Quote:
Originally posted by Qo'noSIf you're the same melgross who reads and posts on arstechnica, wait a few weeks for the early adopters to try it out and find serious bugs. Actually, whether or not you're the same person, I'd suggest two sites to check during the days/weeks after the Tiger release:
1) arstechnica.com -- forums -- macintoshian achaia, and
2) www.macfixit.com.
Early adopters there will probably have reports out after a few days and you can decide whether any bugs found are critical for you.
Personally, I think you're right to be cautious. I well remember the Panther Firewire bug and I daily thank Dog it did not bite me. Some fanbois 
here would rather forget that one and just tell you "yippee! Install!" 
(Oops! You mean installing your brand spanking new OS just trashed my external hard drive? Thanks, Apple!)
Then after that you get to decide whether the Tiger bugs are worse than the Panther bugs, and proceed from there 
Best of luck.
It's difficult to decide to whom I should reply, so I've picked you, since you seem to know my posts elsewhere. A lot of my post is speaking in general, so don't get upset at some things I might say. You'll know what I mean.
Yes, I am somewhat cautious. I am also a beta tester, so I know the pitfalls.
I owned a commercial Photo lab here in NYC, and have owned almost every piece of imaging, editing, graphics, 3D, and publishing software ever written. I still do. My upgrades cost over $9,000 a year.
I'm quite familiar with bugs, thank you. I kept a machine at work just for the purpose of testing new software. I still do that at home. As I mentioned at the other Insider thread dealing with this issue, I have already ordered the upgrade, and will apply it as soon as it comes in. But only on that one machine.
If you are an enthusiast, and do nothing of importance on your machine, then by all means, apply it right away.
I report bugs to several sites on a regular basis, Macfixit is one of them, Macintouch is another, Apple_Xnet is another etc.
I'm upset not because Apple hasn't fixed ALL of the bugs, that would be a ridiculous thing to expect. The head of OS development at MS said that XP had 68,000 KNOWN bugs upon release, so we can be happy if 10.4 only has hundreds.
What upsets me is that introducing it now is unnecessary. No one expected it now. Everyone (even here) expected it at the Dev. conf. They have come out with new software before that depended upon an upgrade to the OS that wasn't out yet. FCP is one of those.
The conf. is two months away. A short time to wait, but a long time to enable the clearing out more bugs, and stabilizing some shaky features. Possibly that one feature that didn't quite make it could have been included.
You do realize that there are thousands of folders in X. Apple, and even the FreeBSD team doesn't know what all of them do. Some of the code is from the "60's. If they remove it, some things don't work, but they don't know why. Tracing those four or five lines could take a couple of programmers a couple of months. Multiply that by a thousand or so, and you can see why every extra day they have is a blessing.
I know you think that I'm overdoing it, but I'm not. If you knew this from the inside as I do, you would understand.
Remember even a security update causes problems in seemingly unrelated areas. Apple should worry less about secrecy and spread the testing program out to ten or even fifty times as many testers. They would catch more.
In the other thread, some idiot claimed to be a beta tester and said that he, like Apple, tested E V E R Y T H I N G (his emphasis). LOL, a beta tester tests only a small portion of the OS. Apple can't do it either. They test what they changed. If there is a problem, they TRY to fix it. But, as I mentioned above, they don't even know what all the code is.
Sorry this went on so long. I had to stop myself.
We'll see tomorrow, and then come back here, and the other thread, and jaw some more.
