I was downloading a free iPhone app at noon, and I thought: some of these applications have no good alternative in the browser world. Imagine everyone could start using/buying the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch applications right in their browser. You give your Apple ID, you purchase an app like ColorSplash and off you go. Some of the multi-touch interface would be hard to emulate, but still. It would have to be an Apple application that does it: like e.g. iTunes. It’s got your Apple ID anyway. Why not run a virtual iPod Touch in there?
The advantages:
- some applications for iPhone/iPod just have no worthy counterpart in the ‘normal’ world.
- an application would run immediately on Apple MacOSX as well as Windows XP/Vista/7
- the iPhone developers wouldn’t be looking anymore at a potential audience of some X million iPhone owners, but at all iTunes owners.
Research analyst Sam Bhavnani, of the market research firm Current Analysis, says that iTunes has 200 million users. Research analyst Shaw Wu, of the market research firm American Technology Research, gives a figure of 100 million. Oddly, Apple itself gives a much lower number: 10 million.
Google Answers
Seth Godin came up with a visualisation of ‘means of communication’: bandwidth vs sync(chronicity). He took a number of ‘old’ (postal mail, radio) and ‘new’ (blogs, Youtube and -of course- Twitter) technologies and ranked them on a 2D graph according to ‘quality’ (density or bandwidth) and ’sync’ (speed of reaction).
Although it is an interesting way of visualizing things, and I consider Seth a very bright and creative guy, I am bothered by the fact that the graph is neither clear, correct nor complete.
Continue reading ‘Seth’s bandwidth vs synchronicity graph: it’s a start’
Ok, she’s not Kate Moss, and he’s not Inspector Morse, but you get the general idea. If you father a child once you’re past 70 years old, the kid’s gonna have bags under the eyes.
made with www.faceresearch.org/demos/baby – via infosthetics.com
On a totally unrelated note: thanks for all the nice emails, SMSes, IM’s and other Facebook pokes I received for my 38th birthday. If I didn’t reply immediately: I had a wonderful weekend with the woman I love. I can only hope the rest of the year will continue on the same elan.
Look wat ‘experts’ are still telling in the courtroom:
The HP Pavilion computer obtained from McGuire’s attorney’s office had a 60 gigabyte hard drive, and not all of it was searched by Seymour.
She told the jury that it is known in the computer industry that if information stored on a 12 gigabyte computer was put on paper it would create a stack of paper higher than the Empire State Building.
from dailyrecord.com
There was a time once when PCs were just overevolved typewriters and it made sense to express everything in “number of pages”. That time has long gone. Let’s convert that 12 GB into today’s storage currencies:
- 12 GB is the equivalent of 17 CD-ROMs of data (700MB)
- not yet 3 full DVDs (4.7GB)
- Not even one HD-DVD (15/30GB) or Blu-Ray (25/50GB) disc
- 4000 3MB (+-8 megapixel) pictures in JPG format
- 12 days of MP3 recordings (at 96Kbps)
- 16 episodes (not even one full season) of Lost, Prison Break or Heroes
Moreover, a conversion to typed-out A4s only makes sense if you specify font-size, spacing, margins and usage of duplex printing, in which case it remains an impractical antiquated unit.
A jury full of technophobes/non-experts shouldn’t be baffled with exaggerations like a “tower the size of the Empire State”. If you do not take into account the operating system, programs, images, music and movies, what remains on a hard disk of searchable data created by the owner? Maybe 2-5 gigabytes, thanks to MS Office’s bloated file formats. And the most important stuff for computer forensics is maybe 5MB: browser history, cookies, IM transcripts, emails and Office documents converted to text.
After a conversation with Ine on HD formats (1080i vs. 1080p), I researched the topic a bit further. Let me resume some of the things I have learned up till now:
Real HD and HD-ready
HD or ‘high definition’ as defined for screens, projectors and TV, defines 2 resolutions. The smaller one has 720 lines of each 1280 pixels, the bigger one 1080 lines of each 1920 pixels. They can be used with different frame rates: refreshed at 24 fps (a common movie standard) up to 50/60fps (often used for TV). To limit the necessary bandwidth in some cases ‘interlaced scanning’ is used: 1 frame contains all the odd lines, the next only the even lines. This effectively halves the throughput, at the cost of image quality (rapid moving lines appear jagged).
The two most common formats are:
- 720p60: 1280×720, 60 fps progressive scanning, used e.g. in USA-based HDTV broadcasts
- 1080i50 or 1080i60: 1920×1080, 50 or 60 fps interlaced scanning. The higher resolution makes it better for larger screens and movies, but the interlacing has a bad influence on fast moving images (like e.g. sports).
What kind of resolution do we have now? Regular digital TV (SD or ‘Standard Definition’) consists of 480 lines of 720 pixels each. DVD, for instance, allows for 480i and 480p. So, HD delivers at least 3x that resolution.
“HD Ready“, a label that a lot of TVs/screens carry now, just indicates that:
- The minimum native resolution of the display (e.g. LCD, PDP) or display engine (e.g. DLP) is 720 physical lines in wide aspect ratio.
