Rubbish! Everyone knows that Apple computers have no security holes, never get virii, and are much cooler than the fat guy who only does spreadsheets.

The tagline really shivers me timbers and it bain't even be International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

leopard is still the worst apple OS it's been my misfortune to use.

i'm on my fourth install [the last two using 'reformat & clean install'] and - like thousands of other folk - i'm still having problem after problem with it, mostly caused by the fact that apple changed the group ID and group name of the admin user between tiger and leopard, without bothering to tell anyone - least of all, so it would seem, the OS!

so yes, leopard is great if you've just got it freshly installed on a brand new mac. but if you're stupid enough to actually want to migrate across any of your old data from tiger, welcome to permissions hell!

there were hundreds of threads on apple's support forums complaining about this, when leopard was first released and - as usual - apple ignored the problem til the complainers either gave up in frustration and went back to tiger, or resigned themselves to limping along in the vague hope a subsequent update might sort everything out.

needless to say none of them [including this one] have. so apple continues to tinker round the edges of leopard, picking up an untidy icon here and wiping the dust off a font there, all the while ignoring the vast elephant with 'permissions fuck-up' stencilled on its side, lying dead in the middle of the room.

It's a more notable story to mention that this monster update is nearly half a gig!

420mb is not an update thats a damn service pack!

Your sarcasm would be more effective if you used words which exist. like "viruses"

My update was only 138MB wonder what I didn't get.

Apple have released much worse OSs than Leopard. The ten year stagnation period between System 7 and OS X was a particularly embarassing period.

You do realise that because you are having a problem doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is? Just like I'm quite sure that not everyone using Vista hates it, despite the exceptionally vocal people on the internet.

I know at least three people who went from Tiger to Leopard with no problems at all, without using the 'reformat & clean install' option, and a couple of those people have more than one Mac.

um. I'm a fat guy, who works a lot on spreadsheets..

but I use a Mac...

must I leave the room?

"420mb is not an update thats a damn service pack!"

Indeed! For comparison purposes, Vista SP1 is 434.5mb,

Bringing a bit of balance to the debate... I use both Windows and Mac OS X Leopard on a daily basis and would like to make some observations.

Point 1 - Virus Susceptibility: OSX is just as likely to be open to viruses as Windows, it just is used by far fewer people. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. There are just fewer viruses around. I have antivirus and a third party firewall.

Point 2 - Download Size: I see no difference between downloading 420MB once every few months and the almost daily downloads I have to suffer to keep my Windows boxes patched up to date. An ADSL overnight download will be less than an hour, and in my current workplace it took less than 60 seconds (yes, really!).

Point 3 - Leopard Upgrade: It sounds like Apple cocked up with the group number change. I was fortunate enough to get a machine with Leopard pre-installed. I've heard plenty of horror stories about Leopard upgrades to know that when I perform an upgrade, I will move all my data and config info off and then do a wipe-and-install. Apple learnt the lesson about the firewall being off by default, lets hope they learn this one too.

Bottom line, OS X is just another OS and Apple haven't done any worse than Microsoft in the long run, in fact in some ways (using BSD as a basis, for example) they have made smart decisions. And yes, I'm afraid that Apple have made a much better job of their UI than Microsoft have. BSD has a longer history and fewer defects than XP or Vista, and that is a major point in favour.

Am I biased? Well, yes, a bit, simply because I am a software engineer who knows the difference between a good OS implementation and a bad one. And that is also why I have started using OS X, because there are fewer layers of software and I get better performance from my machine than I would if it were running XP or Vista.

Have to say that I've had no problems as you described installing Leopard over Tiger.

Just thought I'd add my tuppence worth to start the great debate going...Macs are shit, no...buy a PC...PCs are shit, by a Mac...who gives a flying fig leaf. If the machine does what you want it to, cool. If you have problems with it, try something else...just don't come online and whinge to the rest of us who really couldn't give a furry rodents ass about whether or not you managed to get the latest version of whatever to work on your kit.

Grumble...I'm off back to bed now...

No spittle-flecked rant a whole two and a half hours after the article was posted? You're slipping...

If you read the guys post in a little more detail, he says the apple support forums have loads of people trying to get a resolution to what sounds like a horrific fuckup by Apple. ("Hundreds of threads")

I can't wait to find out how big my update ends up being - the updater doesn't seem to have got round to downloading my patches yet. I've got the developer extensions installed (gcc etc).

