I was listening to "This Week in Tech" this afternon while jogging - I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the basic errors that flow through the show by this time, but today's was kind of a fun one. They had Molly Wood from "Buzz Out Loud" on, and since Dvorak was also on, they got into the whole Mac vs. PC thing. That's when the utter misinformation segment started :)

Now, I know some people have PCs and Macs that just act up compared to the norm - so it's possible tjat Molly Wood had one of those. However, she made a number of assertions that just left me going "huh, what?" In order, she said:

• Macs boot more slowly than Windows Boxes
• The iLife apps (iPhoto especially) are unusable, and crash a lot
• There's no way to view images in Finder other than one by one via preview

Hmm. My 2 year old G4 Mac Mini boots remarkably faster than the Thinkpad - it would be hard for me to compare the MacBook Pro - I've only rebooted it once so far. My daughter lives in iPhoto, and, when I told her this story in the car, she just laughed, and said that clearly, the person on the show had no idea what they were on about - which is also what applies to the final point. Here's Finder in image view mode:

Took me a second or two to figure that one out; it involved selecting a menu option. There's also a handy slider that allows you make the thumbnails bigger or smaller.

This again leads me back to my general skepticism about reporters. When they talk about subjects I know something abut, more often than not, they're wrong. Often very, very wrong. That in turn makes me skeptical about everything else, whether it's science reporting, political reporting, what have you. "Trust but Verify" seems to apply to all reporting. It probably always has though, and it's just easier to notice now.

Technorati Tags: reporting