261–270 of 372 posts
I'll bet it will even read your password out to you with the speech synthesizer, clearly and unambiguously spelling out each of the upper and lower case letters, digits and symbols.
The lack of attention to detail by Apple recently e.g. code reviews, in house testing is clearly too low. I have seen too many software failures recently from this company. Like photos freezing on my new iMac (before High Sierra), numerous issues with iOS (I remember the podcasts app wasting all my cellular allowance because it ignored WiFi only) and other nuances, inconsistencies and defects. Only in iOS 11 have the…
It's because of the iPhone-ization of all of its products. Making hardware changes and releasing software updates yearly is going to take a very long time to stabilize as a practice. Event with all of their employees, they can't truly make a unique premium product every year.
How did Disk Utility.app go from being one of the great built-in OS X utilities to the embarrassing amateurish shit show that it is today? Perhaps the same people responsible for the file system engineering are also responsible for developing this user-facing application. They might excel at low level system engineering, but they are utterly unqualified to develop a high level GUI application. Spend 5 minutes with th…
It looked like an eager bright eyed bushy tailed summer intern did it in their spare time to impress their manager who had never heard of this Internet thing before, but who then couldn't get the rest of the company to buy into this weird TCP/IP thing, because it was distracting customers from using LocalTalk like they were meant to. But then they shipped it anyway, but never updated it after the intern left at the end of summer.
http://www.simonstl.com/projects/tcpip/mac/mactcp.html
I get the same vibe from the current Terminal Preferences Profiles dialog, whose window you aren't allowed to resize, and which has the fixed size scrolling list of configurations, fixed width run command input field that doesn't let you see the whole command and makes it hard to edit, and many other cramped fields, whose labels are all clipped and scrolled, even when you click on them to edit the labels.
Why the FUCK does anyone (ESPECIALLY Apple) use tiny fixed sized windows jam packed full of cramped tabbed and sub-tabbed dialogs with nested vertically scrolling lists of horizontally scrolling text fields, in these days of gigantic screens?
Lights are on but nobody's home!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a Dell Precision laptop running Linux at home and a MacBook Pro from work. On a weekly basis, the Mac won't wake from sleep and requires a hard reboot. The Time Machine backups get corrupted at least every other month and require a full backup from scratch. Sometimes the audio just quits working when I wake from sleep. The App Store is some horribly wrapped, unresponsive web app. Disk Utility is useless. Etc,…
Opposite experience here. 2015 Dell Precision M6800 issues (all non-linux-related have been replicated by >=1 coworker): Spurious thermal throttle activation occasionally reduces performance to molassas Bluescreen in network drivers ~ once a week Unless you disable integrated/discrete graphics switching, it fails to recognize external displays HDD makes strange grinding noise every month or so, but hasn't failed yet.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just reading about something similar in the "Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?" post Joel Spolsky's point: They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15407114
I reject that comparison. This is not rewriting a core product with tens of millions of lines of code. This is a small utility program. It's very often no problem to just make a new utility program. Especially one that's in the single digits on how many coder-months it costs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if they just don't have enough power users of the OS left that aren't also just developers using CLI? ANY power user of the OS itself has seen a ton of head-scratching changes over the years, and I figure that the product managers just don't know who the features were for or what they're used for.
Is there a reason that the macOS CLI can't be intended as a general power-user feature, not just a developer feature? Consider: Terminal.app comes with macOS, not with Xcode. If the BSD environment was just there for developers, would this be true? Today's Microsoft seems to increasingly think sysadmins would rather use PowerShell than MMC snap-ins; I'm inclined to think that today's Apple is similar. And there's not…
CLIs are opaque by definition. With a GUI you can click around menus until you find what you're looking for; with a CLI you can't even begin unless you already know what you're doing. Man pages are no help to newbies; they're either uselessly terse, impenetrably jargon-packed, or both.
It's probably possible to make a CLI that's relatively easy-to-use and newbie-friendly, but I've never seen anyone attempt it. People used MS-DOS for years because it was the only way to access the large majority of software, and abandoned it as soon as there was a viable alternative (Win9x).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just reading about something similar in the "Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?" post Joel Spolsky's point: They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15407114
I reject that comparison. This is not rewriting a core product with tens of millions of lines of code. This is a small utility program. It's very often no problem to just make a new utility program. Especially one that's in the single digits on how many coder-months it costs.
The problem really is that the new Disk Utility is a minimal viable product, rather than an app that can actually do everything the diskutil command line utility can do.
And then you have terrible bugs like this, which is presumably a non-security engineer writing a bit of UI code that they shouldn't be. I doubt this bug actually came from the APFS encryption itself.
"Erase the affected volume" is really the best solution they could come up with?
As others have pointed out, the password was apparently written in plain text on the disk. So yes, I think a complete erase is warranted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just reading about something similar in the "Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?" post Joel Spolsky's point: They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15407114
I reject that comparison. This is not rewriting a core product with tens of millions of lines of code. This is a small utility program. It's very often no problem to just make a new utility program. Especially one that's in the single digits on how many coder-months it costs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe: “I hope they improve and nobody loses their job”
Sadly, errors like this are usually symptoms of organizational problems. Code cleanliness, testing and QA, are all very easy to sweep under the rug, and neglect/abuse organizationally. In the short-term, everything still seems fine. In the long run, problems like these keep snowballing. Once a trend like this starts, the only way to reverse it is via organizational shakeups. I hope I'm wrong, and that a bug like this…