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<title>BitDepth2008</title><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/index.html</link><description>Personal technlogy reports from Trinidad and Tobago</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2008 Mark Lyndersay</dc:rights><dc:date>2008-12-01T20:46:06-04:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:18:53 -0400</lastBuildDate><item><title>BitDepth 656 - December 02</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - December 2008</category><dc:date>2008-12-01T20:46:06-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth767.html#unique-entry-id-55</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth767.html#unique-entry-id-55</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Google polishes the web browser


Google commissioned comics auteur Scott McCloud to create an online comic that explains how they created their new browser Chrome.


Does the Internet really need another way to view web pages?   Now that Firefox is proving to be a real alternative to the entrenched paradigm of Internet Explorer, web users were enjoying both a resurgence in development that&rsquo;s sure to improve rendering standards for web pages and keep competition alive.


Apple has ported its own web browser, Safari, to Windows and now the 800-pound gorilla of the Internet has decided that along with indexing the web, they would like to present it too.


Google has more at stake here than offering a browser alternative.   The company&rsquo;s Google Gears extension allows both Internet Explorer and Firefox to use online applications like Google Docs without an active Internet connection, but&nbsp; that user experience is still governed by the stability of the user&rsquo;s browser.   A browser crash halfway through a key e-mail or document is quite likely to sour users on using the company&rsquo;s web delivered software.


Polishing Chrome


The company set about building its own alternative, Chrome.   This is a web browser that has as one of its goals the reduction of what developers refer to as &ldquo;chrome&rdquo; the tool bars, search box and buttons that are not part of the core reason for using the software.


Google auditioned web rendering engines and chose Webkit, the open source rendering engine at the heart of Apple&rsquo;s Safari.


Launch Chrome (still only available as a beta for Windows) and you find a spare window, with the tabs curiously placed at the very top of the window, above the text bar that you use to enter the web URL.


There&rsquo;s been a lot of thinking behind this inversion of tab placement and it has to do with the way that Google has engineered Chrome to manage loading and displaying pages.


Web browsers work like most other software, adding windows to the general overhead of running an application.   Some crazed maniacs who routinely keep dozens of web pages open for offline reading (mea culpa, current count, 153) don&rsquo;t take kindly to a single misbehaving website taking down an entire browser session.


Coding the browser


Perhaps the biggest change that Chrome makes to the way browsers render pages on the Internet is to treat each page as a separate process, sandboxed from the other tabbed pages you might have open.   This way, if a web page crashes or freezes; you can just quit the tab without crashing the browser.


You can open a task manager that will tell you how memory and processor use each page is taking up.   If this isn&rsquo;t a way for Google to establish the browser as its own operating system, then I don&rsquo;t know what is.


There&rsquo;s a lot more under the hood going on in Chrome and some of it is quite complicated.   To tell their story, Google hired Scott McCloud to create a comic that reinterprets conversations with Google developers in an interesting way.


It&rsquo;s an intriguing work, but we&rsquo;re still talking about &ldquo;deallocated memory&rdquo; and &ldquo;class transitions,&rdquo; so don&rsquo;t expect many giddy laughs from this online graphic entertainment.


Links


Scott McCloud&rsquo;s Chrome comic


Google&rsquo;s Chrome beta for Windows]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 655 - November 25</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - November 2008</category><dc:date>2008-11-24T23:33:01-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth655.html#unique-entry-id-54</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth655.html#unique-entry-id-54</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Kennedy Swaratsingh, Minister of Public Administration and ICT's big brother, speaks at the first morning's session of the ICT Symposium at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.   Photography by Mark Lyndersay.


Over the last three years, I've attended a few technology conferences for this column and they all exhibit a kind of character.


Some have been rowdy and chaotic (Nokia), others proved to be aggressively curious (Windows Vista), but mostly, they end up like the ICT Symposium hosted by the Ministry of Public Administration on November 16-18, polite, quiet and accepting.


That's unsurprising in a room full of government employees, contractors and suppliers who either work for the government or hope to, but mercifully, the action on stage was not so constrained.


