Category Archives: Hall of Shame

The real stinkers

Just avoid holding it that way

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

David Pogue, technology maven at the New York Times, is in what can only be called Desperate Back-Track Mode over the iPhone hold-it-wrong-and-it-dies design debacle. The poor schnuck failed to realize that his perfectly performing “free-for-as-long-as-you-want-it-David” iPhone4 tester was likely a carefully pre-screened model not some of the shelf POS you and I buy. Fair enough. Would you risk any old specimen assembled by one of a long line of suicidal Foxconn workers when your reviewer has an audience of millions?

Pogue backtracks, while still stepping in it.

So how should we hold it, Mr. Jobs?

Ummm …. you mean not this way as in the video at Apple.com? Better check it out quick before they change it.

Or this:

Or even this:

Hand on the antenna seam, every time.

Yeah. Sure. I know. It’s an isolated occurrence.


An isolated occurrence.

Maybe a spot of the Old Bard is called for:

I know BS when I smell it and this one reeks to high heaven.

Disclosure: No AAPL position. You think I’m stoopid?

Why I cancelled my iPhone 4 order

A deeply flawed device.

I was hoping about now to be regaling readers with my experiences with the much improved 5 megapixel camera in the new iPhone, available today for those lucky enough to get a reservation:

Well, that is not going to happen.

Just about the time young Winston and I were getting ready to ride our bikes to the Apple Store, what comes across the wires but this story?

A moment later and I watch this shocking video.

So we do three things:

  • Cancel the trip
  • Cancel the order
  • Sell all my AAPL stock

Subsequent stories are confirming the issue is not isolated yet not universal. Mossberg of the WSJ made a vague reference to the signal strength bars fading occasionally, but made light of it – he’s not especially objective about AAPL so cannot be trusted.

It seems to me that there are three possible causes:

  • Sporadic manufacturing errors dictating a limited recall – an embarassment for Apple
  • Egregious design error requiring a total recall – a big ‘no confidence’ vote in the stock
  • Software glitch fixed with a new online upgrade – an irritation

None of these is good for a stock approaching nosebleed territory, no matter how attractive the fundamentals.

I have no idea which applies, but as my 3G iPhone is the only phone I use, and as I have no landline, it’s nonsensical to contemplate an upgrade at this juncture.

I’ll let others complete the discovery process and continue to enjoy my obsolete 3G iPhone in the meanwhile.

Talk of dodging a bullet! My advice to any prospective iPhone4 buyer is simple. Wait. Let someone else do the bleeding for you.

Note on older iPhones: You get the same effect, but less so, with older iPhones. My 3G shows 5 bars of signal lying on my desk, dropping to 2 or 3 once in the hand, after some 30 seconds. I can reliably replicate this behavior and it’s the same with iPhone OS 3.1.3 or iOS 4.0 – I tried both. After trying iOS 4.0 on my 3G iPhone I reverted to 3.1.3 – 4.0 adds little to a 3G iPhone (folders and a useless digital zoom for the camera) and unless you are really comfortable with use of Terminal and entering cryptic, high risk commands, think twice before upgrading to 4.0. My downgrade went well, but I know what I am doing – it’s anything but plug-and-play.

The loss in indicated signal strength seems absolutely related to hand contact with the rear and sides of the iPhone. When I place my 3G iPhone in its auxiliary clip-on battery pack, which doubles its battery life, thickness and weight, I lose no bars, so it very much sounds like an electrostatic design fault to me.

Be sure to check Comments for my analysis of the reason this poorly designed iPhone 4 is to be avoided until the hardware issue is fixed. Apple’s advisory today as to how to hold the iPhone is akin to the government telling you how to bend over before increasing your taxes. Unconscionable. Another Hall of Shame entry for the fruit company,

I figure the costs at $4.20/share – 3mm handsets recalled @ $300 + $600mm in legal fees + triple damages at $2.7bn = $4.2bn for 1bn shares. However, the reputational damage and lost sales make this sum insignificant by comparison. The Android crowd must be partying.

Disclosure: Sold all my AAPL position just before writing this.

Google’s culture revisited

Big Brother IS watching you

When I wrote about Google’s Culture of Theft just a few days ago, little did I realize how soon my suspicions would be confirmed.

From MacWorld.com

Dear reader, you do not collect this data by accident. It’s a switch in the system. You either decide to collect it or you do not. No accidents involved.

So when you next see your private data right next to your photographs in the public domain, you know where to go.

You like the ‘cloud’? Sure. So do I. Just go elsewhere than Google Docs. ‘Free’ ain’t everything you think it is.

Of trolls and losers

Kindly take a leak elsewhere.

In addition to containing some of the best writing on the planet on all aspects of Photography, this site is totally commercial free and enjoys high and growing readership.

That’s a win-win for both the readers and this author. You enjoy, or not, what I write and I get the satisfaction of sharing my views with anyone who cares to check in. And if you don’t enjoy it, well, why are you coming here? Go elsewhere.

Further, the software running this site provides an extraordinary level of protection against comment spam wherein some crook tries to question your manhood and sell you pharmaceutical products guaranteed to cure all that ails you. Yet to leave a comment you don’t even have to complete arithmetical questions or enter cryptic codes. It’s as simple as can be, all the protection mechanisms invisible to the user.

