It’s also highly problematic when new versions are flat-out broken. Starting with around STP 124 I started experiencing consistent crashes on some websites, making them completely unusable in STP. For the time-being I chose to use them separately in regular Safari, on the assumption that these egregious issues would be quickly fixed in the next STP version. Well, three versions later and those bugs have not been fixed. Not even close.

Now, with STP 126, it crashes on launch. Every time.

Well, thankfully there are places where you can obtain the prior versions, even if Apple won’t provide them. My preference is The Wayback Machine – you can start with this calendar, from which you can pick a date and (with any luck) the download page for that date will point to the version you want. You then download the disc image, delete the current copy of STP from your Applications folder (otherwise the pkg installer for the older version will refuse to work), and re-install the older version.

Once you’ve done that, make sure to turn Automatic Updates off in System Preferences, otherwise Apple will just trash your working version with the broken one again.

If you appreciate that – I certainly did; I like having a web browser that doesn’t crash on launch – remember that The Wayback Machine is run by the Internet Archive, a non-profit group, and they can always use monetary support as well as volunteers.

P.S. Yes, I’m aware that their donation page is sadly a bit janky. If you’re a web developer or designer, maybe you could volunteer some of your time to improve it? 😁

Process: Mail [19884]
Path: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
Identifier: com.apple.mail
Version: 11.3 (3445.6.18)
Build Info: Mail-3445006018000000~4
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: Mail [19884]
User ID: …

Date/Time: 2018-04-19 16:44:45.717 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.13.4 (17E199)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: …

Sleep/Wake UUID: …

Time Awake Since Boot: 94000 seconds
Time Since Wake: 530 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 13 Dispatch queue: Task Manager Serialization Queue (QOS: UNSPECIFIED)

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'This method should only be called on the serialization queue'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called

Application Specific Backtrace 1:
0 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff55da96bb __exceptionPreprocess + 171
1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff7d4c1942 objc_exception_throw + 48
2 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff55daf2a2 +[NSException raise:format:arguments:] + 98
3 Foundation 0x00007fff57ee7340 -[NSAssertionHandler handleFailureInMethod:object:file:lineNumber:description:] + 193
4 IMAP 0x00007fff6fe88959 -[IMAPTaskManager secondaryIdleMailboxName] + 216
5 IMAP 0x00007fff6fe880cb -[IMAPTask mailboxIsUserVisibleUsingDataSource:] + 180
6 IMAP 0x00007fff6fe6ab68 -[IMAPMailboxSyncTask _nextNetworkPriorityAndOperation:reservedNetworkPriority:] + 164
7 IMAP 0x00007fff6fe6c4ba -[IMAPMailboxSyncTask recalculatePriorities] + 398
8 IMAP 0x00007fff6fe67dd9 -[IMAPMailboxSyncTask initWithDataSource:taskManager:imapMailbox:fromStatus:forceFullSync:] + 766
9 IMAP 0x00007fff6fe931f7 -[IMAPTaskManager _syncMailboxWithDataSource:withIMAPMailbox:fromStatus:forceFullSync:userInitiated:] + 370
10 IMAP 0x00007fff6fe92e68 -[IMAPTaskManager syncMailboxWithDataSource:withIMAPMailbox:fromStatus:forceFullSync:userInitiated:] + 240
11 IMAP 0x00007fff6fe9631a -[IMAPTaskManager didAddMessagesWithUnknownUID:toDataSource:] + 872
12 Foundation 0x00007fff57e4a5df __NSBLOCKOPERATION_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_A_BLOCK__ + 7
13 Foundation 0x00007fff57e4a441 -[NSBlockOperation main] + 68
14 Foundation 0x00007fff57e488ee -[__NSOperationInternal _start:] + 778
15 Foundation 0x00007fff57e44917 __NSOQSchedule_f + 369
16 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff7e09ee08 _dispatch_client_callout + 8
17 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff7e0b1ed1 _dispatch_continuation_pop + 472
18 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff7e0a9783 _dispatch_async_redirect_invoke + 703
19 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff7e0a09f9 _dispatch_root_queue_drain + 515
20 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff7e0a07a5 _dispatch_worker_thread3 + 101
21 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff7e3f0169 _pthread_wqthread + 1387
22 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff7e3efbe9 start_wqthread + 13

Long story short, the issue turns out to be having connection logging enabled.  That’d been turned on many months before in order to debug a different stupid Mail bug, and had been simply left on (deliberately IIRC, since Mail tends to bug-out quite often, so why not have logs already available when it comes time to debug it yet again?).

Connection logging is enabled or disabled by opening the “Connection Doctor” (Window menu > Connection Doctor) and using the checkbox titled “Log Connection Activity”.

So how do you get to that checkbox when Mail crashes on launch?  Well, in this specific instance I was able to disable all mail accounts via System Preference’s Accounts pane, launch Mail, disable logging, quit Mail, re-enable all mail accounts via System Preferences, and then relaunch Mail to have it finally actually work.

From even just brief web searching, it’s clear that this issue has been present and well-known in Mail for a really long time.  Sigh.  Apple’s protestations that they care about software quality, or the Mac, are relentlessly undermined by their actual actions.

It appears, however, that 10.12.2 has introduced some serious issues impacting those GPU tasks.  While there’s always been occasional issues with performance while running these GPU tasks – e.g. Amazon streaming video drops frames – I’ve not had any major complaints.

