Apple releases Mac OS X 10.5.6 Update - Page 3

I've often read people strongly recommending the use of the Combo Updater over relying on Software Update. I have always relied on Software Update and can't recall ever running into any problems, including with the 10.5.6 update today.

I run Drive Genius 2 every couple weeks (defragging every couple months or so) along with regular Permissions Repair with Disk Utility, so hopefully any of my apps which may have behavioral issues are kept well enough in check. I don't do any of the "strange things" you described either, which also probably helps keep my update experience problem-free.

I didn't time the length of the update process; I clicked to download it (walked away, came back), clicked to install it (walked away, heard two startup chimes from the other room, came back) and beheld the snappiness!

In recent weeks, MobileMe syncing has been very frustrating as seemingly every time I sat down at my iBook G4 syncing would commence, crippling the system for a few minutes. Thus far, this problem (not sure if it was widespread or just me) seems to have thankfully gone away.

So you're admitting that you DO indeed own a tinfoil hat?

What kind of voodoo is this? I mean, if the user does not make abusive use of its admin rights, how could the system be corrupted by just installing and removing applications with the traditional "drag and drop" Mac method? Or you mean that the updates coming from Apple, and which require admin access to the system, can often write files in the wrong way or place, with consequences not showing up immediately under normal use but in the long term capable to mess up with another system update? Is this kind of issue you have in mind?


OK, this is something I understand. But please try to explain the previous point (about the system being corrupted over time without user intervention).

Apple fixed the Airport issue on my iMac. For the first time ever I do not lose the signal from my router. I unplugged the ethernet cable and Airport found and locked on the router 4 feet away and no fade out all day from Airport. Good job Apple.

My install this morning went nice and smooth and no issues. It took a hour on the satellite internet to do.

Is it just me, or is incoming Mobile Me email - totally instant? Is there some kind of push implementation happening?

The mail just appears. Boom! No polling.

C.

Ok, as someone else noted, you need to trash what's in (actually probably can just trash the directory):

/Library/Updates/Mac OS X Update

I have a new data point, I updated my MacBook, and that went fine. One perhaps critical difference is that on my MacBook I did not have "Download important updates automatically" checked whereas on my MacBook Pro I did. After digging around, I found the downloaded package on my MBP and saw that it was only 41MB (not 190MB). I'm betting that unbeknownst to me, it was in the process of downloading the update when I closed my MBP.

There must be a bug in the download software where it can't properly resume a download, and doesn't recognize incomplete packages.

Or else what?!?


In an atmospherically sealed environment with the head actually "flying" above the platter? Magnetic storage is still proven to outlast optical in longevity for archival storage. This even comes from our supplier that archives our records in a data escrow service.


Cosmic rays??? You've got to be kidding! Next, you might be talking about stray neutrinos. If the cosmic rays at your location are severe enough to alter the state of magnetic or flash memory, they will certainly have corrupted the synaptic activity in your brain. Perhaps you might actually have a tinfoil hat for yourself.


Where do you find this bullshit?

In 20+ years of trading, our office has used computers with hard drives and other magnetic storage media. In particular, we keep historical analysis data, client account information and the results of our derivatives pricing models and other research on them. We've had hot-swap drive bays in our machines for as long as I can remember. In our experience, we have often reinstalled drives after years (usually more than 5 yrs because shorter periods are live on our network) of sitting on a shelf to retrieve old pricing models with no problems whatsoever. Ever.

After reading a lot of what is on internet forums, I felt I needed one.

There is a new bug in Safari from installing OS X 10.5.6. Yahoo business email account users are no longer able to access their Yahoo business email accounts through Safari after installing the Mac OS X 10.5.6 update. Yahoo biz mail can still be accessed through Firefox and on Macs (through Safari) that have not yet been updated. Hope there is a fix soon.

Simple. Power interruption, computer freezing, files not being written to the disk properly. All are examples that can cause corruption.

It seems you are the one spreading these bullshit myths. Where is your evidence to support your made-up beliefs? I have old floppy disks that are from the early 90's and all the data is intact and readable, and floppies are the least reliable media. I just acquired an old LC 575 and PoiwerBook 540c (both from 1994) and their hard drives still contain all the readable data from that era, and they both have their original Apple drives. "Cosmic Rays" did not penetrate them.

Since I downloaded the update my video has been all kinds of screwy. When I scroll on the screen and when I'm watching videos online I get black squares in the picture. Anyone else?

I had no problems installing this update and all seems well However this update does not appear in my Installed Updates list.

