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

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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.

NOT CLEAR

• I have the impression that the horizontal axis of synchronous/asynchronous in the graph is a fuzzy concept. What is it actually? The average time between the creating of the message and the reception thereof? Or between the sending and the receving of a response? Radio is totally synchronous in its transmission but is very one-to-many: you can’t easily react nor are you expected to. I would like an axis with a unit of measure. Is it expressed in time (seconds/hours/days)? Wouldn’t a measure of one-to-one vs one-to-many be a more appropriate axis?
• Also the bandwidth axis is not clearly defined. Is it something like Kbps/Mbps for 1 individual message? Or is it the average size of 1 message? Is is the bandwidth from the point of view of the creator (writing one Tweet of 140 chars every hour) or that of the consumer (getting 20 Tweets a minute from all your Twitter friends)?

NOT CORRECT

• Why are IM (chatting) and SMS (texting) taken as one? They are different in bandwidth (SMS are shorter and take longer to write) and in synchronicity (chatting is a faster medium: you type with a real keyboard).
• How can you put the whole of ‘art’ as one data point? Theatre? Painting? Music?
• Most of all: what is Twitter doing in that ‘hot spot’ on the right bottom? Twitter is low bandwidth, yes, but not lower than texting, and it is maybe fast but still asynchronous, so should certainly be to the left of IM/chat. It seems like Twitter is there because it would be so cool to have it exactly there.

NOT COMPLETE

• podcasts, as it would be nice to see where to put them compared to ‘talk radio’.
• Skype (conf) call with video?
• Fax/Telex/VHS/DVD
• Email can be one-to-one (like chat but more asynchronous) or one-to-many (newsletter, close to talk radio). Are both uses considered the same?

One can’t post a reply on Seth’s blog, and I’d like the graph to mature a bit. I think that with some better definition of axis and data points it will be  a good way to categorize means of communication. And I’m certainly interested to see what it will look like then.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

Bandwidth for HD

You might know my interest in bandwidth, so what do these HD standards translate in? I’m not taking any compression into account:

• 720p60: 1280×720 gives 0,92 megapixels per frame. If we take a 24-bit color value per pixel (RGB), this means 2,76 MB data per frame, which multiplied with the 60fps gives 1,3 Gbps or 165 MB/s.
• 1080i60: 1920×1080 means a 2 megapixel frame which translates into 6,2MB per frame. The interlacing cuts the bitrate in half: 6,2MB x 60 / 2 = 1,49 Gbps or 186 MB/s.
• 1080p60 is obviously double the throughput of 1080i: 2,98 Gbps or 373 MB/s

HD-DVD and Blu-ray?

For those hoping for 1080p from HD DVD, don’t hold your breath—Toshiba confirmed that the data is recorded on HD DVD in 1080i, and there are no plans to change that. The players have already been designed for 1080i discs, and it would take a redesign to enable them to handle 1080p discs, even if there were plans to produce them.
from guidetohometheater.com

Blu-Ray already has a Samsung player capable of playing 1080p discs. But at $999 that’s a pricy gamble of the fact that 1) Blu-Ray will not be the Betamax of HD and 2) movies will actually be mastered as 1080p Blu-Ray.

1080p is the best

Sure, 1080p is the best resolution home devices could have these days. There are some issues with that, however:

• almost no sources are capable of delivering 1080p input. HDTV can do 1080i at the best, DVDs give you 480p, Blu-ray doesn’t do it yet, HD-DVD will never have it.
• bandwidth requirements are painful. 1080p generates image data at 3Gbps. We need better compression algorithms than MPEG2 to get that down to manageable bitrates. MPEG4 or JPEG2000 might help.
• would you see the difference between 1080i and 1080p? According CNET only on really big screens (more than 60″) when sitting very close to the screen. Not your everyday situation.

Conclusion

If you want to buy a real HDTV -and you have the budget – go for a 1080i one. Don’t settle for 720p and don’t hold your breath for 1080p.

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1. IBC Amsterdam: bigger, better, faster I spent Saturday with Clo at IBC 2006 (Amsterdam),...

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.

SOFTWARE
We were most impressed with the software demos we saw. Apple showed some neat Final Cut Studio stuff. Their podcast presentation was less of a surprise, the presenter didn’t seem to actually understand what he meant with “and then you just make the RSS”. Soundtrack Pro looks like a neat application.

We spent most time at the Autodesk booth. They had really comfy chairs and awesome demos of Maya (3D animation), Smoke (editing), Fire (editing) and Lustre (color-grading) – running on a 4-processor Linux system. Since I’ve never seen a lot of live digital movie editing, I might have been easy to baffle. But what those presenters could do in 5 minutes … Don’t trust anything you see on a screen ever again.

Since we were there with a cheap-o exhibition ticket, and could not attend the conference, we missed out on a lot of the digital cinema presentations. I did see the RED booth: the first 4K digital camera (4520 x 2540 pixels) that records in 2540p (not interlaced). Besides the obvious technical achievements (the camera was demo’d for the first time at IBC) you also have to admire the buzz-marketing around the product.

The RED ONE camera:

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• 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.)

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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.