Some presenters were honest and generous about the realities of ICT in Trinidad and Tobago and the region.   Illuminat's Keith Thomas offered remarkable details about the experience of working as a technology creator and supplier and the uphill fight against the notion that "everything that's foreign is better."

..."We require a local content policy to raise standards and engage foreign suppliers in meaningful knowledge transfer as per the example of Costa Rica, which built that process into their decision to grow their IT sector," he said.


Some presenters were blunt in their assessments, particularly when they would be packing to go back home after the symposium ended.


Plain talk at the podium


Dr Bruno Lanvin, initiator of the Network Readiness Index had to leave before the conference formally ended, but not raising some key issues.   Lanvin encouraged the government to pursue its ICT plans, noting that "knowledge and information technologies are the critical hedge against receding economies."   But warned, using a Middle-Eastern saying, that "vision without implementation is hallucination."


IBM's James Cortada referenced his company's experience observing and advising hundreds of countries, suggesting that the government should increase spending on ICT to $400 per capita and drive suppliers to use online procurement, noting that the process encourages them to upgrade their IT systems and procedures.


His underlying advice?   "Let the market build it, step in when necessary, lead by example, don't do it all and keep at it."


One country's that's kept at it is Singapore, now about to embark on their sixth ICT master plan.   The country currently enjoys 90 percent telecoms penetration and is planning its next generation wireless and wired network infrastructure, which will bring fibre to the home by 2012.


According to Joachim Ng, Singapore has managed these improvements over almost 30 years by building strong partnerships between government and private sector companies.


Costa Rica's Alexander Mora reinforced that principle, describing his government's strategic alliance with Intel in establishing a fabrication factory in the country and the guidance of a Chamber of ICT.   Knowledge and technology transfer following the Intel investment has created an ICT sector that drives US$2.8 billion in exports or 10.6 percent of GDP.


...Trinidad and Tobago's stake in this kind of development is eTeck's Tamana Intech Park and there was no mistaking the enthusiasm that the startlingly young team from the company exhibited in delivering their presentation.

...Whatever they've been smoking in Wallerfield, they need to share it with their colleagues in Public Administration, who settled for demonstrating some touchscreen public access kiosks and questioning the relevance of global indices that show Trinidad and Tobago dropping steadily in world rankings.


In a turn that essentially eviscerated the last three discussions of the event, a visit by the Prime Minister was announced just after 3 on Tuesday afternoon.   Fast paced sessions, during which presenters were routinely passed notes warning that their time was up, slowed to a crawl as time, previously at a premium, was killed languorously.


At 4:38, after the PM finally arrived, Larry Howai, Chairman of the e-Business Roundtable welcomed the PM, acknowledging the general lethargy and restlessness in the room and noting that the mood didn't capture the spirit of the proceedings.


Ian Collier, President of the Chamber, then proceeded to stand at attention and report on the proceedings of the past 48 hours.

...It was at this point that the media, who had streamed back in to the event expecting a Prime Ministerial statement, collectively steupsed and left.   It was a clumsy anti-climax to a promising event and a disturbing reminder of the government's capacity to put its protocols before the needs of technology entrepreneurs.


Related: Notes on the event are posted here...]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 654 - November 18</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - November 2008</category><dc:date>2008-11-17T21:04:51-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth654.html#unique-entry-id-53</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth654.html#unique-entry-id-53</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[What about Fast Forward 1?


Fast Forward, we hardly knew ye.   After five years of planning and spending, the only public gravestone of the first Fast Forward project is a cobweb site that hasn&rsquo;t been updated for months.


Just over two weeks ago, a senior advertising executive contacted me about the National ICT Symposium that ends today.   &ldquo;Nobody I know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;has heard of Fast Forward.&rdquo;


On his agenda was some curtain raising buzz about the symposium.   Would I be interested in helping?


Of course, that&rsquo;s a no-brainer.   Throughout the existence of this column, its one overriding reason for existence is the promotion of information and communications technology locally.


