That blog post reminded me of an email that I answered today - more than three months after having received it. And there are more of those waiting for me in my inbox, some older than a year.
Then they would be out of business. If you thought the 50MB mail quota was ridiculous, this will blow your mind. The Ilias platform which students and teachers use to exchange information, is down every single night between 3am and 6am. That means it has an uptime of about 87%. Usually businesses measure uptime with the number of times the digit nine appears in the uptime to downtime ratio, such as five-nines meaning 99.999%. But there is no nine anywhere near eighty-seven. I don't demand a five-nines uptime, I could live with 98% or 95% (a bit more than an hour per day). But three hours does seem a lot even for the daily windows server reboot.
The site doesn't even degrade gracefully, sometimes all it displays is MDB2 Error: connect failed, sometimes the error message is hidden somewhere between html markup. And the downtime couldn't come at a worse time, it's right when I am the most productive: a couple hours before a deadline or an exam at 8am. So here I sit from 3am to 6am, writing a blog post, instead of doing what I am actually supposed to do.
Mac users are more picky about how the UI looks and behaves. But it's not just the details which don't work, it's basic things which we all, even those working with Windows and Linux, take for granted and rely on in our everyday interaction with the computer. Things like copy and paste, or the fact that the UI respects the keyboard layout. And then, of course, there is the issue with games not launching or crashing. But such problems are to be expected from an early beta, right?
It's obvious that the Mac client was rushed. The official beta period was way too short to work out all the bugs. Working with Mac users may not be easy, especially for companies which so far have only developed for the Windows platform. But it's not impossible, Blizzard games work very well on Mac (they do require a case-insensitive filesystem, but at least they are self-contained and can be installed completely inside a disk image).
And the Linux client was officially announced. So I downloaded the Mac client - but not after spending a few minutes searching the download link. Hint: It's the small button halfway down the main index page. The one where just below it sais: Free 1.5 MB Download. and when you click the link it downloads a 2.8MB file. But hey, that's only 86% off.
Anyway, I dragged Steam.app to my applications folder and started it. But like World of Warcraft Steam requires that Steam.app/Contents/MacOS be created on a case insensitive filesystem. That makes me wonder how it will it work on Linux where all filesystems are case sensitive. Is that the reason why the Linux client hasn't been released yet? Or will Valve require that we install it on FAT/NTFS (or ZFS, which has a casesensitivity property)?
Via Daring Fireball: [...] showing the Android browser playing YouTube videos using Flash, where the guy narrating the video says “Good thing I didn’t buy an iPad, because this one does Flash”, and at that moment, the browser crashes.