Since I updated yesterday I've been having issues with my screen. When I scroll its not always smooth and sometimes black squares appear. And when I watch a video black squares appear around the video. Anyone else had issues since the update?

Naturally, most people DO use Software Update, and most have no problems.

I don't like to tell the average person to go look for the Combo for an update, because it just makes them think that updating is more work than they want to do, and may not update at all. Considering that security updates and bug quashing is important, I'd rather they just updated, and took their chances.

But, for those who do understand more, and I always hope that those who post to forums do, the extra work can pay off.

But if you are doing the work to maintain your system as you are, then the Combo MAY be less important.

The second issue.

We all should know that nothing is perfect. Even Apple releases their product with plenty of bugs.


I already explained some of that. Drives deteriorate without being used. A study showed that drives being used for, I think it was, three years, were about as likely to fail as those never used, and still in the box, for the same amount of time. Deteriorating drives can corrupt date if that date resides in an area of the disk where the oxide has gone bad. You know that disks have more area than reported, so that they can lock out bad areas as time goes by.

We should all know about "soft" errors caused by cosmic rays. This isn't something tat those with "tinfoil hats" think about, but is well documented, and has become a bigger problem as chip features get smaller.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't need disk utility other than to reformat, and do other housekeeping functions other than to repair a disk. We wouldn't need Diskwarrior, or recovery programs. we wouldn't need Time Machine to recover individual files that go bad, or an entire disk that crapped out. We wouldn't have to re-instal individual programs, or the entire OS. We wouldn't need Archive and Install, rather than a simple overwrite, etc. Permissions repaid wouldn't be there if Permissions didn't occasionally go haywire.

No point in going into too much detail, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

Dang, Apple removed a pretty usefull feature with this update.

When on battery, if you click the battery icon, you can no longer switch between normal, speed or battery saver modes, you HAVE to go to the prefpane. I didn't use it THAT much but I can imagine a lot of people miss this and I see no reason why they removed it.\

2 hours after installing the 10.5.6 update and I've noticed some reduced functionality:
'Pinch Open & Close' no longer controls the size of the icons in the finder!

I would use this function all the time to maintain having small-sized icons, but then quickly pinching the finder window open to see and sort images.

Now I'm left to open up View Options every time i want to re-size icons?

Or else you'll look like a fool.


Try any of these articles;

http://www.google.com/search?client=...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Just one part of an article talking about latent drive defects, which you are denying:

http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?...pid=506&page=4


Your ignorance is quite amazing! You are lazy as well. You could have done a quick Google search first, but no, you WANT to look ridiculous! Fine, I have no problem with that.

http://www.google.com/search?client=...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8





So far, I can't find the one article I'm looking for, but this is an example.

http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/01/...e-of-hardware/

Read some of the articles my Google search turned up for my response to Optiontrader.

I had a really good paper on floppy disk life expectations, unfortunately, this is all thats left:

https://www.thedacs.com/techs/abstract/314064

I'm looking for more.

So far, this is the only one that even mentions floppies relating to storage limits. I'll quote, then link:

"You should avoid using standard floppy disks for long-term backups of important information. Floppies are less reliable than hard disks and are best for short-term storage of small files."

http://www.bytesbits.com/backup.htm

This is pretty good article about floppies in general, though it discusses reliability as well. It's from 2004:

http://worldcat.org/arcviewer/1/OCC/.../file3008.html

But then I've got some anecdotal evidence that floppies are quite reliable.

I recently dug up the ol' Mac 512k Fat Mac and the ol' Mac SE from my parent's basement. I had in my old bedroom a bunch of old 800k diskettes. Interestingly enough, not only did both computers work, the Mac SE's internal 20MB HDD was working beautifully, *and* all my old games on 800k floppies were working beautifully. Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle, Deja Vu 1 and 2, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

I don't think there was a single diskette thrown at these two machines that didn't work.



But then, I've had an HDD in my Quicksilver G4 die within the span of 2 years.

It's the expected lifetimes that matter here. We've all had, say floppies, that lasted for years, and those that lasted a few days.

The question is whether you would want to keep valuable data on something that's subject to such loss within the context of normal use and storageeven if some lasted much longer?

Wow! I've been called a lazy ignorant fool that wants to look ridiculous by a "Global Moderator" of an Internet forum. Frankly, I'm glad you don't have a problem with that. So tomorrow I'll be posting this most recent example of your nonsense on the wall of my office for the amusement of all. There is already quite a collection there.

Why would I want waste the time (which is quite valuable) to Google topics for your benefit alone that attempt to refute what I already have well over 2 decades experience overwhelmingly contradicting your "impeccable" sources? I would expect that I could still put a lot more people in a room that would agree with me than would agree with you.

