[X4U] Re: Lack of sleep

Zane H. Healy healyzh at aracnet.com
Thu Sep 1 17:34:05 PDT 2005


> 
> On 09/01/05, "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> ranted:
> >> On Sep 1, 2005, at 4:47 PM, RR wrote:
> >> > Tiger, quite frankly - SUCKS.
> >>
> >> I'm sorry it hasn't worked out well for you, but you do realize that 
> >> the vast majority of people aren't having a problem, so it seems a
> >> bit overboard to register a verdict on the entire OS.
> >
> > I'm going to have to agree.  Tiger SUCKS!!!
> > 1. They broke Appletalk support
> 
> Yeah! It's a shame that six or so years since Apple stopped shipping Mac OS
> 8, they stopped supporting that ancient OS. What will they think of next?
> Stop shipping machines that boot with OS 8 and OS 9?
> 
> According to <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106461>:
> 
> "Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.3.9 support file sharing (AFP)
> connections over AppleTalk  Mac OS X 10.4 and later don't support Personal
> File Sharing (or other AFP) over Appletalk, though by initiating the
> connection from the opposite direction you could still achieve an IP
> connection from a Mac OS 8 computer to a sharing Mac OS X computerŠMac OS 9
> and Mac OS X can both connect over TCP/IP without AppleTalk."
> 
> So, either run Panther w/OS 8 or upgrade OS 8 to OS 9.

That's all well and good if the computer you are trying to talk to can run
those versions of Mac OS.  In my case the computer I'm trying to talk to
doesn't even run Mac OS.  This wouldn't even be an issue for me if Mac OS X
could do NFS in a decent manner, but it can't.  Samba might be a work around
for me if I could figure out how to get Mac OS X to use unencrypted
passwords (yes, I realize that's very bad).

Trust me, I wouldn't be using Classic Appletalk *IF* I could find an
alternative that works.  In fact I *really* need to get off of it, as the
next time I upgrade OpenVMS the Appletalk software for it will stop working. 
BTW, I've never had any trouble getting any other OS using NFS to speak to
OpenVMS, yet to the best of my knowledge no one has gotten Mac OS X to use
NFS to speak to OpenVMS.

I'm not alone in having *MAJOR* issues with them re-dumping Appletalk
support.  This is preventing some people from upgrading, and some of them
are planning on moving to Windows.

> > 2. The memory footprint is OUTRAGEOUS, suddenly my G5 2x2 with 1.5GB of RAM
> >    needs an additional 2GB of RAM to continue to perform the same
> 
> Hmmmm? My G4, 450 MP, 1.5 GB RAM runs appreciably faster in Tiger than
> Panther, but I'm not doing intense video/music/movie processing, just word
> processing, spreadsheet manipulations, web surfing, and some image
> processing. YMV.

Based on what I saw during the two months that I ran 10.4 and 10.4.1 it was
a little better at releasing memory, BUT, overall the memory usage seemed to
be *WAY* up, and the system spent a *LOT* more time swapping data in and out
of memory.

Overall, Mac OS X has the *worst* performance of any "Unix varient" that
I've used for any amount of time, and that includes Linux (shoot it even
makes WinXP look good).  They should take a look at SGI IRIX and try to 
match it for performance!

BTW, my statement about needing an extra 2GB of RAM based on running the
exact same collection of applications under 10.3.9, as I ran under 10.4. 
Under 10.3.9 I can go a month or so before I have to reboot to clear up RAM,
under 10.4, I was lucky to go a week.  As soon as I switched back to 10.3.9,
everything went back to normal.

> > 3. No way to turn off that stupid widget mess, and lets not forget that the
> >    feature shipped with a dangerous security hole.
> 
> You haven't looked very far. Granted, it's not an Apple SysPrefs setting,
> but you can disable it using the Terminal's default
> command-<http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050723123302403&query=disable+dashboard>
> has the details. There are even easy ways to disable journaling and
> Spotlight.

OK, so there is a work around, this sort of thing should an option under the
control panel.

I'll have to keep this in mind for when I have to break down and upgrade to
10.4 to run something.  Personally I consider Dashboard to be an even larger
waste of resources than Expose.  I've yet to form a real opinion on
Spotlight.  I do know you can fairly easily set it so that Spotlight only
runs on the disks/directories that you want it to.

As for journaling, why on earth would anyone *WANT* to turn that off?!?!

> > Those are just the issues I can think of off the top of my head.  Thanks to
> > an unfortunate incident involving a dead hard drive I'm back to running
> > 10.3.9 and *MUCH* happier.
> 
> Sorry for you loss. Glad you're smiling again.

Thankfully it appears that the only thing I lost was the save files from a
game I was playing.  Of course I'd spent a good chunk of my free time for
about a month getting that far :^(  I wouldn't have lost it, if I'd
remembered to retrieve it while I was still able to retrieve data off of the
disk.  As far as I know, anything truely important, was saved.  Which
reminds me, I need to do a backup...

		Zane



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