- Posts tagged Lion
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Second Lion Crash. Now I'm Concerned
I just had my second gray screen of death in less than a week after several years of never seeing one. Both of these crashes have been on my home machine, a Mac Mini.
I've also been experiencing display weirdness. My HP w2338h monitor -- which I love when it behaves -- has been "fuzzing out", going to all-static display. If I turn it off and back on, it is fine. Sometimes I've waited to see if it would self-correct. Once it did after only about 15 seconds or so. I'm wondering if the two observations are related.
Because I make heavy use of my system all day, I have a hard time isolating a possible cause of these kinds of issues. What am I supposed to do, spend an entire day running only one app? But then I don't always see these problems even when I'm running all my favorite apps. That's one of the problems with complexity, I guess; the more of it you have, the more chaos you create.
If you have seen similar issues, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Maybe together we can dope this out. Meanwhile, I'm just glad Apple has improved the OS enough that I didn't lose any unsaved data in either hard crash.
Best OS X Lion Review I've Read: Andy Ihnatko's
I've been reading tons of reviews about Apple's newly announced OS X 10.7, aka "Lion" in the last couple of days. Easily the most exhaustive -- so much so that it borders on a book -- is the one at ArsTechnica byJohn Siracusa. But my favorite of all of them I've read so far is by famed Mac guru and sit-down comic Andy Ihnatko. The long online version of his Chicago Sun-Times piece is not only concise but insightful. I particularly liked his observations about what the new OS seems to signal for the future of Apple and computing devices.
Ihnatko postulates that if you look at some of the key new features in Lion -- particularly auto-save, version control and full-screen apps -- portend a future in the iCloud wherein a potentially vast array of computing devices from Apple or using its OSes can provide a hardware layer of transparency that is only a dream in today's computing environments. While he also finds much to criticize or at least, as he says, get all "grumpypants" on us, overall he declares the $30 OS a must-have for today's Macintosh users.
My techy son-in-law, Jeff Soule, takes a narrower view of Lion on his blog, declaring that the new multi-touch gestures -- which, interestingly, Ihnatko finds useless or annoying -- make him feel almost like a magician as he maneuvers his way around his environment.
For me, I haven't yet downloaded Lion, for a few reasons:
- I have become more cautious about doing things that could disrupt my working environment in the past couple of years.
- The machine I'd find most adequate to put Lion through its paces is my MacBook Air but it's not running Snow Leopard so the upgrade process is going to be painful, long and a little more expensive and a lot more annoying.
- I wanted to understand recovery processes and risks for this all-Net approach to delivering an entire OS. I'm now satisfied that this won't be a catastrophic problem.
I'll take the Lion plunge soon, I'm sure, but primarily because I see this as a way of leveraging the future and getting a better handle on the OS and hardware implications of the Zero-Pound Computer I've been advocating for the past decade or so.