None of that, however, protects me from the occasional Comment written by a real live person who falls straight into the category of Troll or Loser. Distinguishing facts about this miserable class member include, but are not limited to:

  • Often still lives with his parents in the basement
  • Has no job and blames the government
  • Walks around with a vacant stare, arm outstretched, palm up, looking for a handout
  • Has never done a single constructive or original thing in his miserable life
  • Bathes infrequently and blames the world for shunning him
  • And, yeah, it’s always a guy. They’re the ones with too much time on their hands.

So when I get a comment as asinine as the one below – I mean here we really have a guy who just does not get it – I check the above list and, sure enough, it’s from a guy, his thinking stinks, (he may also, but I’m not about to find out), he’s probably on the dole and you can be assured he has never had an original or constructive thought in his life.

Typical troll Comment, received today.

So, trolls and losers, if you expect to get away with this sort of leg lifting on my site, you should know that your comments WILL be published, right here for all to see.

But I was not brought up to take abuse and keep mum about it. You piss on my site and I’ll be pleased to reply in kind. Unknown to the grammatically challenged Anders Holt, I actually managed to get a picture of him – at least I’m pretty sure it’s him – and I publish it here for the first time as a service to my readers. Should you see this wretch do the right thing – hold your nose and cross the street.

On Market Street, San Francisco. G1 @ 17mm, 1/2000, f/4.5, ISO 320. Smell not included.

Meanwhile, off he goes to the global spam list, never to be heard from again.

Google – a culture of theft?

Doing Evil.

For profit companies exist for one reason only. To make as much money as quickly as possible for the owners. That means making products as cheaply as possible and paying employees as little as possible. Nothing wrong with that. It’s called capitalism. It has nothing to do with morality. A company has none. It is, by definition, amoral.

So when a company grandly rolls out a corporate mantra that enshrines the very basics of morality, I tend to smell a giant rat. Google’s mantra is “Do No Evil” which suggests we should watch them the way a hawk watches a field mouse.

Let’s look at some of the behaviors of the Do No Evil company which are all over the press recently.

The China debacle: Having done Evil for years in China by tacitly permitting the dictators to censor web searches, suddenly Google co-founder Sergey Brin wakes up one day, recalls his poor Russian upbringing and decides Chinese censorship is wrong. “That’s what they did to us in the mother country”, he cries in anguish. Now this epiphany just happens to coincide with competitor Baidu’s market share peaking at 70% with Google’s dipping below 20%. Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

The Net Neutrality scam: Net neutrality is an awful idea. Simply stated, the concept dictates that everyone should have equal access at the same price to broadband. This naturally leads to crooks and abusers being subsidized by honest users. Take a look at some of the peer-to-peer networks out there, like Pirate Bay. (Mercifully a Swedish court has fined and sentenced the owners to gaol) Their sole reason for existence is to facilitate the theft of intellectual property – software, movies and so on. The thief dials up the network and merrily downloads the latest movie and, in doing so, makes massive demands on the cable or telco provider of broadband. Yet he considers it his divine rightf to pay the same as you and I do for that access. Google, unsurprisingly, is a strong proponent of net neutrality. It guarantees more hits on their search engine and more advertising revenues. Plus they get to deliver trashy YouTube content at no premium cost to the user. (Google owns YouTube – arguably one of the dumbest acquisitions of the decade). Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

The HTC scandal: Google’s CEO, one Eric Schmidt, who may be the luckiest person alive having accidentally walked into a $3bn fortune when he joined Google, was recently fired form the Apple board. All his acquisitions of truly garbage businesses like YouTube (pretty much impossible to monetize) have added nothing to the bottom line of a company which derives all its revenues from click-through advertising. No one said ‘fired’ because companies never fire board members. They always leave because of time pressures or to pursue other interests. But right after Schmidt left the Apple board, Apple brought a suit against one of Google’s primary cell phone hardware providers, HTC, for theft of a variety of patents, not least the ones relating to touchscreen use. Schmidt will have known more than most and earlier than most what Apple was up to with the iPhone when it was still an idea in Jobs’s skull and, wonder of wonders, who comes out with the first Android-capable touchscreen? Why HTC of course. (Android is Google’s mobile OS). Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

Making information available: Every photographer and writer should be up in arms about this one. Such is Google’s public posturing as a democratizer of information availability that it’s common to find your work available for anyone to steal. Just do a search using Google->Images and there are your pictures. No permission, no copyright, no payment for their use. Available for one and all to take as they please. Well, now they are at it with books as well, as the following from Reuters attests:

The courts can decide that one but it smells to high heaven. It’s a bit like eBay fronting for the sale of counterfeit goods and claiming innocence. “We are just providing a service and cannot be responsible” they say. Uh huh. How else is the thief to ‘fence’ his goods to a global audience then?

China lies? One of Google’s attempts at extricating itself from the decision to quit China was that its servers had been penetrated and code stolen. Wait a minute here. Your code was stolen? What about all the books, images and movies your servers store, Google? You are facilitating freedom but the Chinese stole from you? It doesn’t solve.

So Google, have you Done Any Good recently?

Update May 17, 2010: Google continues to do good.