Steve Jobs & the Digital Era

An interesting juxtaposition this week.

On Wednesday, we lost Steve Jobs after his long fight with pancreatic cancer. Steve was of course a tremendous force in innovation in Personal Computers including the Macintosh.

One of the first digital cameras available to the public was the Apple Quicktake 100 back in 1994. While it wasn't a commercial success for Apple, the entire consumer market for photography underwent a profound earthquake of change from this disruptive technology. Today, film is virtually gone, as are also many small local camera stores. We still have cameras, of course, but they're now digitally based and our methods of making photo albums have also changed, with custom self-published books.

What also happened this week was the culmination of an overly long photo album project. Back in 2004, we went to Peru and with primarily an SLR, came back home with roughly 2000 images ... 75% of which were on 35mm film. A lot of digitizing and organization (no EXIF data) followed in intermittent spurts, but has now finally been concluded: an analog/digital hybrid.

This wasn't our first digital photo album, but it was quite a tedious one to work through, because of it being transitional from its analog component. It reminds us how years of innovation and improvements by people like Steve Jobs have resulted in greater productivity and ease of creating finished products - - hopefully, we won't become jaded and complacent when we realize not only how recent these innovations have been, but also how much more flexibility & freedom they have given us in making great works too.

Our parents grew up in in age where automobiles were young, airplanes were infants, telephones were new ... and then as they raised us, the solid state transistor was invented, which enabled Man's landing on the moon, as well as many other innovations. And in the closet, there's probably some classical old photo albums. Take some time this weekend to see your parents and pull out a few of those preserved memories ... and if you're smart, you'll take a digital photo of each of its pages, and if the images contain familymembers, you'll also record the names & relationships for future generations.

-hh

A quick word on 'snowfall' photographs

(Alternate Title: "A foot of snow later...")

Thanks to it being an El Nino winter, there's been quite a bit of wintery mix precipitation that's been hitting the Northeastern USA this past month.

As such, there's the temptation to go take a digital photo that you're going to email to family & friends (probably to get some sympathy for snow shoveling).

So you go out and take a photo during the storm ... and all that nice white snow turns out a yucky dark grey in the photo - - that's probably not what you wanted, so why did this happen?

The short answer is "technology", specifically, your camera's automatic exposure system.

Yes, we've become quite accustomed to auto-everything cameras, but a downside of this is that the camera never knows what you're photographing, so it guesses.

Simplistically, this "guess" is known as 18% grey, and while it works great 90% of the time for us, where it doesn't work so well is when we have a low contrast scene - - and during a heavy snowfall is a low contrast scene.

With a low contrast scene, the camara's educated guesses often goes wrong: it is looking for "dark AND grey AND bright" contrasts, but it can't find what's not there.

So while a white cow in a snowstorm (light on light) or a black cat in a coal mine (dark on dark) are both intuitively obvious to us, for the camera, it sees both as low contrast and hard to figure out. Subsequently, it can get the overall exposure settings wrong.

Typically, the camera's bad guess is that the cow/snow is "too bright" of an overall scene (it can't find true black), so it sets for a short exposure, which turns white into grey (underexposed). Similarly, the cat/coal is interpreted as "too dark" (can't find bright white), so it calls for a long exposure...and this turns black into grey (overexposed).

Here's an example of an image that's was a low contrast light scene, so it was auto-exposed to be a bad "grey" shot (underexposed), which was corrected later in post-processing:


The trick to avoid this problem is pretty simple: be aware of how your 'automatic' camera settings work, and anticipate what it will do based upon what you know is in the picture. The simple rule of thumb to remember is that the camera will want to turn everything grey if the scene lacks a good cue (bright sunny sky for contrast) to help it out.

With digital, its pretty easy to take a test shot and then adjust your settings. And if you forget (or not bother), you can fix the incorrect exposures later in post-processing. Its up to you to decide how much its worth a little bit more effort upfront when taking the picture, both to get better overall results, as well as to save time later from less post-processing.


And of course, if you do choose to override the default exposure while taking the photo to get what you want, do also make sure to remember to set your override settings back to normal afterwords.


-hh

Photography Retrospective

The above link refers to the top 100 photography blogs, as per Sarah Scraffod. Its an interesting ...and useful... mix.

It served as a reminder to me that my images are getting backlogged. There's still 1000+ images to review & import from Tanzania last month. Plus there's tons of old stuff that should probably be revisited and either scanned or rescanned, such as this 1994 image from Yellowstone Canyon:


Approx 10 year old flatbed scan of 120 film (Mamiya 645)

I don't even know if 'sharpen' filters existed back when this one was done. By today's standards, its resolution is downright fuzzy.


