Enough already.
No more spammers, morons, idiots, bots, crawlers, losers, morons, cretins, grammarians, ill educated scum, you name it.
I’m happy with 5,000 daily readers. The noise is not needed.
Content here is free. The right to abuse the author is not. A blog is like a TV set. You don’t like it, turn it off. You want to abuse me? After 9 years of this I have turned you off.
Cannnot begin to tell you how good that feels.
Hardly surprising.
Apple has announced it has ceased development of Aperture.
Any Aperture user must have noticed how poorly supported Apple’s flagship photo processing app was – now or earlier. I migrated from Aperture to Lightroom six years ago and that was no fun. I hate to think what can go wrong today. My change to Adobe was not motivated by features but by Aperture’s simply awful speed in every task imaginable, not to mention incredible file size bloat. Unless you had the latest CPUs, GPUs and disk drives, you were going to have to watch beachballs. By contrast, LR makes very low demands on hardware – it did back then and with many great enhancements over the past few years, continues to be undemanding. The Highlight and Shadow sliders introduced in LR4 alone would have any rational user abandoning Aperture.
The sad part of this is that Adobe loses a competitor, though if pushed I would guess that Aperture had less than 5% of the Lightroom market. With the number of PC and Mac users roughly equal and Apeture running on Macs only, that makes for a 75% LR market share if Aperture had even 50% of the Mac market. Factor in the poor product support, a lack of timely development – especially with RAW support for new cameras (how hard can that be?) – a falling feature set compared with LR and a parent more interested in selling cell phones, and the writing was plainly on the wall. I have sympathy for all those great photographers heavily invested in Aperture who will now spend aeons converting to something else, rather than spending time taking pictures. And that conversion, I am prepared to bet, will be high risk and whether overlay files for RAW images will even be properly preserved is unknown at this time.
The bigger concern is how long will LR remain with a stand-alone option? You want to trust Adobe? A company which cannot run its cloud securely and cannot even safeguard the code to Photoshop from thieves – their crown jewel? Not to mention your credit card data.
A dream come true.
I can now disclose that this is the very camera I used to take that fabulous image of White Birches in honor of Saint Ansel. For the non-English grammarians amongst us, it’s “Adams’s” not “Adam’s”, unless the real owner was one Bert Adam, in which case it should sell for $19.95. About what it’s worth, come to think of it.
As for Ms. DeCock, no idea who she is, but a name change is definitely called for.
I expect bidding to start at $1mm (the Adam, not the Cock) with the winner a LuLa subscriber ever hopeful of actually taking a good landscape snap.
Impressive.
Sony’s latest high-end point-and-shoot.
There’s lots to like here. A fast lens, a useful zoom range, a big sensor and an EVF. OK, so the latter pops up (ugh!) and there is no manual zoom control, replaced with one of those awful electric toggles. But this is the shape of things to come and while I’ll be sticking with my dual Panny GX7 outfit – with the 17mm and 45mm Zuikos, both outstanding – one day someone will get the small camera/large sensor/fast lens/rational manual controls combination right. This one is close.
Adding the Apple Hardware Test.
For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.
In years past you could run the comprehensive Apple Hardware Test by restarting your Mac while holding the ‘D’ key on the keyboard. However, it seems Apple has ceased including this software in recent years, though that is easily remedied.
Because some of the AHT files and directories are ordinarily invisible, we need to make invisible files visible to see what we are doing.
Once you have invisible files visible, download the AHT relevant to your machine by clicking the image below:
My Mac Pros are all 2009 models with firmware upgraded from 4,1 to 5,1 to permit the use of 6 and 12 core CPUs – the AHT files for the two firmware variants appear identical.
You want to create a directory named ‘.diagnostics’ (the period makes it ordinarily invisible) in the System->Library->Core Service directory, thus:
Now move the downloaded files from the ‘.diagnostics’ directory in the download to the new directory on your Mac.
Go back to the first link and once more render the invisible files invisible.
Shut down then hold the ‘D’ key while starting up and you can run AHT – a useful diagnostic tool. Here it is installed in one of my Mac Pros with upgraded 12-core CPUs and lots of other aftermarket hardware installed:
