Tyger, Tyger, burning bright...
Offical Apple Tiger Information
3 days until Apple's 64-bit Operating System, 10.4 Tiger is released from Apple's jealously-guarded cage. After what happened with the initial release of OS X, 10.1, as full of bugs and close to beta as anything made by--dare I say it?-Microsoft!--I have lost a little faith in Jobs' Fruit Company. We Appleheads had to wait until 10.3--Three releases until they got it right! And they charged us for each one! And Apple, Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA/Artists' Coalition of Whine wonder why Piracy (yes, with a capital P, there's trouble in River City...) is rampant? When we consumers without recording contracts or golden parachutes look for a piece of software that will fulfill a need in our computing lives, we expect it to work--at least well enough to use it effectively. Nothing's perfect, because it's all made by people, and until things change, there will be bugs. That's OK, but is it too much to ask for the Operating System to be more or less stable? We here in the trenches have gotten tired of buying the latest set of software or games, only to have the drivers or program cause a general protection fault and crash the entire machine. So we download it off Bittorrent sites and try it out, and if it s***s, we toss it. If we find ourselves really getting into a quality game, we buy the full copy so we can mod it and play online and frag our friends. The same goes for Operating Systems, Apple included (which hurts me to say it as I am a long-time Mac Advocate). If 10.4 comes out for $129 retail and is full of the bugs that 10.1 and 10.2 were, I hope it is pirated for all it's worth, and that someone out there hacks it and makes it better. Hopefully, when the stock options start losing value, someone up top will realize that we are tired of paying hard-earned money for crud. Someone will make it work, but whether that someone is on 1 Infinite Loop or not will remain to be seen. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? [Britt Godwin]