Online shared intelligence

So, another day went by, and I am still trying to recover from the mess I described in my last post, about upgrading to Apple OS X Leopard (or was it Leper?) 10.5.2. I have by now gone through the typical curve Stress vs. Time, that goes from suspended disbelief (I am sure this is something minor) to the oh shit moment, to increasing exasperation caudes by the idiocy of brands and the power of the large corporations (that component seems to always be there), to gradual understanding of the causes of the problem, and finally to the sweet and sour process of fixing the mess, with increasing confidence, and (I never did, and I will never do it again) some level of realization of the personal responsibility in the disaster.

 So, I am fixing the problem. Not out of the water yet, but a few things I have learned:

Let me state very clearly that it is not my intention to pick up a zeallot fight. I am NOT a hacker, I am not an expert, just your regular user who has found a couple applications he/she depends on, and uses them regularly. I expect thousands of such users to be in the same situation as I am now, and thus I decided to share my experiences.

I use a quad-processor Mac G5, 2.5 Gb memory, Quadro 4500 Video Card driving two Cinema 30 inch monitors. The machine has 750 Gb internal disk, plus 4 Tb of external disks. Not a low end system, not one that can “barely run” the OS. Further, with OS X 10.4 the machine was a screamer, running Aperture with thousand of pictures of 20 Mb each, and at the same time flying through three or four other simultaneous heavy-load programs like Photoshop.

So, one day Safari breaks.