So… Billy Childish played a song once that had that refrain, above, and it’s a great song.

When Steve Jobs sings it, it’s not so good, to me.

Ever since the very earliest installs of OS X I have had recurrent, highy irritating timeouts in the console which essentially amount to “I can’t see any name servers, so you can’t have the internet.”

The messages are spurious and do not reflect actual status of the name servers addressed. Rather than trying again, and so on, the default behavior of the OS has been to stop attempting DNS enquiries until the process which performs the queries is stopped and restarted in one of several ways.

In lay terms, the computer decides that the pipe to the net is plugged and stops trying to get data from it. But the pipe’s fine.

There’s no meaningful documentation of this bug at Apple’s website.

I’d learned workarounds.

Guess what? in OS X 10.2 (Jagwyre), my workarounds have been DISABLED! The lookupd messages in console are even gone…. but the problem is still there, and infact, it appears that all Apple’s done is make it harder to diagnose the problem when it occurs.

Terminal, a new and different app apparently LACKING font smoothing, now has user-tied scrollback disabled as well.

Oh, I’m steamed. From my perspective and a couple of hours of scowling at the screen, this is a downgrade.

Keep working on the record!