Now, however, I have this:

That’s what I get when I render a Nikon NEF file, pretty much anywhere in the system.

The exact symptoms of the issue seem to vary depending on where & what type of NEF file I render – e.g. rendering them in Preview mostly constraints the graphics corruption to Preview, and doesn’t readily lead to the whole system hanging.  Using the Finder for its previews, or Quicklook, however, very quickly leads to massive graphics corruption and, for Nikon D7100 NEFs, quickly hangs the system entirely.  Oddly, Nikon D500 NEFs don’t tend to cause immediate system hangs, but will prevent the system restarting or shutting down – it ends up hung at a black screen, after seemingly closing the window server, with a very consistent pattern of corruption and a frozen mouse cursor.

I never saw this, or anything like it, prior to the 10.12.2 update.  Sigh.

FWIW, the particular work unit in question triggering this right now is:

A few hours later, Gandi.net was working again, but my site wasn’t.  Sad panda.

Long story short, I used up all the disk space – and by “I”, I mean something – still haven’t figured out what, yet.  Apparently when you use up all the space, that simply kills the VM without any notification (their dashboard for my VM still claimed it was running just fine, no problems detected, which was obvious crap).

That said, their tech support identified the problem quickly and were ultimately able to rectify things for me (after first suggesting I delete some stuff myself, which I tried only to find that when your Gandi VM is wedged in this state, you can’t log in via SSH nor delete anything via SFTP, and those are your only two means for deleting any files…).

As far as I can recall, this is the first time my site’s actually been down in the ~four years I’ve hosted with them (other than a few errors on my part when messing with WordPress etc).

Long story short, it’s far worse than even I thought.  I wish I could believe it’s just a bad joke, a prank, and we’ll get the real thing in a few months, but I just doubt it.  It looks deliberate.  It’s depressing.

You have to actually use it for a while to really appreciate how badly it’s broken.  It’s just hard to explain otherwise – you wouldn’t believe some of it, for a start.

There may be a careful-what-you-wish-for moral here.  I’ve long disagreed with Apple’s domineering focus on iOS over all else.  The Mac is still what gets the work done in the end, and it’s been horribly neglected.  It was a small part of why I left Apple.  Yet when I look at OS X Mavericks, aside from the dumb name it is actually a very promising release.  Both from an end-user and a developer perspective.  I’m actually looking forward to it (but, since as noted I actually need my Mac, unlike my iOS devices, I’m not putting the beta on it).

It appears that all the Mac engineers that were stolen by iOS over the last few years were put back on the Mac, and then some.  iOS 7 is superficial, crass, styleless and boring.  Mavericks isn’t a correspondingly revolutionary upgrade, but it’s at least some kind of solace.

Unfortunately, performance appears to have come at the cost of reliability.  And boy is it a high cost.

Take Driver: San Francisco and Rage, for example.  Both these games will crash at launch if you have anything other than “English” as your first language in System Preferences.  WTF.  How the hell did they ship a game that won’t even launch if you dare not speak American English as your preferred language?  It’s especially bizarre when you consider that Ubisoft, the publisher of Driver: San Francisco, is headquartered in France.

The fun doesn’t stop there for Driver: San Francisco, oh no.  Even if you can get it to launch at all, it will then not accept any input of any kind while you have a graphics tablet plugged in.  That’s right, any time I want to race around the virtual streets of San Francisco in a crappy 70’s muscle car, I have to not only screw with my system-wide language settings, but disconnect my graphics tablet.  Please draw a schematic diagram indicating how the hell any of this makes any sense.

And the latest crashtastic game I’ve come upon is Company of Heroes.  Once again we get the crash-on-launch mini-game as soon as it’s installed.  Turns out it is allergic to Perian – a Quicktime plug-in providing playback support for a variety of esoteric audio & video formats – and said plug-in must be uninstalled in order for it to run.  Ugh.

Even once you get it running, you’re then faced with periodic hangs.  Sometimes these hangs are so hard they require a hard reset of the entire computer.  Of those that don’t, that I’ve managed to escape from so far, the spindump profile indicates deadlocks in the AI code.

Since that game offers no form of autosave, I’ve lost several hours gameplay already, just in the first week that I’ve been playing it.  It’s getting close to the point where I return the game and demand a refund.

In fairness, I should state that there are other examples of non-existent quality control predating these.  The Civilization series, not to be outdone by these newer games, has been a pillar of both horrible performance and depressing unreliability since version 3.  They’ve also managed to include, in versions 3, 4 and 5, a growing lineage of graphics flaws, including the infamous black ice that foreshadows an imminent crash.  It boggles my mind that Civilization 5 is the top-selling Mac game on Steam, and has been for months and months.  Does that ranking not consider returns?  (does Steam even take returns?)

And Unreal Tournament 2004 had a very special ability to hard freeze my previous iMac.  Although in that case I let the blame slide down to NVidia; as far as I could tell it was their horribly buggy drivers that were the culprit there.

Which brings up NVidia.  I used to at least be impressed by their hardware, but in recent years it has been – even on paper, from a performance perspective – only on par with AMD’s offerings, and the quality has been abysmal.  And their drivers have always, always been terrible.  After having my old iMac die thanks to what I believe is fundamentally a bad GPU, the camel’s back has finally broken.  I will probably never buy another Mac, for myself, containing NVidia hardware.