Skype

Thing is, hipsters, this Blackberry wasn’t designed for you. The $2000 device was made for someone who carries one of these:

Laugh if you will – just don’t do it with the owner in range.

Eleven percent of those under the age of 25 would interrupt sex for a message, and 24 percent under 25 would answer a message in the bathroom.

…is a bit silly.  But really, it seems to me almost like it’s a restructuring of social norms.  Is it a problem, or is it just an evolving expectation that we have with the immediacy in communication and relationships?

Although, if you’re interrupting sex for a message you’re just not doing it right.

(From io9)

In the same spirit, I’m going to start a company called Apple. I think they’ll understand when my legal team demands they change their name. Not that big of a deal.

What’s most interesting to me about the Lifehacker article is that there should even be an article at all.  Its subject “Is The Web Crucial To Your Morning Routine?” is about as germane as “is the telephone crucial to your morning routine?” or “do you turn on the TV for the morning weather or open a newspaper?”

My routine involves roughly, turning on the computer and leaving it to boot, make a pit stop in the washroom, to the kitchen and make some tea, pour some cereal and then sit down to check out what news or weather updates have come up – on the net.  It’s my main (and preferred) source of information that informs my day and it seems that it should figure into the start of it (I don’t have kids yet, will change, I’m sure).  However, is it really that much different from looking to the sky to see if it’s going to rain today or running around the corner to grab the paper to see if the economy has tanked and I should buy extra tins of food for the bomb shelter?

This had been happening for months and I started to get suspicious that it might be BT doing something sneaky like sending a reboot command to the router.  After all, they update the firmware remotely and silently with out telling you.  Who knows what else they can do?

I renewed my search for an answer a few days ago and came across this posting in a forum in which it’s reported that a British Telecom support person says that it’s a fault in the firmware (version 8.1.H.G) and should be fixed by the end of June (which it wasn’t).  There’s also this posting in which it’s suggested that it was a security feature programmed into the firmware.  To do what, exactly?

If it was, in fact, a security “feature” is crippling the router the best way to handle it?  Who exactly is being protected by the unit indiscriminately rebooting itself?  What’s the scenario in that programmer’s head that leads to the conclusion that killing my FTP transfers is the right thing to do?  Although, this smacks of middle management incompetence not having the scope to understand the ramifications of their actions when they say “do this dumb thing.”

The “feature” apparently only kicks in when you’re doing uploading with no download traffic (as if this is a tell-tale sign of perfidy) so just go download something while you’re uploading and maybe it will work.

Sat-nav clearly suits an era which has given up on understanding the roads as a coherent, logical system – an era in which map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.

I honestly wish I knew more about how the editorial process in the mainstream media works.  I can’t fathom the genesis of this story and I can’t understand the fear-mongering behind it or why its acceptable to crank out a fluff-piece that does nothing but weep about the loss of our humanity (which isn’t happening, in case you were wondering).  And yes, I am aware that this is quite a common pattern, particularly on slow news days.

But seriously: I can read a bloody map and use a compass and I have to say, driving in some rural England’s back-roads both tools would have done nothing for me.  The sat-nav saved me a lot of time and backtracking, particularly when you’re in an area where road signage is optionally accurate, if also even optional.

This piece is quite incredible, though.  It pushes so many buttons you’d think the authors keyboard only had 1 key (labelled STUPID).  Here’s another gem:

Men in particular seem to recoil from being given digital instructions, and read the satnav woman’s pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like “make a legal U-turn” and “recalculating the route”, as stubborn or bossy. Of course, they are reading too much into it. Sat-nav is just a dumb computer, obeying its algorithms.

Yeah, let’s play that gender-role card.  I do like the sly reference to robotic women, though.

Look, anybody who takes offence at a machine generated voice or gets lost on their own neighbourhood’s streets need to take a closer look at themselves.  As one Slashdot commenter wryly said it’s “akin to asking if real men don’t use hammers. I wouldn’t use one to open an egg, but I would use one to fix my stairs.”  Yes, sat-nav is a tool.  If you don’t know how to use tools, don’t take them out of the box.  That is all.

