Tell them, my song.

I inserted a Columbo DVD in my iMac Core Duo running Leopard, and it stopped in the “FBI warning bla bla bla” screen. I could not navigate, because it was ‘not permitted’. Now I could write a book about how much I hate that ‘feature’ of DVD players, and how much it demonstrates how much corporations disrespect their paying customers, but it’s not the subject of this post.

Then I tried the DVD in my PowerBook G4, also running Leopard. The same behavior.

I put the DVD in my Xbox 360 — and it played.
Then I put the DVD in my girl friend’s PowerBook G4, which still runs Tiger — and it played.
I rebooted my iMac Core Duo to Vista — and the DVD played.
Just to be sure, I rebooted the iMac again to Leopard — and the DVD got stuck in the “FBI warning bla bla bla” screen again.

So what does that tell me about Leopard’s DVD Player software?

Well, it’s simple: It’s a piece of dung. Apple’s DVD Player’s always been junk. The version that came with Tiger had its own bag of fleas and never worked well either. But obviously, Apple’s been able to make it even worse. Is that what they call innovation that ‘just works’? I mean, shipping a new OS that’s not even able to perform a basic task like DVD playback properly and that even works worse than its predecessor?

A few days ago, I said that everything was forgiven, because I really love Aperture 2 despite its many new bugs (for which I filed official bug reports). But now, once more, I feel that huge disappointment that the premium-priced systems of mine fail miserably at even simple things, as they do so often. Just try copying mp3s back from your iPod to your Mac, for starters; or try to explain that pathetic ’synchronize your iPod’ feature to an intelligent person, especially the part that this is a one-way-delete-everything-on-the-target ’synchronization’. Try to explain to a normal thinking person why copying a folder to another location where a folder with the same name already exists deletes the target folder entirely instead of just overwriting the existing files and adding the new ones (you know, just as Windows does it, and what in 99.9% of the time is exactly what you want to do).

Well, as you can see, I’m in that mood again and could kick that Apple crap out of the window. “It just works” turtlenecks for breakfast anyone?

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