burnaby t wallace

This is radical. I heard about this last year, but I never really thought about how useful it is until now.

This thing will allow me (with a compactflash adapter) to take pictures from my camera and it will automatically save it to a folder on my laptop. Excellent! It only works with JPEGs, but that’s OK. It’ll keep the RAW on the card for when its time to do some processing. At least the clients can view the images right off the bat.

There’s a side-story brewing in the “Vista Capable” lawsuit against Microsoft, with NVIDIA playing a supporting role. Judge Martha Pechman ordered a 158-page bundle of internal Microsoft emails unsealed, and in them, Microsoft documentation appears to suggest validity to complaints of early NVIDIA driver issues with Vista. NVIDIA’s G80 architecture endured a delayed driver rollout, and according to Microsoft’s data, the drivers were the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or 29 percent of all crashes Microsoft logged. Arstechnica wonders if that could have played a role in public perception painting Vista as a buggy and unstable OS, but admits there’s a lack of information to say conclusively.

So there’s this idea that is going around that any system that Apple can put together is all a photographer needs for flow and processing. Why? I can’t figure that out, but at any rate…it’s not true. Apparently you don’t get all your colors.

Apple settles “millions of colors” class-action lawsuit

By Slash Lane

Published: 09:00 AM EST

Apple has settled with two professional photographers who had charged the company with falsely advertising the quality and capabilities of its MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook displays.
The out-of-court settlement, for which terms were not disclosed, brings to a close a 10-month old class-action lawsuit filed by San Diego, Calif. residents Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley.
In the suit, first reported by AppleInsider last May, the pair cried foul on the part of Apple’s marketing lingo, which advertised that both the MacBook and MacBook Pro included displays capable of supporting “millions of colors” and offering views “simply unavailable on other portables.”
Instead, they charge that the Intel-based notebooks were only suited to display the “illusion of millions of colors through the use of a software technique referred to as ‘dithering,’ which causes nearby pixels on the display to use slightly varying shades of colors that trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color even though it is not truly that color.”
Greaves and Gatley, both professional photographers, argued that the misrepresentation was critical given that members of their profession rely on the accuracy of the displays for properly editing imagery. They asserted that, even at their highest resolutions, the notebook displays are unreliable for post-production purposes.
In addition to false advertising and misrepresentation, the photographers also charged Apple with violating the Unfair Competition Law and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act for its failure to properly address and rectify the situation.
There’s no word yet on the steps necessary for other proposed class members to take advantage of the settlement.

Hehe.

It’s no secret that the new Apple iMacs have gradient issues (phew, am I glad I didn’t get one of those Cinema displays).

Well, as if the fact that Apple isn’t helping the issue, they are actually censoring certain messages on the topic by deleting and replacing them with error messages.

From Tom’s Hardware:

UPDATE: In what appears be the first move toward censoring discussion of the issue, Apple Support has locked the discussion thread Bought new iMac 20″ Faded Screen, which began on August 7 (the day the new iMacs were first sold). The thread had, until it was locked earlier this week, served as the major focal point for discussion of the gradient color issue that continues to trouble owners of 20″ and at least some 24″ 2007 iMacs.

The discussion thread had seen a recent surge in activity since it was mentioned in the article below, and since the beginning of the holiday shopping season. From August 7 to November 18, a 95 day period, the thread chalked up an impressive 15,000+ hits, an average of about 158 hits per day. However, in the time since then, November 19 to December 10, a period of only 21 days, the thread gained an additional 9000 hits, an average of about 429 hits per day.

Further exacerbating the censorship matter, new posts regarding the gradient color issue are being deleted and replaced with error messages, as seen in this example: iMac Screen Gradient - What’s the next step? (we captured a screen shot of the post before it was deleted). Apple has not replied to any of the posts regarding the gradient color issue in its Intel-based iMac Display support forum, or for that matter, even acknowledged the existence of such an issue.

I can’t even believe I used to drool over their products.

As soon as I got word that my Blackbird was somewhere in San Diego on its path to my house…my wife and I got ready. She was at the window, ready to alert me of the UPS man. I was doing stretches because I heard this thing was heavy and gigantic…like it’s owner.

Get ready for a ton of pictures. This may very well be the longest picture blog post I have ever done.

The UPS man was like “is this a server?” The box is huge. It should come with wheels.

2 stick figure people needed to lift this computer.

That’s me…all excited, but still needing to cook dinner.

Ah, releasing the Canadian air.

The installation poster–pshhh.

Lifting box one. The accessories were in here (keyboard, mouse, manual, and cables).

Sweet…the Razer Keyboard. It’s the Tarantula model that VoodooPC includes with the Omen machine.

A look at the software and manuals.

The Razer DeathAdder mouse, VoodooPC branded, no less.

In case I had crazier video card needs (past my 8800GT SLI setup that this includes), here are the cables.

