ITunes 8 a Real Killer App; Taking Down Vista 735
CWmike writes "Apple 's latest version of iTunes crashes Windows Vista when an iPod or iPhone is connected to the PC, scores of users have reported on Apple's support forum. Plug in and Vista crashes and shows the 'blue screen of death.' The errors began showing up immediately after updating iTunes to Version 8.0, which Apple released Tuesday as part of its iPod refresh. 'I just installed iTunes 8 over my iTunes 7 on Vista [and] now whenever I plug in my iPod, I get a blue screen death. Three times so far. Even if it is plugged in on boot, I get a blue screen," said a user identified as 'sambeckett' on the support forum about 90 minutes after Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrapped up the iPod launch."
Re:MS or Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple should have debugged it on a vista box
Fixed that for you.
Re:Good Marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good Marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
media center (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, and here I was thinking it's time to upgrade the media center from that elderly, barely supported (but solid) XP Media Center Edition, to Vista. 26 gigs of music, and no way to get it on our ipods... Yeesh. Oh, I know it'll be fixed, but stories like this give me chills.
Upon re-reading that, it sounded like I'm dissing Microsoft. Not really, just prudently waiting for these kinds of issues to settle -- no matter who's fault they are -- before thinking about upgrading. By then, the CPU upgrade necessary to run Vista should be really cheap. :-)
This is off topic, but I have to say it: I may have to turn in my Linux geek hat for saying this, but I've been running XP Media Center Edition 2005 since it came out, under heavy daily use, and have not had a single bluescreen of death. Not one. (Nobody is more surprised than me. :-))
Re:Good Marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
Eh. Kinda. Ultimately I think this is a lack of testing on Apple's part though. I don't think you should be able to code together some drivers and then pass off any and all testing to Microsoft.
You both laugh now... (Score:5, Interesting)
...but what if Apple pulled a Microsoft and put an intentional bug into the app? Sure, it might seem a little too sophisticated for such a small thing, and people will still blame iTunes since it's the main application, but what if tomorrow Steve releases a press release apologizing to Vista users but blames it squarely on Vista "oh sorry something in our new version invoked a buggy piece of vista and we had to work around it." And what if that's what all the support people at apple are instructed to say? What if friends down the street say "oh dude I have a Mac/XP and it works fine for me" might iPod users say "fuckin' vista!" With a little careful preparation, I think this might be possible... maybe only a little bit of a stretch? :)
Sounds a little conspiracy theory-ish, but keep an eye out the next couple of days. You never know.
I am a mac fan, but I don't put evil past Apple by any means, they are a corporation after all. At the same time, evil attacking evil is loads of fun to watch, but I pity the people who get caught in the middle who can't sync now until a fix is released.
Re:Good Marketing (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you crazy?
My MP3 player is a simple storage device. This is because I can just drop MP3s into it without any user or software intervention, and it plays them without complaint. (It's an old RCA Lyra, BTW; it's gone through the washing machine by accident twice and keeps on ticking.)
Try doing that on an iPod. Go on, try it. No, without iTunes, and without any additional drivers. What was that? It doesn't work? Yeah, that's because Apple uses a crazy scheme whereby they update an index file every time you change something on the iPod hard drive. Don't update that file and you can't see it inside the iPod's UI.
That's why there are a bunch of third party programs so you can treat it as a hard drive, but they are always updating that file in the background.
Good Call! (Score:5, Interesting)
The tags right now are [+] bug, media, music, windows, haha (tagging beta)
Odd that Apple, iPod, and iTunes aren't tags for a story about a bug in their software?
Vista sucks for not encapsulating the exception, but it sure sounds like the bug is on Apple's side of the issue.
-Rick
Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)
WMP doesn't follow windows UI guidelines. I think the UI guidelines for Windows specifically give media players a pass.
My computer won't boot with an iPod connected (Score:4, Interesting)
On-topic enought to tell here: My computer won't even boot with an iPod attached. Might be just the shuffle, but I think having my old mini connected is a no-no, too. Won't even go past the BIOS screen, it hangs before the pseudo memory check at POST.
Sometimes I don't even get an image on the screen, I think because it hangs too fast for the monitor too sync. I found this out the (very) hard way: Computer didn't boot, no image on screen, seemingly for no reason, so I did what I had to do, basic troubleshooting. Remove power cord and reconnect after a while, didn't do anything. So I started tearing out extension cards, disconnecting hard drives, removing RAM chips. Had pretty much the whole thing disassembled, short of removing the CPU (because removing the HSF is such a PITA). Erased the BIOS using a paperclip, nothing. Only then did I notice, by accident, that some USB devices, including the iPod, were still attached. Disconnected them, and the system booted fine. WTF.
The whole thing is so strange that I promptly forgot about it and repeated the whole procedure half a year later. Doh!
Note that everything works fine once the POST is done, I bet I could even boot of of it if I wanted to, and I can use them in Linux or Windows just fine. So really just a minor inconvenience, albeit a very odd one. (I blame my motherboard, BTW, not the iPod.)
Re:But still... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good Marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
The GEAR drivers are signed by Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility, therefore are completely compatible with Windows Vista.
Re:Sigh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Asinine, but then again Apple doesn't follow Windows UI guidelines either.
There are Windows UI guidelines? From the truly bizarre menagerie of inconsistent UIs I see in the 3rd-party windows software world, it wasn't clear to me that any guidelines even existed.
Certainly very few people follow them.
Obviously not. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I Blame DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
It might not be that. Encrypting the connection protects the files in transit, but who the hell ever sniffed the USB connection to break Apple DRM? There are far easier ways to free up your music in order to exercise your legitimate fair use rights.
I suspect the encryption is there to make sure that only iTunes can talk to an iPod. That's Apple's profit right there: you're forced to manage your music collection using their application, with its inbuilt link up to their music store. And you get used to doing things the Apple way - hell, some day you might even buy a Mac. You're not supposed to use Amarok - God forbid! That way you don't join up with the Cult Of Steve!
The part that pisses me off is they've done a pretty good job of encrypting the firmware updates too. Absolutely no way in for the Rockbox hackers. Pity, because I was thinking of buying a 160GB iPod Classic now that my old iRiver iHP-140 is full. That's a sale lost, then...
Re:But still... (Score:5, Interesting)
The "Printer On Fire" status code is strictly a UNIX phenomenon.
Laugh all you want at Microsoft, but this one is mostly our fault :-P
(For those not familiar with this meme, there was a certain brand of mainframe printer in the 1970s that was infamous for continuing to print after jamming, despite being able to correctly detect the jam and take the printer "off-line". This would cause an immense heat-buildup that would often lead to the paper catching on fire. Therefore, a printer that is somehow printing while off-line is reported by most Unices to have a status code of "Printer On Fire")