I'm sure I remember there being an OS X advert last year sometime, where they were talking about the fact that XP needed to have a few hundred meg of updates applied and that OS X just 'worked out of the box' I remember at the time re-installing my 10.4 box and it downloading a good number of updates to get it to 10.4.6 or something like.

as a side note, I was always rather amazed that nobody did a parody of those adverts, where PC guy comes in wearing some WW1 army gear, gets changed into some medieval jousting gear and says he's going off to play a different game now leaving mac guy to play chess and the one or two other games that are possible on OS X,

maybe PC guy could suggest mac guy makes a postcard if he gets really bored...

just always struck me that PC's have so much more potential for 'fun' than mac's could ever do

Virii = more than one virus. Trust me, I really am a microbiologist. Honestly!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus

Granted, languages change, and the origins of virii (Latin) are from a dead language, but the word is scientifically correct, even today.

Meanwhile, as a Mac user of some 20 plus years, and now having read Madra's comments, I am so pleased that I stuck to my guns of NEVER upgrading the Mac OS until at least x.x.3.

Thanks Madra! I will now stick to 10.4.11 until 10.5.4 is released, at the earliest.

Am I alone in thinking that Apple and Microsoft are as guilty as each other in pushing out new OSs with features that they deem to be great, but with insufficient market research / testing among their captive customer bases? Vista has been widely panned, and it seems, Leopard also. If it ain't broke don't fix it, especially if all you are offering is a clone of the competitor's product (yes, I am referring to Vista v 10.4.x) or more bells and whistles that nobody has actually asked for (yes, I am referring to 10.5.x).

For the benefit of the "I hate Mac Fanboyz" brigade, I also run 2 Windows XP Pro machines in addition to my 3 Macs. Both OSs have their pros and cons, but overall, and in my opinion, Mac wins hands down had I to choose a single OS.

"he says the apple support forums have loads of people trying to get a resolution to what sounds like a horrific fuckup by Apple"

I saw that. Hence my point about Vista - you don't hear from the happy customers. There are loads of people whinging about things on the internet. The happy people, those who are having no problems, are all off doing other things, not whinging on the internet. True of any product.

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx1053update.html

And to those that said ...oh 400mbs not much....imagine having an office with 40 macs in all trying to try perform automatic updates.

So you have to pull it down manually (savign bandwidth) and then apply this to those machines via RDC....it takes time...lots and lots and lots and lots of time!

gimme me small incremental updates anyday!

Or you get a copy of Mac OS X Server and schedule that to do all the updates for you...

I got my Mac with Tiger on it.. Upgraded it to Leopard and I've had no problems. Ticks along nicely. I hate to admit it but this is the best computer I've ever owned, and that's with a chequered history with Windows, Linux, Sun and even Pre-MacOS X machines... I used to hate Mac OS... No more... love it!

Come on in, the water's warm!

Did I miss the sarcasm in that statement?

if you read the second paragraph of the link you posted it says -

The less frequent variations viri and virii are virtually unknown in edited prose, and no major dictionary recognizes them as alternative forms

a quick look at the Oxford English Dictionary the most comprehensive guide to our language, has viruses as the plural of virus

a link in that article points to

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html

defining it as the 'authoritative essay on the subject'

which quite clearly states...

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

Mine's the one over there, in pedant's corner.

unfortunately not, I'm so unpopular there is only one pedant in my corner, it is the corner belonging to the pedant rather than the popular pedants' corner that you appear to occupy.

No his use is perfectly acceptable.

Pedant: A pedant, or pædant, is a person who is overly concerned with formalism and precision.

Therefore the corner could easily belong to a single pedant, thefore pedant's is perfectly acceptable.

Ya no what I meen, innit?

While I've got my pointy hat on my pointy head:

Calender: a machine that smooths or glazes paper or cloth by pressing it between plates or passing it through rollers

Calendar: a list or register of events (tx wordnet.princeton.edu)

There is no verb 'to calendar', so please do not use calendaring (though I think calendering may be OK :)

Those of us still using 10.4.11 got the 130-odd MB update, those with 10.5.x got the 400+ MB monster.

Early adopters are self-inflicted victims. Wait for the bugs to get ironed out.

AC: You are of course correct, Virii is indeed not a word. However, you mustn't forget that this is the register, and that we laugh at the very notion of being limited to so called 'dictionary-words'.

Pavlovs well trained dog: I'm going to ignore you turn cool from exposure to apple products.

The difference in size is also down to whether you are using a PowerPC machine or an Intel Mac. The 10.5.3 Intel update is the 420Mb monster.