Unfortunately, the way that I interpret that goal sometimes comes into conflict with the mission of communications professionals and their clients.


There was a place for pre-symposium discussion of the Government&rsquo;s plans for ICT in Trinidad and Tobago, but any overture to the future needed to embrace an accounting of what happened over the first five years of the Fast Forward initiative, and that&rsquo;s what I asked for.


What ensued was two weeks of e-mails and calls that ultimately yielded no discernible interest in any discussion of the five-year-old Government initiative to build infrastructure, policy and services in support of a tangible improvement in Trinidad and Tobago&rsquo;s ICT profile.


Nothing would please me more than to be wrong about this, but there seems to be little hope that any part of the ICT symposium scheduled to run from its launch on November 16 to its final sessions on November 18 will spend any time evaluating what worked and didn&rsquo;t work for Fast Forward 1.


What was Fast Forward?


The Fast Forward initiative was born out of the Government&rsquo;s desire to fulfil crucial measures in order to achieve developed nation status by 2020.   As part of the Vision 2020 plan, FF-1 was accorded appropriate front burner status and launched grandly in the last quarter of 2003, with splashy print and television advertising that sought to position the effort as hip, knowledgeable and inclusive.


But from the outset, Fast Forward was created with only a dim understanding of what would really be necessary to achieve the intimidatingly long list of goals that the consulting committees created.


What the project needed was a champion equivalent to Ken Julien in the energy sector.   Without that kind of leadership talking to the highest levels of Government, Fast Forward&rsquo;s work stumbled along, its few visible successes credited either to the bodies that actually implemented them or to the Ministries with line responsibility for specific areas of improvement.


The fast fade


What was left for the Fast Forward team were the soft and fuzzy bits that nobody wanted to claim, which included the ill-starred launch of a Government link aggregation portal meant to fulfil at least part of a mandate to link Ministries and Government agencies together and make their services available on the Internet.


My snarky representation of this unfortunate launch earned an angry response from an inside man on the team.   &ldquo;Until you have tried to get information from 20 some odd Ministries and tried to start the necessary process re-engineering to make this and other initiatives effective and efficient, then you can talk,&rdquo; wrote AD in a comment on my blog.


This, unfortunately, is where my concerns as a columnist diverge from those who have undertaken a responsibility to produce.   Where AD found &ldquo;a Gov't service which is still run by non-ICT savvy persons, with not enough daring to challenge the status quo,&rdquo; I find myself unsurprised.


The faltering status of Fast Forward I does not absolve the government of a responsibility to report on the results of five years of work and spending.


At launch, the project had a five-year budget expenditure pegged at US$82 million in 2003 and a long list of proposals that remain largely in limbo.  &nbsp;


While it&rsquo;s important to look forward hopefully with this symposium, there remains outstanding an accounting of results against stated expectations, which even a champion of the project described as a &ldquo;tooth and nail&rdquo; but wholly predictable conflict between fast changing technology and government bureaucracy.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 653 - November 11</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - November 2008</category><dc:date>2008-11-10T18:58:03-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth653.html#unique-entry-id-52</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth653.html#unique-entry-id-52</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Conversation Flowing


Flow President and CEO demonstrates Mosaic, a new feature to be added to the Flow menu of services.   Photography by Mark Lyndersay.


When a company invites the media to a "one on one interactive lunch meeting" it's usually a sure sign that they want to raise their media profile but don't have anything specific to announce.


When that company is willing to produce their normally low profile President and CEO for more than three hours of chit chat with the media, it's enough to bring out television crews.


That's pretty much how last Wednesday's meeting with Flow played out, though much of it alternated between confusing and predictable.


High on Flow jefe John Reid's talking points were the successes and challenges his company has to report just over two years after taking over the shambling zombie assets that the merged cable conglomerate had devolved into.


Flow claims 65 percent market share and a slate of content that's 96 percent legally acquired from the authorised licensors.   There remain issues related to regional bundling that have left some channels skipping between Spanish and English, but the cable company points to Caribbean specific content from ESPN and HBO as a result of his company's lobbying of content providers.