-hh

Making a left turn in Albuqurque

It seems that the end-of-year travel isn't quite over yet. A short notice meeting, but it did the afford the opportunity to catch up with a familymember.

With a few hours on Sunday to see the region, we travelled on the Sandia Peak tram ("World's Longest passenger aerial tramway") to the top of Sandia Peak. At an elevation of 10,378 feet, this sea level flatlander was sucking wind. At least I remembered from Cuzco, Peru to go slow and not over-exert.

After attending business, the return home wasn't quite smooth, due to delays caused by heavy rain in the NYC metro area, but it could have been a lot worse than an extra ~2 hours.

And my thoughts were "At least I've now flown on American Airlines in 2008 so as to keep that Frequent Flier account still technically active", but FFM accounts vary in their rules and AAdvantage has expired another 34,625 miles on me this year.

And in this age of computers, my most recent flights on AA from two days ago still haven't posted their mileage credits.

...and the airlines wonder why I have clear preferences as to where I take my business when I have a reasonable choice in the matter.

-hh

Iranian photoshop manipulation? An illustration

There's been media reports (eg, NY Times) this week about Iran's missile test ... and how the images distributed very well likely might have been faked - - a Photoshop manipulation.

I'm sure others have already done this, but I didn't notice any examples, so I've put one together quickly for anyone else looking for the same: here's a very simple Photoshop overlay of the two ("4 missiles" and "3 missiles") photographs, so that people can decide for themselves how suspicious they are of if this is (or isn't) a manipulation.




In other words, 'decide for yourself'.
(you can click on the image for a larger version)


-hh

Green Snake Oil?

In the news today: Toyota is planning on putting a solar panel on their Prius.

Sounds good, doesn't it? An electric hybrid that's able to be partially powered by the sun.

Well...

How are we sure that its not essentially just a clever sales gimmick?

Here's one take on the "Reality Check" of physics.

A conventional solar panel (Mitsubishi; Sharp) provides 185W of output, and is 65" long x 33" wide: call it roughly 5ft x 3ft. Let's assume no sunroof, so you can install two of them on the roof of a car like a Prius.

Those two panels result in roughly 370W of power under ideal conditions. Let's assume that there's another 10% of roof real estate available and round up the number to a conveniently easy to work with 400W of output.

The article (see link) reports that the A/C system needs up to 5kW of power. Standardizing units, that's 5,000W.

Thus, the panel can provide (400W/5,000W) = 8% of the A/C system's peak demand.

Thus, you can run your A/C "totally on solar" if you only run it at ~8% of its capacity. That doesn't sound like all that much cooling capacity to me.

Okay, let's look at things differently: let's assume that the solar panels can charge the battery pack, even though this isn't mentioned in the article. While we're also at it, let's be an irrational optimist and assume that this storage will be 100% efficient and has no other trade-off factors (such as needing a bigger battery).

So how much power can we store? Classically, solar systems are discussed and designed around the time of day which results in roughly 80% of the total daily collection. This is commonly defined as 10AM-3PM, which is a period of 5 hours. True, there is solar gain before 10AM and after 3PM, but generally it isn't planned for too much, as the sun angle, strength and shading factors are some of the factors for why the panels run at below their ratings and all of these other hours of daylight only collect around ~20%. This is classical Pareto Principle.

So in those 5 hours of good gain, the panels will run at their rating, so this sytem will generate 5hr * 400W =2,000W-Hrs.

Continuing to assume that idealized 100% efficient storage battery, this means that the system can provide 0.4 hours (24 minutes) worth of full A/C per day. For a to/from work commute, that's 12 minutes each way...assuming that you park your car in the sun at work and don't go out to lunch.

Okay, it is better than nothing, but do keep in mind that those panels aren't free. Their retail price is around $2,000.

And more importantly, they aren't weighless. In standard trim, they're just over 35lbs each. Figure that with packaging economies, they can be reduced from 70lbs down to around a 50lb increase in vehicle curb weights. Now ask yourself: an increase of 50lbs in the vehicle's weight hurt the car's fuel economy by how much?

And ditto for that idealized 100% efficient battery. To do 2000 W-hr worth of power storage, you're roughly going to need a battery roughly the size/capacity of a standard automotive Lead-Acid battery. In NiMH, I'd SWAG it at another $500 and 25-30lbs increase in curb weight.

