Those who follow my writing for Examiner.com known that I
have long
been a champion
of the Berliner Philharmoniker Digital
Concert Hall, particularly through the video streaming of concerts that
have been archived. Recently, however, I have discovered that visits to this
Web site have fallen victim to the current run of software development blunders
by Apple. Thus, I recently discovered that, since the upgrade to Lion, one
could get the video stream on Safari; but none of the controls for the video player
would work.
By now I am used to the fact that the folks on the Apple
Help Desk automatically respond to any problem with Safari by asking if I have
tried another browser. Therefore, I did not need anyone to tell me to try using
Firefox as an alternative; and this did the trick. On my last visit to the
Digital Concert Hall (still in Firefox), however, I found that the stream was
being interrupted with inordinate frequency. (I could not get an uninterrupted
signal for even one minute.) I reported this to the Digital Concert Hall
technical staff, and they made some useful recommendations regarding Flash and
making sure that my network connection was working up to speed.
By accident, however, I considered a possibility that had to
do with neither of these problems. When Software Update appeared to be running
sluggishly, I decided to check out CPU usage with Activity Monitor. This is not
the most reliable tool, since the CPU usage numbers often add up to more than
100%; but, as indicators go, it is better than nothing. In this case it
reported that the CPU was being thoroughly hogged by the Safari plug-in for
displaying PDF files. (No PDF files were being displayed at the time.) It thus
occurred me to just kill Safari and run only Firefox. It was immediately
apparent that the streaming service from the Digital Concert Hall had returned
to its usually reliable state.
My guess is that this is all due to a “perfect storm” of
software development ineptitude coming from both the OS X group and the Safari
group. Whether this is a consequence
of what Ted
Landau has called the “iOS-ification”
of Mac OS remains to be seen. Even if Apple has shifted its design priorities,
this seems to be a blatant case of releasing software before rigorously testing
it. As I observed in a
previous flame about Lion, Apple may now be counting on its users to live
with problems, rather than on insisting that they be solved, following the
logic of E. M. Forster’s “The
Machine Stops.” (The point of that story, of course, is the nature of the
consequences of that logic, which is what justifies the story’s title.)
Alternatively, this may be a calculated move on Apple’s part to get those of us
who do “real work” to start using iPads, however unrealistic that aspiration
may be. What will the consequences of that
move be? Enquiring minds want to know!
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