My CD of drivers, all Blackbird looking.

Some Blackbird schwag.

All the manuals come in this neato Blackbird-branded box.

And now to open up the Blackbird itself.

First to stand up the box with the system in it.

I am trying to lift it. I knew it was going to be heavy, but seriously–this is heavy.

Liquid-cooled. Nice.

Corsair Dominator RAM.

The motherboard has a little LCD screen in the back.

Seriously…am I the only person who likes Vista? Why is it being panned by everyone (including possibly Bill himself?).

For me, it’s as fast as XP…looks better. Sure, the UAC got annoying, but disable that. And it runs my programs that I’ve been running for years.

Leopard, yeah–that was a disappointment. I still can’t login to my Apple account without repeatedly mashing my buttons to try to login with my strong password. And it’s been like this for a couple months now. Apple! You are making me swear on the inside.

Anyhow…that’s a previous post.

To add, it looks like Vista fewer flaws than any other OS last year. Yeah–check it out. Sure it didn’t have very much driver support during the first few moments of its release. People! Vista is built on Windows 2003–a server OS. If you work in the industry, try running a server OS with anything less than 2 gigs along side your gaming video card and Sound Blaster audio card. It’s unheard of, though Vista is trying. It’s rock solid, which is more than I can say about the OS from that fruit company that shall remain nameless.

But I think this is the year that Apple can kiss my ass. For the past several years, we all have drooled over Apple products–me perhaps more than anyone. I have been thinking of this for a while…I figure now is a good time. I have to say this.

Apple Company–you suck.

For several reasons really.

Let’s see, last year I bought my iPhone only to find that it dropped $200 mere weeks later. OK…early adopter’s tax, I suppose. OK, OK. I’ll let that slip. That, after coming out with a "smartphone" with no tasks list. C’mon. And don’t get me started on the deep sunken headphone port. I am beginning to not like my iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it’s large screen, email client, and true-web surfing, but it sucks at replacing the devices it was supposed to. Once the other companies come out with these items (like Windows Mobile 7 or Google Android), my iPhone will be simply another music player with a low-rate audio chip.

Then I remembered the whole $2.00 upgrade fee to get the 802.11n that my Macbook already had. What?! Seriously, on the PC side of the fence, this would never have been an issue.

Also, after I installed Leopard (which, by the way, sucks more than Vista–but why is Vista getting all the hate?), I couldn’t login to my account on my computer because half of my keyboard stopped working and I couldn’t apply my "strong password" anymore. What was Apple’s fix? Use an external keyboard. Seriously? SERIOUSLY? It’s a laptop–there’s a keyboard there already!

Leopard sucks. I know I mentioned it earlier, but dude. It sucks. What does it do that Tiger didn’t? Oh yeah, have bugs in the hundreds! Stop my keyboard from working. Drop support for a ton of great apps. The one app, THE ONE APP, that I was hoping would bring happiness in my PIM life on the iPhone failed to deliver. Mail.app–still no task list on my phone. Today, as I write this, I am still perturbed that a task list has not been implemented for the Apple iPhone (jailbreaking, not withstanding–yet even those tasks lists blow). Dude. my Visor PDA from the mid 90’s had it. I thought the Mail.app would somehow unlock it. Nope. So what does Tiger have that I like? Time Machine sucks. And Apple even had nearly half a decade to copy it properly from Microsoft Windows Server. So what? A see-through menu bar? Stupid.

Then, to top it all off–the news we got from this past week’s keynote. OK, the iPhone got cell phone triangulation–OK, the Apple TV is having a second chance to prove itself as a tethered iPod to the TV. But to charge $20 to iPod Touch users to get an update for their device? That’s crap. CRAP. Dude, when the new Microsoft Zune’s came out, Microsoft gave out the firmware to flash the first generation Zunes so that they did not lose any functionality. Oh–and it was FREE!

Then my wife tells me about this blogger who approached Steve Jobs this week to ask for a picture. He dismissed her with a "That’s rude" reply and had a small circle of people surrounding him snigger at her. Boo to Steve. You and your uppity entourage can kiss my ass. Not that I ever expected him to be a nice guy (at least Bill Gates gives some money to charity and seems as approachable as my college mates).

Robert Scoble got the reaction mere seconds after this and it’s published for all to see here. Think Rude.

I like Apple computers. Yes. I do. The Mac Mini introduced me to green computing. The Macbook Pro is small, fast, and neat looking. But you know what? I enjoy running Windows Vista on it more. Their machines continue to be beautiful and sexy. But much like the cheap department store, Walmart–once you have a problem with the executives, you begin to have a disdain for the rest of the organization.

2008 is going to be my year of Apple detoxing.

Oh yeah. I have the best wife ever. Even before last week, when she let me get this mutha!

This is the HP Blackbird. Better than a Mac Pro.