This is just a quick "back of envelope" system analysis, but it looks like at least a 50% salesmanship snake oil for a 'Green' product to me at this point. I'd personally like to see a more comprehensive one done with real values, to specifically include how much the vehicle's cost goes up, weight goes up and MPG goes down (because of that higher weight).

Don't hold your breath.


-hh

Psystar Mac clone could save me all of $18!

Here's an interesting confluence of observations:

Despite what Ben Charny (Dow Jones Newswires) claims:

"At $400, the Psystar box is a quarter of the cost of Apple's Mac Mini, the Apple computer most like Psystar's."

... the facts are that the MSRP on the basic Apple Macintosh mini is $599.
Not 4 x $400 = $1600. A wee Journalistic 'Oops'.

So the difference isn't that dramatic.

But what's also been quickly lost in the noise is that the $400 price being thrown around for the Psytar Macintosh clone doesn't include Mac OS, for which they want an additional $155 for Leopard (10.5), which brings its real (honest) price to $554 total.

So the difference is: $599 - $554 = $45.

$45 is less than a 10% difference, yet people are so excited over it with this new clone.

But this $45 difference is before one even start to look for deals on the Apple mini, such as if one is eligible for a discount (such as EDU). Well, as a Federal Employee, it turns out that I can buy the base mini from Apple for $563, so the price difference for me is a whopping $18.

So if I'm willing risk IP/EULA issues, as well as not have a functional Apple 'Software Update' feature to maintain the system, I can save all of $18?

Thanks, but no thanks.


-hh

John Gilmore was right

I recently ran across what I thought would be an interesting blog from former Apple Executive  for Federal sales, David Sobotta.   After a fairly straightforward dialog exchange ... which by definition, must have included some elements of disagreement (else why bother to reply), Dave terminated the dialog.  The topic wasn't really all that important, or profound: we simply disagreed, based on our personal perspectives.  It didn't even bother me if Mr. Sobotta wanted to curtail the discussion because he tired of it, nor even using his Moderator responsibility to have done this...that would have merely been rude.  

Instead, what bothered me was that he cut things off so as to get the last word in, a childish way to "win" a disagreement.  FWIW, this isn't my interpretation of what happened, for in this blog posting  David made his motive and intentions explicitly clear that that was precisely what he chose to do. 

Were I willing to stoop to David's level, I could have listed each of my discussion points here, where David can't touch it, to childishly get in my own "last word".  But I loathe being a hypocrite, so that won't be happening here.

So why am I writing anything?  Because this is unfortunately yet another example of something that I'm finding disappointing ... no, make that downright disturbing ... which is yet another example of someone who proves himself incapable of recognizing that with the Information Genie out of the bottle, all liars invariably get caught.  

  

This is precisely what Gilmore was warning of a decade ago:  the nature of IT is that if one tries to squash something in one outlet, there's now hundreds of alternative venues, so the word still gets out.  

There's already been hundreds of corporations who have learned this lesson by getting burned over the past decade - they were applying their 20th Century belief that they can manipulate and selectively lie without getting caught - - but then got caught, courtesy of this unbottled IT Genie.  It is effectively the Pandora's Box of the 21st Century.  

Overall, it does seem that there's a segment of the population who are otherwise very very smart people who think that their intelligence lets them stay on top of the lies that they make and avoid self-contradiction.  Unfortunately for them (my online friends know that I'm probably thinking of a certain former Clemson University Professor too), archives have a 'perfect' memory that merely takes perseverance to search, which reveals the self-contradictory claims and other hyperbola that people try to employ to obscure reality to try to force it to conform to their biases.

Thus, as John Gilmore reportedly said:

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".

And the latest example is in the news this week, namely the drama of the website "Wikileaks", which posted documents that revealed criminal banking activities in the Cayman Islands.  It is the apparent crook who is trying to get the website shut down, so as to squelch the dissemination of evidence of his criminal activity.   But in the meantime, the news of the event has probably caused a few thousand more copies to get spawned.   To try to suppress them all is an exercise in futility, so the next thing we know, the criminal will be claiming that he's a victim...of getting caught.  

-hh

Thinking about buying hybrid automobile?

Hybrids are all the rage whenever there's a spike in gasoline prices.

But while they might save you some gas, are they really saving you money? Afterall, isn't "saving money" usually the real reason why people want better gas mileage?

So lets see if a hybrid car really does saves us money or not.