Training of call centre staff continues throughout the year, but in the current job market, Flow has not been able to entice enough staff to take the late shift on a proposed expansion to a 24/7 help desk.


The company also took kudos for changing the broadband market, noting that "we talk in megabits, not kilobits" and stressing that they do not lock in customers to year long contracts.


Ask anything, except that


While Reid and several of the large contingent of Flow's senior staff welcomed the press at the start of the event, encouraging questions, they neglected to mention the bit about "except for the stuff we don't talk about."


Questions that spoke directly to numbers, dollar amounts and quantities that would quantify statements like "extremely successful" and "exceeding prior buys" were politely dismissed by a smiling Reid, "we're a private company and we don't discuss those numbers."


So the stated success of Pay Per View (PPV) initiatives that were expanded to include local films during the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival have no stated returns, nor is the company willing to talk about the cost of placing such films on the PPV service.


After that snub, there seemed little point in asking how the TT$600 million that the company has spent so far on its improvements has been apportioned.


Despite the caginess of Flow when it comes to specifics that cut too close to accounting realities some intriguing facts leaked out between the carefully managed "talking points."


The company's VOIP based landline telephone service was introduced in May and 8-9 percent of digital customers have chosen to sign up for the service.   Call volume numbers have been "rising."


Potential customers may wish to note that the cost of local calls is double that of international calls, a result of the interconnection fees that Flow must pay locally.


New initiatives


Flow announced three initiatives at the meeting; improvements (framed in suitably fuzzy futuristic terms) to the Cable in the Classroom project which currently serves 300 schools, a partnership with Trinidadtunes.com to promote legal, online purchases of local music during the Carnival season, "a good fit with broadband" according to Communications Officer Rhea Yawching, and a teamup with Courts.


The Courts project will bring a low-cost Acer built computer to market at TT$2999 with a one year warranty.   The system runs Linpus Linux on an 2.2Ghz Intel Celeron chip, 1GB RAM, 160GB HD and ships with speakers, 16" LCD monitor and DVD burner.


Flow will bundle free broadband installation, a free modem and free Internet service for one month in the package.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 652 - November 04</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - November 2008</category><dc:date>2008-11-03T21:59:42-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth652.html#unique-entry-id-51</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth652.html#unique-entry-id-51</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[All roads lead home


Alejandro Chaskielberg, Shahidul Alam and Larry McNeil at PhotoPlus Expo, 2008.   Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.


It was the closing day of PhotoPlus Expo in New York, and I was late for what would turn out to be one of the most interesting talks of the three-day exposition for a photographer from the developing world.


Culture on the Edge: Indigenous & Underrepresented Photography was supposed to feature the four winners of this year's All Roads Photography Program; Alejandro Chaskielberg (Argentina), Rena Effendi (Azerbaijan), Khaled Hasan and Farzana Wahidy (Afghanistan).  &nbsp;


Of the four, only Chaskielberg would eventually take the stage (visa issues and work claimed the others), but he was well supported by Shahidul Alam, the legendary founder of the India's Drik photo agency and an aggressive supporter of indigenous photographic points of view and Larry McNeil, a 2006 award winner.


The All Roads Photography Program is an enterprise of National Geographic that reverses of the traditional flow of information and perspectives of developing nations and their cultures.


The anti-Geographic


All Roads is, essentially, the anti-Geographic, views of countries as seen by the people who are indigenous to them.   The presentations at PhotoPlus suggest that the perspectives of those who live in a place are decidedly different from those who visit, even for the extended tours that are Geographic's specialty.


Larry McNeil's presentation offered a whimsical look at native American relations with the Europeans who would eventually conquer America. 


Among the thorns in McNeil's psyche are the documentary photographer Edward Curtis and the Lone Ranger's simple buddy Tonto, who are subverted through his irrepressible wit into a bumbling imagemaker and an intellectual giant, respectively.


Alejandro Chaskielberg's work, The High Tide: Native Islanders and the


Community of the Paran&aacute; River Delta, is an intimidatingly complex look at the inhabitants of the lower delta of Argentina's Paran&aacute;-Plata basin, site of the region's first modern settlements.