My Mac was Tiger, bought Leopard on the day it was released, updated and really have never had any problems. I use this computer for all sorts of heavy multimedia applications, and I really have no complaints.

Updated to 10.5.3 this morning...

Still no problems at all.

bob: you're conflating OS X the operating system and Macs the machines. Which is just silly. OS X can run OS X and X11 applications. OS X + [Parallels/VMWare] + Windows can run OS X, X11 and Windows applications (including games, with hardware acceleration) simultaneously and on one seamless desktop.

It should therefore be obvious that PCs cannot have more potential for fun than Macs, since — while you make the distinction on purely hardware terms — they can only run a subset of the same software.

inspector_Morse: you're not alone. I, and I'm sure many others, could see that a translucent menubar was an incredibly stupid idea from the moment it was mentioned. Stacks as presented in 10.5.1 and 10.5.0 were also clearly suffering from failed attempts at eye candy.

The only problem I can see going forwards is that there's nothing obvious you can add to OS X (or Vista or whatever) now to improve the experience. And the last 'obvious' things that were added to the OSs (full compositing, Expose) are sufficiently easily misunderstood as eye candy that people seem to think that adding eye candy is what the mass audience wanted.

Actually, there is one obvious change I'd make to OS X — don't just fade out floating windows in Expose. That is rarely a problem, but when it is it's really annoying.

Hmm... sounds like you've got your user UIDs and GIDs confused in the migration.

Classic 'nix OSes always indexed admin group user UIDs from 501 onwards, and placed their user-level home folders in group "staff" (GID 10).

OSX 10.0-10.1 also did this, but then changed to a non-standard custom GID scheme for these folders in 10.2-10.4. (e.g. user UID 501 got a user home set to GID 501 etc).

In 10.5, they've reverted to the proper GID model, but if you upgrade your OS from 10.4 to 10.5 it will retain the custom GIDs in those pre-existing user accounts. Leopard is supposed to fix this, but I've found it's much better to do it yourself.

1. Open Applications/Utilities/Directory Utility

2. Enable root user account and set a password

3. Log out and log back in again as root

4. Open a terminal window

5. type cd /Users

6. Assuming the user account was the first to be created*, type chown -R 501:10 <username's home folder>

7. Log back in as <username>

*NetInfo manager used to tell you this info, but they've removed it in Leopard tut tut.

Leopard uses stricter permissions that previous OSX versions, so be sure to run Disk Utility and verify files are set as it thinks they should be.

I've upgraded leopard on about 10 systems so far without issue.

There have been countless debates on the plural of the word Virus and well, the plural of the word Virus is, yes you guessed right, Virus.

If you really trust Wiki, well good luck ...

And in regard to the Mac update I installed it today, it was 138MB and my Mac is working fine as it was from 10.5.1.

10.5.0 Surely had some stability issues which went as soon as I updated the OS.

So far it has been going like a breeze ...

Dual G5 2.7 with 6GB RAM and ATI X850XT ...

YMMV I guess

Colander: • noun: a perforated bowl used to strain off liquid from food.

I've been running Leopard for a few weeks. Upgrade from Tiger, though from a partially mucked up Tiger cloning done just before I sent my MacBook in for repair and got it back with new hardware. Which means a new drive.

So I figured it was time to try Leopard since I had to do a re-install anyway, and you know, I rather like it. Especially Time Machine. I've found a way to do the clone backup accurately as well, so this shouldn't happen again (knock on wood).

I have no idea how big mine was, it's not the sort of thing I keep track of. :)

Windows historically has required a lot of patches and updates, and if you try to do them all at once you generally get to reboot a lot. But of course neither Apple nor Microsoft can make the smallest mistake without fanbois from the other side feel it imperative that they absolutely must make as much noise about it as possible.

Of course, this all means nothing, because I didn't do a standard upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. I re-installed Leopard multiple times before I decided I liked the results. Part of the problem was that I'm running an old version of Parallels that works OK but won't let me re-install with an outdated key, and I have no budget to buy the new version. Installing Leopard over a damaged Tiger didn't fix the problems, so I did a fresh install but migrated the applications (just to get Parallels). It took some experimentation to get the combination I liked best. The drawback so far is that Claws-mail (runs under X) doesn't work under Leopard, so I'm back to using Apple's Mail program for now. But mostly I'm happy with the upgrade -- enough that I don't want to change back.