But then maybe not. There's another one born every minute. There is obviously more stupidity and gullibility on this planet than water. In the financial markets, that alone has helped me make an impeccably comfortable living for a long time.

Have a nice day!

For what it's worth... Installed the combo update on an 20" iMac and PowerBook G4.

Zero problems. As usual.

Carry on.

Those problems are precisely why a journaling file system exists. Fortunately for us OS X has used hfsj for a while.

Don't know how helpful, but I did a Time Machine backup before the 337MB update from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6. Then did another backup after and the backup is 1.2 GB. The install may have deleted some redundant files, but clearly there was a lot of compression in the download.

Question for users of Time Machine:

Do you usually include System in the backups?

Pro seems to be that you can recover all the way back to your current System, without having to run every update since you bought your Mac.
Con is that these updates take up a lot of space. This update to 10.5.6 just cost me 1.2GB on my Time Capsule.

Many thanks for your time and thoughts.


HmmThe footprint permutations appear vast, which makes partition size decisions more of a guessing game for me. At first blush, now that hard drive capacities continue to mushroom and that cost per megabyte continues to fall, how far to err on the side of caution is much less of an issue. That said, given the comparatively very low storage capacities of today's SSD and 1.8" drives, the cumulative OS growth on a laptop with say, an expected 3-year working life with OS X undergoing sequential updates and a feline upgrade along the way, could have a huge impact on available user storage.

In addition, updating alone increases pressure to upgrade to a higher capacity drive; and/or to perform a clean install sometime over the 3 years. Predictably, this in turn has an impact on the laptops total cost of ownership --- a variable based on the method used to perform the changes (i.e. work done by the user or by a service technician). Naturally, other storage and OS health considerations may surface over a 3-year period to warrant the above changes, but when strictly isolated, the update/upgrade process has a cost beyond the initial price of the computer.

Granted, an OS X upgrade may be more a matter of choice than one of necessity; implicit in the owners decision to upgrade is their acceptance that it will alter the storage parameters, both to cost and availability. However, OS updates are arguably more a matter of necessity than one of choice. As such, when estimating storage requirements for the working life of a laptop, an owner may need to remember that the impact of OS growth to their available storage is inversely related to solid state or hard drive capacity; as drive size decreases, impact increases --- all highly salient stuff to netbook and MacBook Air owners.

Hmm, Interesting --- especially, as I understand it, Time Machine does not compress files.

not for me.

i tested it tonight and a calendar entry on my macbook showed up on the phone in less than 30 seconds; i then deleted it on the macbook and it took five minutes to disappear from the iphone.

an event entered on the iPhone took about 15 minutes to show up on the macbook.

that's generally the inconsistency i had before the OS update.

(and a question: should syncing be set to automatic? manual? or one of the time periods? how does one make the choice, if one wants "one minute" syncing? what other settings in the OS, in iTunes, on the phone, or in iCal need to be made to optimize things?)

I don't know which of you is right. But i do know the truth is more likely revealed through multiple data-based articles than one person's 2 decades of experience, and that it's narrow-minded to believe that what's happened to ME (good or bad) dictates the broad reality of a situation.

anecdote or empiricism? I know which gets my vote.

For matters that could affect my well-being, I prefer evidence that can be counted, measured, recorded and validated over collective decades by my own experience and that of many peers in my selected and related professions versus often disputable "facts" from the Internet. Common sense and scientific reasoning should also be employed. I don't blindly swallow every pill just because somebody tells me to.

Ever hear of Pierre Salinger Syndrome? It appears to be an epidemic.

You're lucky you're not on another site, or the moderator would have kicked you off after your first post to him. I'm kinder.

But the fact that you refuse to read anything just proves what I said.

I feel so privileged. But if you can stop masturbating in Google long enough, do me the favor and remove me from this forum.

I won't lose a wink of sleep over it.

Where are your sources then? I had not the time to check what melgross posted so far, but if you are so bold about this, again, where are your sources?

Well, it is your personal choice how to behave when writing anonymously in a forum, but saying that you won't lose sleep over banning is a good thing.

Stop. This is internet forum stupidness. It doesn't matter. He's not a bad human being. This is stupid. Let it go. Please stick around. La de da.

You are absolutely correct. This is stupid.

Me too. Also thought I was the only one experiencing it!

It's definitely triggered by something, as there will be periods when it happens all the time and periods when it doesn't.

Amorya

Is this a QuickTime-only bug? It has happened to me too (frequently), but I can't remember if it was while using QuickTime or VLC...will have to pay more attention.