Re: [MacPerl] looking at Mac OS X

[bart.lateur@skynet.be (Bart Lateur)]

On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 10:57:38 -0600 (CST), Matthew Langford wrote:

>I think I misunderstand you.  What I _think_ you are saying is very
>improbable.  You have a document A1.  You update it, A2.  You make a
>finder copy, B2.  Then your machine crashes, and when you return you find
>only A1 and a B1?

What I said is simpler than this.

You have a script A1, as a droplet. You test it, and find a bug. You fix
the bug, and save it again. A1 is gone, and overwritten by A2. You run
the droplet again, it works. So it IS flushed. A1 no longer exists.

A bit later, the Mac crashes. When you run the droplet again, you see
the same bug pop up again: so the Mac has silently replaced the newer A2
with the older A1. (Note: this doesn't always happen. That makes it far
more difficult to track down.)

Improbable, yes. But it is more or less the same behaviour as Christian
Brechbuehler describes. Indeed, it looks like the Finder silently does a
"rollback", when the newer version gets corrupted. It's better than
loosing the file completely, but it's definitely not nice that all this
happens *without any warning*.


Final note, for all those people that emailed me privately about the
frequent crashes:

It is not uncommon for the Mac to crash a lot. Yes we do try to keep our
Macs in tip-top condition. It happens to all the professionals I know
that really stress the machine heavily. I think that is the main point.
Try printing a 200Mb file, etc, and you have a nearly 50% chance to get
a crash.

What also seems to happen a lot, is network related crashes. For
example, try to disconnect the netwerk cable, and your Mac might freeze.
The Mac's network related stuff seem to be very fault-intolerant.

Another example: I tried the RealBasic demo. As soon as my mouse moved
over a window: bang. The only solution was an upgrade of the Mac OS. So
RealBasic was not to blame.

Sorry fro the off-topic rambling.
	Bart.

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