For me, these are all indicators of a trend: there will be a day when you don’t need your own machines to run your complete (complex) web applications: the storage, the authentication, the aggregation, the statistics will all run on 3rd party servers, some of which you pay, some of which you don’t. I’m not talking about service providers like Ning: they allow you to configure/customize a web app that they developed, not you.
I see a web-based IDE for RubyOnRails coming, I think Yahoo, Google and Amazon will building the bricks too, and pretty soon you will be able to develop a Flickr-like photo management application and run it without having a machine of your own:

• user/group management: Yahoo or Google or Microsoft’s single sign-on
• photo storage: Amazon S3
• database: some future version of Google Base
• email: some future version of Yahoo or Google groups
• photo tags/folksonomy: some future version of del.icio.us (see my Folksonomizer post)
• comments: some future version of Gtalk or Campfire (mental note to self: write something about commentalizer and use of URI as web API)

Give it another year.

Technorati Tags: rss, feed, ruby, webdev, web2.0, yahoo, google, amazon, aol

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Co-founder Danny Hillis escorts me down a hallway that dead-ends into an old-fashioned red phone booth. The phone rings. He places receiver to ear.
“The blue moon jumps over the purple sky,” he says, and hangs up.
Suddenly, the booth becomes a door, swinging out to reveal a vast, open room filled with engineers, gadgets and big ideas.
from Applied Minds Think Remarkably (Wired)

I remember Maarten, Henry, Frederik and me, in the early days of Keyware (in 1998, I think), preparing a demo for Walter Debrouwer’s Riverland company. The latter wanted to impress his prospective client BP, and so he wanted a biometric access control to his ‘labs’.

We hacked something together with a hastily purchased badge-reader-annex-intercom, linked to a PC’s soundcard, running the first beta demo of our speaker authentication software (based on a Lernout & Hauspie technology). I think we even added the Visionics (now Identix) face recognition software we licensed, linked to a QuickCam webcam. So the system would recognize your face, recognize your voice while you pronounce your passphrase and then let you in when it was sure enough it was actually you. Wonderful when it works. And when it doesn’t, you can always explain about false rejection, false acceptance, and equal error rate. Maarten and me even wrote a white paper on the subject, but I can’t find that document back, only references (PDF) to it.

Frederik is now at Vasco, Maarten is at Imec, Henry has set up Broncoway. But I have no idea what happened to Veronique, An, Anke, Rudy and the lovely Julia. Maybe it’s time for a reunion.

Technorati: biometrics

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“Just write it on a CD” can mean a lot of things. There’s the plain audio CD (also ‘IEC 908′ or ‘Red Book‘ standard – 74 minutes of audio), the CD-ROM (or ‘Yellow Book‘ – 700MB of data), the CD-R (’Orange Book‘) and I’m not even gonna go into stuff like SVCD (Super Video CD – up to 60 minutes of video).

While these colorful standards define the lowest level of formatting, for a CD-R/CD-ROM you still have the issue of which filesystem to use on it. Apple has chosen for using its Hierarchical File System (HFS) – the weird one with the resource forks – on CD media too, while PCs use the ISO 9660 standard (in its basic version: 8.3 filenames). PC-style CDs are readable on a Mac most of the time, while Mac disks are only accessible on a PC with special software. And it’s possible to create a CD with both a Mac and PC partition, each of them invisible for the other platform: the hybrid disc.

How does one create such a ‘Hybrid CD’? Some web pages will tell you it can only be done on a Mac, with Roxio Toast.

Clicking on the Advanced tab displays all of the available formats:

1. Mac Only: A Macintosh only disc is a data disc that contains Macintosh data and is usable only on a Macintosh computer.
2. Mac & PC: A Mac & PC disc is a cross-platform data disc that contains Macintosh and Windows data, and is usable on either operating system. All disc data will be visible to both Mac and Windows users. This is the easiest disc to create for both Mac and PC users.
3. DVD-ROM (UDF): Make a DVD-Video from a VIDEO_TS folder, or a data CD or DVD usable on computers with UDF reader software.
4. ISO9660: An ISO9660 disc is usable on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Macintosh, UNIX, Linux, and DOS.
   e. Custom Hybrid Make a data disc that is usable on both Macintosh and Windows computers. Macintosh data will be visible to Macintosh users but not to Windows users and vice versa. This also allows Macintosh users to see the normal icons and window positions for the data while maintaining complete compatibility with Windows systems.
5. Mac Volume : Record the entire contents of a local HFS Standard or HFS+ volume or partition to a disc.

(from Roxio Knowledgebase)

This is not correct, there is at least one excellent tool for Windows: MacImage. It allows the creation of an CD image (.ISO file) with both an HFS and ISO9660 partition, with features like: decide per file on whether it appears on 1 or both partitions, let the disk autostart in MacOS, create the correct forks for Mac files (so they start up in the right program). The resulting .ISO file can then be written to a CD with Roxio or Nero or another CD authoring tool. It does what it advertises, and has a trial version (limited to 250MB images) on its website. Try it out!

If the developers of the software are listening, here’s some feature requests:

• an ‘autorun wizard’ for PC that would create the correct autorun.inf file. It’s not at all complicated to do, but it makes so much sense to have it in the program.
• while the main program is quite intuitive, the bundled icon composer is not. I can imagine that Macs and PCs treat icons differently, and it is crucial to have an editor that creates icons for both platforms. But on my machine (Win 2003) it’s rather buggy.
• extend the command-line interface: nope, bar that, I reread the usage notes and the -i option (file/folder inclusion) does exactly what I had in mind. Neat!

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from folklore.org

This story illustrates the birth process of the Apple Mac user interface from 1978 to 1982, as told by Andy Hertzfeld. Lots of Polaroids to document the progress. The whole Folklore site is full of early Apple inside stories, for instance on Steve Jobs’ “Reality Distortion Field”.

The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.
(from folklore.org)

(via itconversations.com)

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