There's a lot of things that go into the expense of operating an automobile. Its original cost, insurance, fuel, maintenance, etc. The sum of all of these is around 41 cents per mile, as per IRS tax law provisions (for non-cash donations to charity, etc). But I'm going to simplify things and only look at two of the variables, assuming that the others aren't going to change much.

The two I'm going to look at is the differences in fuel and maintenance expenses.

Fuel seems obvious...miles per gallon. Yup, its that simple, but I'm going to flip it over, to "cents per mile".

But maintenance isn't so straightforward, because Hybrid vehicle technology is more complicated than conventional automotive engines (including diesels). Simplistically, it is a conventional engine, "plus some other stuff" to pay to maintain. Without getting down into the weeds, I'm just going to consider two main components, the electric motor and the battery pack.

Let's get started:

The battery pack: when the Toyota Prius first came out, one of the pieces of information that was also released was the engineering acknowledgment that batteries don't last forever, and that having a bigger battery is going to cost more to replace than that single one that all cars have under the hood. At the time, Toyota estimated that the battery pack would last 100,000 miles, whereupon the cost to replace would be around $3,000. These numbers have probably since been updated, but I'm going to stick with these because they were real numbers and they serve as a good illustration of the cost comparison process: when we amortize this $3000 expense over its 100,000 lifespan, we get ($3,000/100,000) = 3 cents per mile.

The electric motor: its maintenance is hopefully zero, but some will break and need repairs that won't be cheap, plus it will eventually wear out. I don't really want to claim numbers because I've not researched any. However, if its similar to a clutch and/or transmission rebuild, we can probably expect half of a fleet will need such a service done by 100,000 miles and that it will cost at least $1,000. If you do the math, that works out to (1 cent per mile per vehicle)(50% service rate) = 0.5 cent/mile. For sake of keeping this analysis simple, we can assume that this is the lower limit for the sum of a bunch of the new electrical system components , such as the accompanying high voltage harness, etc. Keep in mind that the exact value isn't as important as how it is then used in the cost evaluation process.

And before I go on, it is true that we don't see these costs on a day-to-day basis: they show up when the car eventually gets service or repair, or by when we sell or trade-in the car before the repair is needed: more wear is invariably be reflected in a lower resale price, just like how you'll get a higher price after you've just made repairs, new tires, etc.


Okay, so the simple summary of the above essentially is that a hybrid costs more to keep maintained, and based on just these two factors, our estimate of this these expenses are (3 + 0.5) cents per mile driven.

And what this means is ~46 MPG (Prius) isn't the whole story: its 46MPG with a 3.5 cent/mile handicap that needs to be better, and we need to figure out the math to see if that's the case or not.

Assume: Regular Gasoline at $3.00/gal

46 MPG is thus: $3.00 / 46 miles = 6.5 cents per mile (direct fuel cost).

6.5 cents/mile + 3.5 cents/mile hybrid higher costs = 10 cents/mile (incremental hybrid cost)

Converting 10 cents/mile back into MPG: ($3.00/0.10) = 30 MPG

Thus, a Prius that's actually getting 46 MPG is the same as a normal car that's getting 30 MPG after we factor in the hybrid's higher incremental maintenance costs.

And since there's diesels that can do better than 30 MPG (even after we handicap their fuel cost), the simple bottom line is that a hybrid doesn't have the lowest cost per mile.

Do feel free to update & refine my numbers to make them more accurate.  However, you can't violate the general process of accounting for all operating expenses, and in particular the simple fact that a more complicated machine inevitably costs more to maintain.

-hh

Irony of technology

I don't want to be OS evangelizing or political...

Nor do I really use You Tube much at all...

But I stumbled across this one in a technology article, and it has a certain irony to it:




Overall, it is inevitable that our computers will evolve and have different UI's than they have today. However, the consumer still gets to decide if he wants it or not. Thanks, but if we have room for something the size of a chest freezer, its going to be a chest freezer!

Other ironies in technology include those optional 'hands free' cellphone interfaces on new cars: a couple of years ago, I passed on one as it simply wasn't anywhere near worth the $1800 asking price for the feature. I'm still trying to figure out why it cost so much. I see the same thing happening today with navigation systems for automobiles: you can easily pay well over a Grand for one built into the dashboard from the OEM, or you can add an automotive GPS later yourself that sits on top of the dash from Garmin starting at only $200. Anyone care to explain why it costs so much to (figuratively) toss it into a reserved empty hole in a dashboard?


-hh