odd and annoying fact

[mmcirvin]

If you leave your iPod plugged in to charge via the FireWire port, and the Mac secretly has a kernel panic while going to sleep (as it will once in a blue moon), the iPod battery may well start discharging and be drained by the time you see the Tasteful, Translucent Notice of Death.

This kind of thing is why I don't gloat a lot at Windows PC users. Many people tell me that Windows XP never BSODs. Of course, there are also Mac OS X users who swear to me that they have never seen a kernel panic, so it could be a small-sample-size thing. And if I judged an OS solely by lack of catastrophic crashes I'd be using Linux right now, no question about it.

That said, iPods are great things, and on the whole, the experience of using an iPod is much better with a Mac. But Apple's supposedly working on removing most of that advantage.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The tasteful non-bomb is just the modern version of a kernel panic. They changed to that from the ugly screen-munging text in 10.1.

The most common cause of these now seems to be some interaction between sleep/wake and flaky USB hardware.

But I also got them back in the day from trying to do wacky and forbidden things with SSH port tunneling. I use this to encrypt my passwords because the crazy man who runs my ISP doesn't trust that newfangled SSL. For a while, you could tunnel through Darwin OpenSSH encryption from old Mac network applications running under Classic, though it was not officially supported, and I did this happily for some time. It was great because of OS X preemptive multitasking. SSH tunnelling had always sucked on Macs because it required cooperation between two different processes, and the switching overhead made it like swimming through molasses. Not any more!

But around 10.0.4 or so it suddenly broke and started making kernel panics. Eventually they fixed it so that it just failed to work instead of bringing down the system. But it still doesn't work and Apple has no plans to fix it as far as I know: if you want to do port tunnelling with the lovely Unix version of SSH, you have to use real OS X or Unix applications. Well, it got me off the ancient version of Eudora I was using.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what the result of a hardware failure on startup is-- I've never seen that happen on a machine running OS X.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, the real problem here wasn't specific to SSH: it was that you were no longer allowed to let a network client application running within the Classic box connect to a server process running outside the Classic box on the same machine. Unfortunately this was the very thing I wanted to do, since my e-mail program was Classic, and the whole point was to move the SSH tunnel outside of Classic so that it could preemptively multitask with Classic itself.

The most common manifestation of this bug (or, I should say, documented non-feature) was that it squicked a lot of Web people who were trying to test their Apache-served Web sites from inside old versions of Dreamweaver.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

BSODs happen, but they're much more rare in NT-based OSs, and in my experience happen when you pull out hardware hot, hotplug in hardware, or try to run software meant for later OSs (something I learned because I ran NT4 up until 3 months ago at work, at which point I was moved to XP). BSOD is something you're tremendously unlikely to encounter in normal operation, these days.

I get a few crash-to-restarts when running new software. I do notice that Windows seems to be the least stable when you've used autoupdate to download and install a windows security update (or whatever other kind) and yet you don't restart immediately as requested. It's a bit of an counterincentive to secure one's PC.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Sounds about the same as the frequency of kernel panics on Mac OS X, really.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I'd be not at all surprised, arr. Now Mac and PC zealots will have to find something else to fight over.

[grumblepants.livejournal.com]

It's true, XP never BSOD's - it can, however, become brain damaged over time and gradually grind to a halt.

[jecook]

Heh.

I've got a few BSOD stamps for XP.

Actually, any OS lately is pretty stable.

I've got win98 running on my desktop (to play the really old games that just won't run on 2000, along with the mileage program I used for my palm pilot), and 2000 on the laptop, which used to run XP Pro. The laptop had a nagging habit of popping up a BSOD on it until I found out that the Jetsuite program does not fully like XP. Solution: I moved that functionality over to the win98 machine, and setup a print server on my lexmark optra. Stuff works fine now (except for the DVD player on the laptop, but that's a crock in and of itself, because I'm too cheap to buy a commercial software DVD player.)

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

See, sometimes I think hardware is to blame. Because I've had a number of hardware issues on my Silver Tower G3, and have had quite a number of kernel panics.

But the titanium laptop has only had one such panic ever. Its hardware is newer and has never exhibited any problems.

Both have run OS X forever, with Classic running once in a very, very, very blue moon.