Moonlight, long exposures


These people's lives are tied to the river and Chaskielberg explores their existence with long exposures at night, careful setups that are shot with a large format film camera and require his subjects to remain still for up to ten minutes while he records moonlit images that he walks through, painting the image with additional light from handheld strobes and flashlights.


Chaskielberg's halting English was hard to follow, but his All Roads essay on his chosen subject includes the following, "...   I set up scenes with local inhabitants and Paraguayan immigrants to show a new culture that has formed in these islands&mdash;a culture with its own laws and codes, a by-product of unemployment and the immigration, in this estuary that is unique in the world, with a dense forest full of water and silence."


The photographs rarely have dark skies, and the lighting is both theatrical and surreal.   The images include one of two young men on a pontoon laden with logs navigating down a river and another of a man with what looks like a half-ton of cut log on his back are as far from the rulebook of National Geographic as you can imagine.


Links


The All Roads Photography Program


Alejandro Chaskielberg's blog


Shahidul Alam's blog]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 651 - October 28</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - October 2008</category><dc:date>2008-10-28T21:52:13-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth651.html#unique-entry-id-50</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth651.html#unique-entry-id-50</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Stock photography goes global...and local


Yuri Arcurs, Lee Torrens and Andres Rodriguez (Kelly Cline is partly hidden at right) discuss the microstock business at a seminar at PhotoPlus Expo 2008.   Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.


The show floor at this year's PhotoPlus Expo might have been abuzz with photographers and snappers taking in the newest gear, but a remarkable seminar session was one of the 11 that opened the seminars that run alongside the photography exposition.


At a session entitled "Microstock Superstars", PhotoDistrict News' Daryl Lang moderated a talk by four successful young turks in one of the most troubling areas of modern digital photography.


Microstock is the term given to an offshoot of the traditional stock photography tree, a weed, most old pros will probably say, that emphasises low prices and royalty free licenses for photographs.


The stock photography business was once an exclusive club, with privileged members earning hundreds of thousands of dollars licensing the use of their images to advertising agencies and magazines.


Two digital age forces combined to change the landscape of stock photography forever, the ready availability of cameras that offered instant feedback and high quality files and the growing feasibility of Internet based distribution.


Today, no stock photo agency publishes huge books of images for an art director's perusal and you can buy a decent photo with all the licensing most people need for a dollar.   A US dollar, but that's still quite a drop from the heady heights of the 1980's.


...Today's stock successes are remarkably cosmopolitan, as befits distribution systems that know no real boundaries.   Yuri Arcurs is from Denmark, Lee Torrens is Australian, Andres Rodriguez is Colombian, working out of London and his homeland and Kelly Cline, the lone American, is based in Seattle.


The Internet enabled workflow is even more cosmopolitan.   Arcurs outsources his digital clean-up work to India and Torrens uses Indian IT outsourcing agency eMetaworks to handle his image keywords, the embedded text tags that make online searches of large image libraries possible.


This globally interconnected network of suppliers, shooters and distributors has put an end to the "stock safari" of the great white shooter.   Microstock photographers are everywhere and they're shooting their backyards with authority.


Perhaps the most compelling thing about Thursday's meeting between photo veterans and the four young champions of dollar pix was how civil and curious the audience was.   With only two snarky exceptions, the questions were focused on how the photographers in attendance could prepare themselves and their work for a new world of cheap photos licensed freely on the web.


Making it big on small returns


Equally intriguing was the attitude of the young microstock photographers, who were working hard to improve their returns in a business built on coins.


In a world of free YouTube videos and Flickr, even dollar photos start to sound pretty expensive.


Yuri Arcurs is microstock's first million dollar man, selling an image every 50 seconds and uploading more than a thousand new photos per month to the nine microstock agencies that sell his work.


From a cold start in 2005, he has invested much of his income in production, paying himself just $100,000 per year and spending the rest on a support staff of ten and in building studios to create more work.


