[geeks] Article: Sun's not so cheap trick doesn't work

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 12 Oct 2008, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

>> [0] for most folks.  Every time I launch into a screaming rant about how
>>     Leopard is a steaming pile, I say that knowing full-well that I am
>>     likely not the target market.
>
> You are not being fair. From what I remember, I have yet to see one rant
> on how bad Vista is. Is that because you use Leopard?

I've used Leopard daily since the day it came out.  I've filed more bug
reports I can remember (most of which were marked as duplicates).  Most of
the bugs I hit center around X11, the X11 SDK, samba, and Mail.app.  Some
are just really awful--there's a bug in Apple's port of smbd that causes
files to have their POSIX permissions clobbered and replaced by equivalent
ACLs.  Apple calls this "working as expected", nevermind that if you do
-anything- with those files using an application that respects POSIX
permissions, things degrade quickly.  Compressing and decompressing from
the Finder is a good example.

Tuesday I fly back to the US from Taiwan, where I've been using Vista
daily[1] for the past two weeks.  The reason you haven't seen me rant about
Vista is because I haven't finished inventing the language I'd need to
convey the degree of disgust required.  This is well and far beyond a
great OS with some brain-damaged bugs.  It's unadulterated, distilled
badness.  Since I've resolved to use it exclusively for my trip here, I've
really tried to make friends with it, but Vista and I mostly seem to get
in each other's way.

To Microsoft's credit, the betas of Windows 7 actually seem to focus on
making Windows somewhat usable again.

Deep down, I hope that there's a timebomb buried within Vista that, after
a few weeks of putting up with this abominably bad excuse for an operating
system, the user gets a popup saying "Ha ha!  We're only kidding.  Thanks
for being such a great sport.  Click OK to return to Windows XP."


[1] An indirect result of the iToys soaking up more of Apple's R&D budget.
     If I had an Intel-based Mac laptop, I wouldn't have needed to borrow a
     PC laptop from $ork.  If Apple would release an Intel-based Mac laptop
     that wasn't a step sideways from my PowerPC laptop that still gets 5
     or more hours to a charge, I'd buy one the day it came out.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |