. I would quite like my money back, I already have XP, and most Linux
Flavours are free. If I wanted to pay money I would have bought a MAC…

Yeah after Microsoft told me that I apparently have to pay £46 to even try to ask a question about my new Vista set up, I decided it was time to see what all the vista fuss was about. Sadly I realised Microsoft have released what I can only call “A waste of money”

Maybe they will try to rescue vista just like they rescued XP after a couple of years of people complaining about it. But really Bill you have outdone yourself this time. If I wanted to pay money for shit, I would have asked Stig.