Mac OS X Tiger Accidentally Shipped Early 540
boarder8925 writes "Engadget reports: 'In many places around the world, Mac fans and Apple distributors received a shipment they weren't quite expecting: Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger arrived at the door a full eight days ahead of schedule for some lucky folks who pre-ordered. Vendors PCMall/MacMall and ClubMac gave pre-order customers a treat by unleashing the OS ahead of schedule, quickly followed up by a 'recall' of the copies from PCMall.'"
No idea how it works in that industry, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyways, my point is, doesn't Apple (or other software companies,) have a similar policy regarding the release of their product and preorders? If not, perhaps they should.
This was a mistake?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I installed it already, and oh man, it is everything I thought it was going to be. Actually, those ten improvements (Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, etc.) that everyone's talking about are all pretty cool, but the OS really is significantly faster and smoother than 10.3.x. And a lot cool stuff is changed under the surface. Check the man page for cp, etc., and you'll see what I mean.
I have to say, I really am impressed with this release. Every previous upgrade has been a big surprise and a big improvement, and I was skeptical that Tiger would be anything to jump up and down over, but I really have to say that I've been pleasantly surprised with this one.
And no, I'm not sending it back!
We've had Tiger for months (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the stupid JVM bugs specific to OSX that we run into aren't reproducible on the machine running Tiger. Java seems to be really improved in this release.
Re:Oh come on... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd have to imagine Apple's arranging for pickups. Otherwise, I'd tell them they can take my word for it that I destroyed the disc. I don't think they have any legal recourse anyway (as you point out).
Although as a prior poster pointed out...EBAY! Though I bet that auction gets cancelled.
Inside 10.4 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No idea how it works in that industry, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps only tangentially related, but I've found that some stores very regularly start selling products before their official release. One that immediately comes to mind, Blockbuster usually starts renting movies about a week before the actual release on DVD.
I wonder, do these "release dates" actually have any legal teeth behind them? Obviously a distributor could refuse to sell anything to those stores that don't cooperate, but such a threat against companies like Blockbuster or WallyWorld amount to cutting off their nose to spite their face - WallyWorld might just respond with "okay, bye", instantly halving the available market for that product.
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Interesting)
Question (Score:4, Interesting)
or does one have to wait to the release date for new macs do have 10.4?
Re:No idea how it works in that industry, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure as far as Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and the like. I'd say there's a good chance agreements were made with the producer for allowing to be rented earlier than bought.
However, I do know that in the game industry, they do indeed have teeth. Bungie made all the companies that were going to sell Halo 2 agree to the offical release date. (Known as Street Dating; you can't even display the product until the Street Date.) If you failed to follow the instructions, they reserved the right to sue your company for each copy sold early. I believe a game store somewhere in the Mid-West was sued thirty thousand dollars PER copy.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, it's just amazing to see you and everybody else fall for the old accidental "leak" trick.
This "leak", just like that one [betanews.com] is a classic PR trick to get press time. It works, as you can see. Did you even wonder why the "leaks" came all boxed-up (just like the final version) to select individual and companies able to make noise about it?
Re:We've had Tiger for months (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm looking for a good editor to do some Mono work on my mini. Yes, seems a little heretical to be using a java-based editor to write C#, but SharpDevelop hasn't been ported yet.
Thanks.
Chip H.
When does the cherry arrive? (Score:2, Interesting)
Speaking of Cherry, does anyone know when the 'OSS' version of their software is being released? Probably on the same day as Longhorn's
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that there was a major problem with people shipping unordered merchandise through the mail and then billing for it. So a law was passed that made any such treatments something like a gift.
About 15 years ago, someone started sending me issues for some lame business newsletter that I did not order. There was also a calculator and some other cheap things that glitter in the first package from them. That was about January or February that year.
The issues looked like they went through a few of the more popular business magazines and summarized the first paragraph or two of some of the articles until they had three or four pages worth of summaries. If you read Business Week the week before, you would have already seen just about everything in the newsletter. And in pretty much the same order.
After about a month they sent me a bill for something more than $100 for a year's subscription. Since there is no requirement that I pay for unordered merchandise, I threw them away.
After a couple of months, they started sending me letters demanding that I pay them the subscription price. I threw them away.