Much of the work on show was airy, clean and European in style, blurry whites and stylishly desaturated colours abounded.   But behind the scenes was a tremendous amount of work, metered by the almighty RPI (return per image) which sets limits on the amount of work and money that can be invested in shoots that sell to buyers on a budget.


Arcurs, who is sponsored by Hasselblad and shoots with the company's 39 megapixel digital camera estimates that he spends US$40 - $60 per image per month on his submissions and needs six months of sales to cover his expenses.


Models tend to be non-professionals and Torrens jokes that the two most popular models in microstock are Arcurs ladyfriend and Rodriguez' sister.


More notes on this session are part of my blog reporting from PhotoPlus Expo 2008.


...Yuri Arcurs' website


Lee Torrens' blog]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 650 - October 21</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - October 2008</category><dc:date>2008-10-22T16:09:47-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth650.html#unique-entry-id-49</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth650.html#unique-entry-id-49</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Apple's new Macbook notebooks reduce the number of available ports and line them up on the left side. 

...I wanted a good reason to sell off my Macbook and get me a shiny new sumpin' sumpin'.


The buzz leading up to last Tuesday's Apple event was particularly hopeful, with standout rumours suggesting that Apple was machining their new line out of a solid block of aluminium (almost true, but not quite) and the new systems would add quadcore systems to the dualcore Intel processors that are now standard across the company's consumer line.


...No quadcore chips, no BluRay drives ("a bag of hurt" according to Jobs), and no massive price drops at the bottom of the line.


There was little reason for Apple to take drastic measures to stoke sales.   The company is claiming market share double figures, up to 17.6 percent of the US market, after spending most of the last two decades as a barely perceptible blip on the computer sales charts.   IDC's analysts place Apple third in the third quarter, 2008 with a 9.1 percent share.


...That confidence gave the computer maker license to spend quite a bit of presentation time on their new manufacturing techniques for the new notebooks, the main piece of which is hewn from a solid block of aluminium.   At the end of the press conference, the frame, a shell with ribs and cutouts for the keyboard was passed around to the press in attendance for their admiring appreciation. 

...More interesting was what Apple giveth in this revamp of the laptop line.   The original white Macbook remains in the line untouched save for a price drop of $100, bringing its new retail price to US$999. 

...There's now an upscale Macbook built from the new "unibody" aluminium casing that's a "Mini Me" version of the new Macbook Pro, the mid-sized laptop that anchors the high-end of Apple's notebook line.


Apart from their redesigned shells, Apple has upgraded screens across the line to LED displays and has built two NVIDIA GeForce 9600M video chips into the Pro &nbsp;notebooks, a low powered version that extends battery life and a full bore chip that maximises performance.


The new Macbooks ditch the lame X3100 Intel graphics chip for the GeForce 9400M from NVIDIA.   Apple claims the new integrated graphics chip (still steals 256MB from your system memory) boosts graphics performance by a factor of five.


...In a nod to the very vocal critics of their manufacturing processes, Apple has made sweeping changes to the materials they use in these notebooks, earning an EPEAT environmental gold certificate.   If you've been concerned about brominated retardants, these are the Macs for you.


A new 24 inch LED based display was also announced as a natural partner to the new notebooks.   The bundle of cables has been narrowed down to just three, a connector for the new display port video connection, a USB cable that expands to three outlets on the monitor case and a Magsafe power adapter that charges any Macbook.


...Firewire is disappearing from the company's laptop line.   The new Macbook pro has just one Firewire 800 port and there is no Firewire connector at all on the new Macbooks.


Firewire 800 to 400 cable adapters are easy enough to find, but notebook users with desktop installations that make heavy use of Firewire will be, at the very least, annoyed.


Annoyed by Apple's insistence on a single trackpad button on its notebooks?   Well the company has heard your complaints, and now there is no trackpad button at all.   The entire trackpad is now made of glass and inherits the touch and gesture sensitivity of the iPhone and iPod Touch.   To click, you press firmly on the touch sensitive glass.


...Faster integrated graphics in Macbook, two graphics chips in Macbook Pro.


