[X Newbies] Crashing of text editor?

[Alex]

On Monday, Mar 29, 2004, at 12:55 Canada/Eastern, Charles Martin wrote:

>> From: J <themacintoshlady at earthlink.net>
>> OS X has been crashing a lot lately even though I run
>> several routines. It just fills up and can't take it anymore I guess.
>>
> This comment is indicative of something more seriously wrong with your 
> setup. [...]

Undoubtedly. Of course, it remains to be seen what exactly "OS X has 
been crashing a lot" means to J. Kernel panics? Finder or other 
processes getting stuck? And so on.

> [...] Mac OS X is not supposed to crash *at all.* As in *ever.*

C'mon. That's absurd. If, by "supposed", you mean "designed to", well, 
no OS has ever been designed to crash (to my knowledge). On the 
contrary, most engineers try to make their software as crash-proof as 
possible. How well they succeed -- that's another matter.

If you mean "shouldn't", then it would make OS X perfect. And well we 
know that nothing wrought by human hands is ever perfect. (Of course, 
Steve Jobs may very well be right to believe he's the Second Coming in 
disguise, but even then my statement would still hold.)

Yes, OS X is robust, certainly more robust than previous versions of 
the Mac OS (of which it is not really a descendant). But it has its 
bugs, turkeys and warts. Anyway, modern computer engineering is moving 
away from the idea of trying (probably hopelessly) to prevent systems 
crashes to designing systems with generous fault tolerance and rapid 
recovery (cf. Scientific American, June 2003).

> [...] as far as system stability goes OS X is a quantum leap above all 
> other consumer OSes.

Nonsense. Palm is a consumer OS -- is Mac OS X to be compared with it? 
Essentially, there are only two points of comparison: Win XP and Linux. 
Mac OS X is not "a quantum leap" above either; in fact, in some 
respects, it is inferior. For instance, it is much more sensitive to 
(less fault-tolerant of) marginal hardware (e.g., RAM chips, USB 
devices, etc.) then either.

Let's be honest. Mac OS X is not "a quantum leap" above any of its 
competitors, in any respect. But it does have a combination of features 
which makes it very attractive to a very small percentage of computer 
users (myself included).

f