About November, they turned my delinquent account over to a collection agency who started sending me letters demanding that I pay up. I threw them away.
At some point the collection agency even doubled the amount they claimed I owed. I threw them away.
After that, I didn't hear from them again.
About two years later, they started my "subscription" again.
This time I went over to the local post office and talked to the postmistress. She suggest that I just write "Forward to the Office of the Postal Inspector" on the envelopes along with a brief explanation and put them in the mail. No postage required.
So every time I received anything from the scammers, I sent them on to the postal inspector.
After about two months, they sent me a very indignat letter telling me that they are not crooks. Other than that, I never heard from them again.
Later, I was working at a software development company and I was using a cow-orker's computer for testing one day while they were on vacation. Right in the middle of their desk was something from the very same company.
I had already figured out that what that company seemed to be doing was sending subscriptions to business addresses figuring that most of the time it would be turned over to accounts payable without a glance.
So I told the president and the owner of the company about the scam. They immediately canceled the subscription. When the cow-orker came back from vacation, he was a bit irked because he had intentionally signed up for the subscription!
For another example, my mother is in her 80s and is more easily confused. One time she answered an ad for a free gift of some books. She received the books and then about a month later she received an invoice for the books. I had her send the invoice along with a note explaining the situation to the Postal Inspector's Office. The Postal Inspector's Office appears to have had a quick talk with the company involved because she received a letter cancelling the invoice within a month. And the company who sent her the ad for the "free books" hasn't sent her any more such ads.
Re:Other early resellers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Who puts a warning about not being aloud to read something at the bottom
At first it may seem rather daft, but think about it this way. If they put the message at the top, the recipient could legally stop reading the message after the blurb and later argue that they had no way of knowing 100% for sure whether or not they are the intended recipient without reading the rest of the message, which they were forbidden to do if they were not the intended recipient, and so on and so forth.
I've been seeing this message word-for-word on a lot of email coming from lawyers and other legal organizations and though I'm no laywer, the message seems more like a scare tactic than anything else (like most everything lawyers do or say). While the scenarios above are certainly not beyond the realm of possibility, I don't see how the message can carry any significant legal weight for a variety of reasons that I'd be willing discuss some other time.
Zoiks 'On time and Under Budget' (Score:2, Interesting)
However I am on the fence about this upgrade. My Powerbook 500\DVD just got put on the 'unsupported' list and while it will run just fine, I am mighty happy with Ubuntu. I have been leery about feeling like a 'revenue stream'
And of course this accident of fate will make M$ the Last company to get to the 64 bit desktop.
All bitchiness aside I think I will pony up the bucks on a Mini.
130 for the OS and 150 for the iLife and iWork bundle take me more than half the way to the base model mini.
difference between CpMac and cp (Score:4, Interesting)
CpMac and cp are totally different. try man CpMac... two options. -r and -p... and the behaviors when copying directories are different between cp and CpMac also. (subtlely but importantly.)
CpMac is a very simplistic program existing just because of the HFS+ quirks. It's not very sophisticated while cp (from freeBSD source tree) is full featured and has a pedigree
Like i passingly mentioned in my previous post, CpMac fails when copying broken symlinks.
try this:
ln -s nonexistant_file link
this works:
cp -Rp link copy
this does not
CpMac -r -p link copy
this was an issue when I was trying to back up my MacOSX partition. There is a symlink to
Re:Apple cut piracy on Tiger. NOT. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the one and only thing you need to know to understand Apple: Our goal is to make using your Mac a pleasant experience. Anything that takes away from that is our enemy. That's why we've historically even had an iffy relationship with some of our biggest software vendors. When Word 6 came out, I'm told that the level of anger around campus almost reached the point of violence. (That was before my time here.)
Bottom line: When you're installing your new OS, having to swap CDs sucks. So we're shipping DVDs. Anybody who doesn't have a DVD drive -- which is something like three out of four Mac owners, believe it or not -- can get CDs from their local Apple store or from the Web site.
(And don't think we didn't have long and heated conversations about whether it sucks more to have to swap CDs or to have to mail-order CDs. That one went back and forth a lot.)
Re:Legal status of unordered merchandise (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh come on... (Score:3, Interesting)
Aren't credit reports indexed by social security number? Since I never filled out anything for them, they didn't have a social security number to use to report anything.