...No more Firewire 400, single FW800 port on Macbook Pro.


...No major CPU changes, speeds range from 2GHz at the bottom of the line to 2.5 GHz. 

...Top of the line Macbook Pro (2.8GHz) is a special order item.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 649 - October 14</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - October 2008</category><dc:date>2008-10-13T10:45:58-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth649.html#unique-entry-id-48</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth649.html#unique-entry-id-48</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It isn't a new idea, and it isn't a particularly original one.   What it is, though is free.   In that it doesn't cost you money.   What it does cost you is the learning experience of working with the web directly.


The idea of putting a more accessible face on the hardcode guts of the Internet is as old as the Delphi online service, which was overtaken by Prodigy and then by America Online, the most successful effort at creating an online community until the Internet exploded.


AOL death watch began when accessing the Internet became something easily separated from using that company's software.   Free protocols for creating web pages, transferring files, sending e-mails and chatting online trumped the commerce driven convenience of AOL's business model.


...You can send fellow Facebook users e-mails, text chat with anyone who's online, create community pages and post photos and information on what seemed to be a customer focused web service.


...The first inkling that avid Facebook users had that the company hosting all these delightful services wasn't a benevolent sugar daddy was the announcement of the "new" Facebook.


Facebook users comfortable with the old interface immediately went ballistic and the company added a text link to user's pages that allowed them to switch between the new design and the old one.


Then a few weeks ago, Facebook pulled the trigger on their redesign, announcing "the new Facebook is the only Facebook."   The new interface, with a few adjustments, became the only option for Facebook users.


The group "I Hate The New Facebook" currently has 1,544,351 members and there are many more in various "Facebook sucks" pages.   To its credit, the company and its 24-year-old founder leave these dissenting group pages alone.


...Part of that change, and the one that annoyed hardcore users the most, was the relegation of non-Facebook applications, the bits of code that made the website's experience so interesting, are now relegated to a sidebar and to a ghetto of "boxes" three tabs away from a user's home page.


Many of these third party applications don't work on the sidebar and some don't work at all any more.   Developers are likely to be concerned about creating and updating features for the website that most casual users will never find.


This wouldn't be so bad if Facebook were paying attention to what their users like and use, but that doesn't seem to be the case.


Photos, one of the most popular parts of any user's Facebook page, have no prominence on a user's home page and Facebook native features that link to external websites don't work particularly well.   There is no functional RSS reader and the web clip software, which claims to share links to external websites is simply abysmal.


...So why create this massive upheaval and change the user experience so fundamentally? ...  Today's Facebook is spare and clean, with no cows being thrown at anyone or vampires being chumped.   It looks like an effort to position the service for the kind of maturing users who prefer the spare, business focused interface of services like Plaxo and Linkedin.


But Facebook's history of playing fast and loose with user information may deter business from embracing the service, though the misguided users who make their pages private (hiding on a social network?) 

...Still, that shouldn't be a problem for Facebook's business.   Ranked fifth in the world by web traffic monitor Alexa, the site has 110 million users and more than 70,000 from Trinidad and Tobago alone. 

...But Facebook's lack of interest in the virtual world outside its tasteful blue and white walls may ultimately be its undoing. 


You can post and share on Facebook, but there's little incentive to create work that lives on the site. 


Blogs are still better handled using  purpose built sites like Blogger and Typepad, and nothing touches Flickr for sharing photographs and tracking visual trends.   When users grow weary of Facebook's web training wheels, there isn't much sophistication to keep learning; growing web citizens interested.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 648 - October 07</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - October 2008</category><dc:date>2008-10-03T13:21:26-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth648.html#unique-entry-id-47</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth648.html#unique-entry-id-47</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Futurist thinking is always an iffy business.   Attempting to figure out what happens next based on the indicators of today is a guessing game that's easily overturned by completely unforeseen developments.


Thirty years ago, it wouldn't have been out of line to have expected a cure for cancer by now, but a popular self-organising, self-sustaining communications network with no central management? 