When I was working at an animation studio back in the late 90s, I was introduced to the avuncular Charles Poynton who has made a career out of sitting on panels, making recommendations to technical boards and writing books on video, color and especially gamma.  I took a course from Charles along with some colleagues because we needed to implement color correction and set a mutual standard across our studios around the world.  So knowing what it was we were trying to achieve was somewhat key.  We had digital ink and paint and compositing people on SGIs, color artists on Macs, a renegade CGI team that switched from Maya to 3D Studio Max and then editors on Macs in Avid but did their viewing through expensive Sony Evergreen reference monitors.  Finally, an art director who looked at the work on all of these systems and wondered why everything looked different.  The majority of people don’t need to ever concern themselves with this stuff and should probably just move on.

The term gamma (more accurately, “gamma correction”) is thrown around loosely by a lot of people without much knowledge or theory behind it.  It’s not something that should be common knowledge (sorry Charles) but the way it’s bandied you’d think everyone is an expert (for the record: I’m not); it’s actually pretty boring and somewhat arcane.  Boring and arcane because there’s a bit of math underneath involving fractional exponents which often terrifies anyone who hasn’t done A-levels or SATs (or whatever your region inflicts on you to make you to learn algebra).

Specifically, gamma proper, historically refers to the exponent of the power function relationship between the CRT electron gun voltage and the intensity of the phospor output.  Blah blah blah.  In simplified terms, it’s pretty much:

intensity = voltage^γ

I say “historical” because the distinction of what it actually represents is blurred by a lot of factors (not the least of which being the introduction of LCD and plasma displays and a myriad of high definition standards).  However, gamma correction is loosely defined as an inverse function (i.e. voltage = intensity^(1/γ)) which would theoretically correct for this, perceptually, to get your display to output what you intended.  Poyton writes:

NTSC historically specified gamma as the value 1/2.2 or about 0.4545. More modern video standards, including Rec. 709 for HDTV, call for the value 0.45 or about 1/2.2222.

This is telling, because it underscores several things you need to keep in mind before creating new color profiles and “Snow Leopard-ing” your gamma.

• the 2.2 number comes from an NTSC standard (1.8 is the traditional Mac number)
• newer standards for video specify different values of this number, i.e. if you’re not doing video, is there really a point in blazing out your display?  Do you really want your display to look like a TV?

If you’re doing graphic work, say for print, web or film you really need to know what you’re output media’s visual characteristics are before changing from any defaults.  Keep in mind that some systems try to take into account source color profiles and do their own correction along the way (often not correctly…but that’s another story).  Some software, like Photoshop, can take advantage of this and embed a color profile of your monitor in the image file.  This may or may not yield the desired results if you, say, send it to a printer.

Also, none of this talk addresses other display systems, such as LCD monitors, projectors, etc.  It also doesn’t address the fact that (a) not all CRTs are created equal (there are manufacturing variances), and (b) even if they were, they don’t all degrade the same way: it’s a moving target.

Finally, it doesn’t address the seldom discussed problem that if you sit too close and stare at a 2.2-gamma display, you’ll go blind.  It’s a scientific fact.

There’s more great stuff on Poyton’s site: it’s more than just Macs and gamma but a bit of color theory as well.

They’ve dubbed it as what email would have been if it were invented today.  It takes the best of online/offline collaborative messaging and smooshes them together into what the preview announcement describes as product, platform and protocol (which will be open).  All of this is currently being made available to developers to start hacking together “robots” and “gadgets” which will surely bring about some terrifyingly brilliant, if not convoluted and sinister collective artificial intelligence which I’ll dub Skynet (when Wolfram escapes into its own robot instance) but is probably closer to Borg.

Anyway.  Sounds neat.