Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

This one wins my "Stupidest OS Design of the year award, and it's not even Vista related. it's actual Mac OS Related. yep!

"Perhaps the most troublesome of the problems has been a data loss issue caused by Finder, which performs a function on Macs similar to that of Explorer in Windows. In Leopard, when Finder moves a file from one drive to another, it deletes the file from the originating hard drive, without first checking to see if the file arrived safely on the destination hard drive. If anything goes wrong during the file transfer, such as a momentary power glitch on the destination hard drive, the file would then be destroyed on both hard drives."

Lovely.

Update: To all those who think this issue was fixed - here's the quote from the article:

"Leopard users hoped that a free maintenance update (OSX 10.5.1), released on Thursday, November 15, would fix the issue, but Apple's statement accompanying the update is too vague to give a definitive answer. With regard to data loss, it states that "... a potential data loss issue when moving files across partitions ..." has been fixed, but moving files across hard drives is not addressed. Personally, I wouldn't want to bet my important data on that statement."

Published Sunday, November 25, 2007 8:23 PM by RoyOsherove

Comments

Sunday, November 25, 2007 8:41 PM by Jeff Miller

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

Though it was fixed within a week whereas the Windows delayed-write failure has still not been fixed.

Sunday, November 25, 2007 9:05 PM by Chris Patterson

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

Heh, Fixed in 10.5.1 :)

Sunday, November 25, 2007 9:25 PM by Griffin Caprio

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

However, what's un-Vista like is the fact that this was fixed shortly after Leopard was released, in a 10.5.1 update:

docs.info.apple.com/article.html

Sunday, November 25, 2007 9:34 PM by Sergio Pereira

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

I've been using a mac daily for more than one year now and I gotta say this, people are unreasonably forgiving to the mac. I mean, it's cute and all but it's got its own issues.

I upgraded to Leopard and if people think vista wasn't ready when it came out, consider that Leopard is much smaller release than vista and the amount of bugs I encountered in Leopard makes me feel like this cat isn't ready either.

Sunday, November 25, 2007 11:17 PM by Omer van Kloeten

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

Title of a blog post in a few years: "And that's how I ruined the move function in Leopard." :P

Monday, November 26, 2007 3:48 AM by MesBlog

# E poi parlano male di Vista...

E poi parlano male di Vista...

Monday, November 26, 2007 5:07 AM by RoyOsherove

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

Only partially fixed, you mean:

"Leopard users hoped that a free maintenance update (OSX 10.5.1), released on Thursday, November 15, would fix the issue, but Apple's statement accompanying the update is too vague to give a definitive answer. With regard to data loss, it states that "... a potential data loss issue when moving files across partitions ..." has been fixed, but moving files across hard drives is not addressed. Personally, I wouldn't want to bet my important data on that statement."

Monday, November 26, 2007 8:31 AM by bastian

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

I hate this kind of gratuite trashing. You should at least check if it hasn't really been address before stating it. Or just keep your topics on what your blog is about, you know: 'Unit Testing, Agile Development, Architecture, Team System & .NET'

Monday, November 26, 2007 10:31 AM by RoyOsherove

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

bastian.

My apologies. Please let me know what you'd like me to write about next. In fact, it would be great if you could also send me the full text of the post you'd like me to write.

You are free to get your money back if this blog has not lived to its SLA.

Monday, November 26, 2007 12:04 PM by bastian

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

Talk about whatever you want. Just give arguments when you are criticizing (if calling stupid an OS can be called criticizing) something if you want to be given some credit. Can you reproduce a data loss on different hard drives after applying the patch or are you just interpreting the note at your will?

PS: BTW, I am no OSX fan either, after having having used it for about 3 years.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007 3:16 AM by Nathan

# re: Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

I'm not sure what your comment about drives versus partitions is supposed to mean.

In Unix (and perhaps windows?) when you "move" a file within the same partition, nothing much happens besides updating the file table - the actual data stays in place.

To move across partitions, the physical data has to be copied onto the new partition - whether that happens to be the same physical drive or a different one is not important.

Of course your partition may not be a single drive; it might be RAID'ed across multiple drives. Or maybe its a loopback device stored as a file within some other partition.

The OS doesnt care, the process it undertakes is exactly the same - all it knows is the destination is a different partition, so the same-partition-shortcut can not be taken.