@virii: Every time I see "viri" or "virii" I want to reach through my monitor and strangle the miscreant who wrote that. The plural is "viruses" for all the reasons our resident pedant stated. The Wikipedia article you linked to does not support your contention that "virii" is correct; quite the contrary.

Relevant to nothing: My favorite definition of "pedant" is "somebody who, when you ask him what time it is, tells you how to build a watch." :)

I'll be sitting over there in the corner with the other pedants.

The full update package, downloadable from Apple is 430mb but the automatic software update will vary from Mac to Mac ...for me it was 200mb.

Apple also has a full combo 10.5.0 to 10.5.03 update package which weighs in at 600mb.

There was no doubt the 10.5.0 was full of issues. Apple released 10.5.1 within a month and 10.5.2 which squashed many of the remaining bugs about 6 weeks later.

As for XP, Vista and Leopard comparisons... I use all three and each has it strengths. But my personal preference is OSX. I am not a fanboy for either MS or Apple but for me the Mac UI is really better.

But both Apple and MS seem to be rolling out bigger and bigger service packs, updates and fixes.

With Apple it is iTunes and Quicktime that seem to be update every month with 80mb downloads very common.

I would hate to be a home user on diallup!

<<mostly caused by the fact that apple changed the group ID and group name of the admin user between tiger and leopard>>

Just because someone is a moron does not mean the OS is bad. JFC - if you change the owner of a document/application and then get mad because you can't edit/update - it sounds like the flipin OS is working the way it is supposed to work. Even VISTA gets this right - hell I think 95 had this right. Try going into information on those items that don't work and update the owners.

BTW there are shareware programs that you can find to help do this.

And next time you piss yourself don't blame the Pope OR Gordon Brown. Neither of them did it. MORON.

<<Don't you mean pedants' corner?>>

Cold! (I love it.)

now that that's that that is all she wrote time to get the coat (Add punctuation as you see fit.)

Not sure which update people are getting that are so huge. I just dl'd update 2008-003 (intel) 1.0 and it is 113MB. I still have the update window open because I haven't restarted.

Well thats okay then, nothing at all to see here, move along please.

Oh and pass the panty wipes across to the "I hate all things Apple" crowd, they tend to be such messy buggers.

IT? The size of an update is hardly an IT story these days, they're all at it.

According to my edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary, the plural of 'virus' is 'viruses'. However, English is not a fixed, static language; dictionaries are descriptions of the current state of the language, not definitions of it. For example, 'email' and 'blog' were in common use for some time before being added to that dictionary. As 'virii' is also frequently used, I believe the error lies not with those who write it, but with the editors for not updating their dictionaries.

... speaking as one who has a brand-spanking-new (3-day-old) iMac, replacing a PowerTower 225 from the Pleistocene, I can say I've seen a heck of a lot worse upgrade/update behaviour, both in Windows and Linux (along with the aforementioned prehistoric relic). I started the update and left it to its own devices for a few hours to go do other things; came back to find the system had gone to sleep. Powered back up, still had the spinning beach ball... time to Force Quit on Finder (which had hung). After that, update took <5 minutes before prompting for a reboot and bringing me a newly-bumped OS release number.

18 hours later, still enjoying the new system; found some neat new and/or updated tools that have (what would be 'remarkably' on other systems) little learning cliff once you're up to speed on any of them; already 'feeling' more productive than on Ubuntu (and don't even /think/ about Vista). Set up some 'simulated' security attacks from other systems on my network and was very happy with the results so far.

Overall, a much, MUCH less painful experience than, say, XP SP3.

My Macbook came with Mac OS X 10.4.10 pre-installed. I was happy with it, then 10.4.11 came along. Then I came crashing into a brick wall when I needed Java 6 JDK for my Mac. Apple released it for Leopard (x64). Luckily, my system has a Core 2 Duo, that means it can execute 64-bit software. Plus, I always hated Tiger's metal brush so I decided to go Leopard, since it has a better kernel and a friendlier shell. I'm still having a little issue with the Shared computers popping up on the left pane, but it's easily remedied using the cmd+k to "connect to server", I just type my smb:// filepath into it and it works like a charm.

I have yet hit into a MacOS X issue regarding to updates at all or even the upgrade! Unless I deliberately cripple it (as I would do as part of my system experimentations).

Overall, I enjoy Leopard more than Tiger.

Hmmm ... stop trying to be so smart and just do a straight upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. I've upgraded 10 systems using this method and I've yet to hit any problems. I've also done a couple of raw installs and imported data from Time Machine backups due to disk replacements. No problems with those either. Poor workman and all that methinks ..