- The display device accepts HD input via Analogue YPbPr1, DVI or HDMI
- HD capable inputs accept the following HD video formats: 1280×720 @ 50 and 60Hz progressive (“720p”), and 1920×1080 @ 50 and 60Hz interlaced (“1080i”)
- The DVI or HDMI input supports content protection (HDCP)
from eicta.org (PDF)
Even if the display can only show 720p, and so must ‘downsample’ an incoming 1080i signal to that lower resolution, it can be called “HD Ready”.
Continue reading ‘HD – 720p, 1080i and 1080p’
I spent Saturday with Clo at IBC 2006 (Amsterdam), an exhibition about content creation, management and delivery. As boring as that may sound, we did see some neat stuff.
HARDWARE
First of all, IBC is a paradise for hardware freaks. I’ve never seen so many 30″ plus flat screen displays on such a limited surface. One vendor combined 6 of those into one impressive control room. Accenture was showing off a huge touchscreen display for geo-applications, which reminded of Minory Report. Apple had dropped off several truckloads of equipment, including a full XServe RAID rack which probably packed more than 30 Terabytes. A nice rack to look at.
There are camera support cranes and extensible poles up to 15m high. We saw a lot of steadycam demos, and one guy did a steadycam demo that was some mix between martial arts and ballet.
All vendors of blue screen/green screen solutions for broadcast purposes showed of their equipment with one or more blond girls. Must be the best hair colour for blue screen effects.
Continue reading ‘IBC Amsterdam: bigger, better, faster’
Statistically improbable, but there you have it: both my machines (Laptop – Windows XP, Desktop – Windows 2003) are swiftly breaking down at the same time. The following things all happened in the last week:
- DESKTOP: Upgraded to iTunes 6.0.4 (I think), and the program hasn’t started up at all ever since. No more ripping my CDs, no more podcasts. I’ve gotten a pop-up to upgrade my iTunes on the laptop too: erm, no, I don’t think so.
- DESKTOP: inserting a DVD in the drive halts the machine. Like, mouse freezes and everything. Power button is the only solution
- DESKTOP: upon booting, the machine now gives me between 3-5 error messages. iTunes, obviously, but also Firefox (multiple times). Those popups with a “Send a message to Microsoft?” You bet I’m sending!
- LAPTOP: couldn’t get a VPN connection going. Errors at different stages, but always an error. Seems to have been solved by upgrading my ZoneAlarm firewall, but loads of other stuff has gone wrong since that install
- LAPTOP: Power management went belly-up. I can’t shut down properly (PC hangs on wall paper or just after), I can’t suspend nor hibernate (neither with the key combination or via the shutdown menu)
- LAPTOP: USB stopped working. No more sync with the N91, no more sync with the iPod (doesn’t even charge), no more transfer of my pictures. Couleur Cafe is coming up and I’m going to take hundreds of pictures to post (some) on Brussel.blogt.be. Joy!
I always gathered that one PC would break down before the other, and I’d go through the work of moving all data to the good one, reformat and reinstall Windows on the first and go from there. As it is now, I’m not sure which one I can consider to be the ‘good’ one. I need a good working portable for Friday (Couleur Cafe), but I’m in the middle of finishing a project on that machine and I hadn’t really calculated an OS reinstall in my Gantt chart.
Wednesday is Windows Vista demo time @ Microsoft Belgium headquarters. That might be an option …
(No “switch to MacOSX” comments please. Not gonna happen.)
Writing code in your browser, it’s coming this way, I tell you! Some indications:
- my own WikiRAD article (July 2005)
- Playing around with PHP and wikis at the same time made me think on how web-based editing and compiling would be a good way to develop and run web applications
- Feed43
- Create an RSS feed out of any web page by using regular expressions with a nifty Web2.0 user interface. Lots of services are based on URLs and use RSS as input, so this can be the start of a first application. E.g. I just created an RSS feed for the Stubru playlist pages out of a Stubru Javascript file. Imagine I could now tell Feed43:
for each item in feed_that_I_just_created {
parse_the item_url
publish an rss feed for this item_url as feed_url_X
}
and then start working with that content too.
- Amazon S3
- web-based outsourced storage for any application, which made John Keyes and Peter Van Dijck to ask themselves: “Can you use Amazon S3 to create the new Flickr killer?”, and which made me think: but what if not only the storage, but the whole program was run by a 3rd party?
- Iamalpha (via Richard McManus)
- AOL’s new initiative for building microformat-based applications. It’s a bit early to grasp the extent what what they’re trying to accomplish, but I think it’s potentially more than just widgets. They don’t have a web-based IDE yet, but they do have a copy/paste code-validator. Most importantly: the applications are run by AOL!
- YouOS (via Jeremy Zawodny)
a web-based OS that allows you to develop Javascript-based applications in a web-based IDE, with version control and compiling. It’s one of the products coming out of Paul Graham’s Y-combinator startup incubator.
Continue reading ‘Web-based web development’
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