They could try to match the address and I suspect it would be easier these days with even more computerization. I don't know if they had that capability then.
I figured that if it ever did make a difference, I could protest the bogus report.
Re:Legal status of unordered merchandise (Score:1, Interesting)
Interesting. In Japan, that's illegal. If you drop a bill or wallet, it's still yours. If someone finds it, they're required by law to take it to the police station and report it as lost property. However, they are automatically entitled to 10% of the monetary value (as an incentive to be nice, I'd suppose) even if you do come to collect it. If no one shows up after 6 months, it's yours. Sounds like a fair deal to the loser AND the finder. I was a bit suprised that this isn't the case in the U.S.
And for those wondering, yes, the Japanese law applies to hard cash too. There have been times when people have "forgotten" 1 million USD in a paper bag in a box in a drawer they trashed. They need to do a lot of explaining to the police to prove that it's really theirs, but they get it bak. (Of course, this 1 million USD in cash is usually tax evasions, so they get a very nice visit from the equivalent of the IRS later on.)
Re:This was a mistake?! (Score:4, Interesting)
To clarify, BeOS had/has what I believe is the best of all three worlds. Files on the BFS file system have "attributes", which are labeled bits of data that I suppose are a bit similar to the resource fork on Mac OS, but are also similar in many respects to the attributes where ACLs and other programmable metadata is stored on some filesystems that are appearing for various *nix systems now. There was an attribute that named the MIME-type of the file. If this existed, then when you clicked a file, BeOS would match the MIME-type to an application (and there was an interface where you could easily set up these relationships), and launch that app for you. If the attribute didn't exist, BeOS would look at several things: The extension, if one existed, was a good starting place. Also, the OS would look for magic numbers in the file to ascertain its type. There were a number of pre-programmed types that the OS knew about. I think they were planning to add an API where anybody could add other types to the system. Anyway, this recognition would happen almost instantaneously when a file was clicked. The attribute would be added at that time. And, furthermore, when the computer went idle, a daemon would go through the system, pick out files that didn't have the attribute, ascertain their type, and put the attribute there. In all, I never experienced a time when the system didn't know what to do with a file.
Attributes were also good for other purposes. When in detail view of a folder, you could set up the columns to be whatever you wanted. If it was a folder full of MP3s, for example, you didn't have to see filename, size, creation date, etc. You could set it up to show artist, genre, song name, duration, etc. In fact, you were not limited to pre-programmed types. You could add any attributes that you wanted to any file, even programmatically, and you could perform live Queries (like the Smart Folders in OSX), and you could set up the Detail view to show any columns... In all, the filesystem was very similar to a database. And the *nix-like part of the OS was integrated so well into the GUI part of the system that there was never a problem of kludginess when using both at the same time. 'course, it wasn't really *nix, but it was a beautiful OS design.
Personally, I believe that once the resource forks are treated well enough by all parts of OSX, Apple will find more uses for them once again. Perhaps when copying to a non-HFS system, you'll have the option of outputting a ZIP file that contains all of the information. Who knows. Apple is known for creativity.
Re:This was a mistake?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Bear in mind that Tiger has been compiled using the Apple optimised version of the new GCC 4. GCC on PowerPC has so far not been as efficient as IBM's own PowerPC compilers, so there has been scope for improvement.
Given the amount of time that Apple's engineers have had to work on this deficit, along with the over all code improvements in GCC 4, and quite probable they've managed to find some extra performance from somewhere.
Never mind all the other profiling and tune ups they've been working on in the last year.
Re:Legal status of unordered merchandise (Score:2, Interesting)
Years ago, my dad ordered several rolls of newsprint for his presses. The paper company shipped the wrong size. Dad contacted the shipper, and asked them to let him know the details as to what carrier would pick the stuff up, etc. The thing is, these rolls of paper weigh tons, being something like 1 meter in diameter and a meter or two wide. The paper company said, "Just send it to the dump, and we'll ship you the right size."
Dad doesn't throw stuff away, and he had the paper cut into letter-size sheets, scratch pads, etc., and used it for typing up news copy & whatnot. He finally exhausted the supply after about 20 years.