Leopard Frenzy
The whole world seems to have gone crazy.
In case you don’t know it yet: on June 11, 2007 at WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) Apple presented a beta version (build 9A466) of Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, to several thousands of eager coders.
Guess what? It turns out to be popular, at least, by Google’s standards. Take a look here, at Google’s search statistics:
…
16. amanda monti
17. 9a466 torrent
18. terry bradshaw
…
27. hellfire caves
…
31. real dolls
…
61. us open 2007
…
89. david kirschner
…
Only 3 days after the keynote people are searching for Leopard’s torrents. Searching really hard. I mean, really hard.
This is crazy, right? Because it’s a beta, it has bugs, some of which may well be dangerous, dozens of features disabled or not working. Who wants it? Yeah, Mac OS X developers surely want it to test their code on a new system. Oh, wait, developers already got their Leopard DVDs at WWDC perfectly legally. Except me, of course. So who the hell is searching for the torrents? Whose finger got stuck on the F5 key with Internet Explorer in the foreground?
Joking aside, I think Apple should consider a public beta program. Instead of bulk-mailing cease-and-desist letters to torrent sites, bloggers and forum posters, why not distribute betas via bittorrent itself? Alright, make them time-limited. Is it so insane to think that the more beta-testers there are, the fewer bugs the final version will have? Maybe, we should start a petition if there are so many people who are ready to install a beta version of Mac OS X on their precious Macintoshes?
