All posts by Thomas Pindelski

About Thomas Pindelski

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WSJ puffery

Photography

Don’t expect objective reporting here.

Under its new ownership, the Wall Street Journal is redefining yellow journalism, seemingly perfected by W R Hearst in the ’30s.

Meaning, write what suits you politically and economically, and the heck with objective reporting of the facts. It makes the New York Times look like an arbiter of truth, which is saying something.

Today’s edition has a puff piece on the new Apple Tablet and how El Jobso is back and driving everyone to distraction with his attention to slim perfection at the expense of all else.

Well, I simply could not resist adding to the Comments section (link is probably available to subscribers only), with my own 2 cents worth – OK, $7,500 worth looking at the volume of Apple junk we have bricked. My opening sentence references Jobs’s oft quoted remark when asked why Apple will not make a cheap netbook:

I may have added a few months, maybe even a year, to the life of my 24″ iMac with all the work I have been forced to do to it, as described earlier, but when it fails you will see me going the Hackintosh route. And I don’t need any sanctimonious shill for the legal profession lecturing me on the legality of this – how can it be any less legal than selling devices under false pretenses (“It Just Works” as Apple advertises)? Thus my computer odyssey will have come full circle – a big well ventilated reliable PC box full of hardware running the best OS for the home and small business user out there.

Here’s an index to my recent spate of articles here on Apple’s awful hardware and let that be an end to it:

I am still committed to sharing temperature readings on my repaired/ventilated 24″ iMac with readers, and these can now be seen here.

Snow Leopard – Just Say No

OS X

Serious compatibility issues.

Apple has said that its 64-bit OS, Snow Leopard, will be on sale August 28. You know – all the usual twaddle – better, faster, smaller, etc. Just pay up, please. The cash register is right over there. We gotta keep those analysts on Wall Street happy. Goodness alone knows what additional stress the 64-bit OS places on already overtaxed graphics circuitry in overheated, poorly ventilated boxes. And excuse me, but just how many 64-bit third party applications are out there and don’t these need 32gB or more of RAM to show any benefit? Once again, it seems, we are being offered a Ferrari to do the grocery shopping, because the racetrack is closed.

Come to think of it, I’m still trying to figure out what, if anything, the ‘upgrade’ from Tiger to Leopard did for me, other than a butt ugly purple login screen. At least our machines did not fry under Tiger.


Snow Leopard (in)compatibility list – extract

Unless you are positively insane or unless you have checked this compatibility list and are willing to believe what you read, you really should hold off upgrading, no matter how cheap it is.

Older PPC applications like Adobe Photoshop CS2 (will not run) and Intuit’s Quicken (Intuit says it will run but they are a business which shares business morals with eBay and PayPal – no earthly way you can trust a company that disables its software every other year to force you to upgrade) are problem areas. I don’t know about you but I am not about to shell out hundreds of dollars on the latest version of Photoshop which does nothing for me, or trust Intuit, only to do my photo processing or mess up my on-line banking.

But there are bigger shockers in this list. SpamSieve, the ne plus ultra of email spam apps, superb in every way and leaving Apple’s Mail Spam function in the dust, will not run. Photoshop Elements will not run. Really! Disk Warrior (serious $) will not run. MenuMeters will not run. NeoOffice may not run (the thinking man’s free alternative to the garbage called Office from Microsoft). SafariBlock – a key ad blocker for me which stops all ads, including those irritating flash ads – will not run. SmartScroll will not run. Dozens of others are in ‘Unknown’ status.

And no news of all those fan (Fan Control, SMC Fan Control) and temperature measurement (Temperature Monitor) utilities which are essential to stop your Mac from frying. What if they don’t run? And what if your new OS fries the GPU twice as fast as the old one, seeing as Snow Leopard is meant to be so much faster?

Well you get the idea. Updating now is simply crazy. Let the guinea pigs who see no wrong in anything Apple do the bleeding for you.


Snow Leopard – run away fast or it will bite you in the rear.

Red alleyway

Photographs

A slice of San Francisco.

Spotted in San Francisco the other day. I just love this sort of thing. Takes me back to childhood days.


Red alleyway. G1, kit lens, f/5, 1/500, ISO100

It amazes me that people still hang their washing out to dry – just like when I was a poor kid in London. My job was to push those wooden clothespins onto the laundry and line!

A quick roundtrip to PS CS2 took care of the leaning verticals.