...This is the world that Gerd Leonhard lives in, and he focuses his thinking to media and communications over the next five years.   That really doesn't make his job any easier.   He's picked the move volatile, challenging and fast moving aspect of modern technology development as his speciality.


He speaks tomorrow at the Hilton Trinidad along with Jeff Swystun, Global Communications Director, DDB and Jeroen Matser, Strategy Director, Tribal DDB on the rather sweeping subject, "What does the future hold."


Leonhard agreed to an interview via Skype last Wednesday at his home office in Basel, Switzerland.


We had a brief movement of amusement when the connection came up, two people chatting thousands of miles and six hours apart on a free but functional voice connection delivered by free software.


"You know, British Telecom did not invent Skype, it takes an outsider to do that," Leonhard said, laughing.


In some ways, this whole chat is pretty redundant, since his lectures are widely available on YouTube and he offers his book, "The End of Control" available for free download both as a PDF document and as a homebrewed reading of the work in MP3 format.


This is clearly a guy who eats his own dogfood when it comes to content distribution.


"I do a lot of work with film, music, publishing and they have always been of the view that the more control they have the more money they make," said Leonhard.   "But I try to tell them that the change is pretty much inevitable.   Once you throw away your preconceptions, then you can begin.   It's not about copyright, it's about getting paid for the use."


"The idea of giving away things for free is very difficult for companies; it feels uncomfortable.   Once you have gotten used to total control over your customers, it's very hard to give that up.   I try to give people a picture of what it might look like so that they can dip their feet in."


Concurrent with the rethinking of content control is the development of distribution, which Leonhard sees as a system still in its infancy.


"It's still a minority market.   Only three percent of the world is on broadband, so the market has to be focused on mobile devices. 


It can't be the only means of distribution yet because the numbers don't support it.   You're talking to a percentage of a small percentage of potential consumers.   I always tell content creators that they have to get ready for when the system works and the market arrives."


Creating that online channel is the real challenge, because it means both building the infrastructure and providing cost effective mobile devices for the potential audience for all this content.


Leonhard believes that the best way to do this is for governments to subsidize a free wireless network that can be accessed by low cost mobile devices, but that open connections bring with it a new chaos as information now flows to the least connected, least enabled members of the community.


"There has to be a broader consensus on connectivity and pricing and making devices available," said Leonhard.   "The future belongs to the underprivileged of the world.   When we enable people who are not wealthy to participate in the networks, then everything becomes better for everyone."
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 647 - September 30</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - September 2008</category><dc:date>2008-09-29T20:31:31-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth647.html#unique-entry-id-46</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth647.html#unique-entry-id-46</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Atlantic Monthly wasn't exactly hands off with the Republican candidate as that "Is Porn Adultery" ribbon on the McCain cover attests, but that's still some distance from the licence taken by Greenberg with these three images from her website's home page. 

...It's easy for almost anyone with a computer to alter photographs and it now possible for amateurs to make substantial changes to photographs that are virtually undetectable.

That's been a godsend for the fashion and advertising industries, but it has made any photograph published as news open to suspicion.

So what then to make of the case of Jill Greenberg, who launched a very specific and aggressive smear job on one of her portrait subjects, American Presidential candidate John McCain.


On August 09, 2008, Jill Greenberg met with McCain and his public relations team in Las Vegas to make a series of photographs for the Atlantic Monthly.

The Atlantic Monthly leans to the left and Greenberg practically hangs over the side in that direction.

The photographer is famous for two major bodies of work, one a hyper-real, razor sharp series of photographs of wild life shot in a studio environment, the other series of crying children that she produced after the Bush administration returned to office called "End Times."


That collection raised some eyebrows, not just because the titles of several of the images explicitly made a connection with the Republican Party's return to power but also because Greenberg got her photos by provoking the children to fits of tears.

...At the photo session, Greenberg did a series of photographs in her signature style, then invited McCain to stand near a wall, where she shot him with a single low strobe, creating low "horror movie" lighting of the politician.


Greenberg submitted her take, from which the Atlantic chose its cover photograph.

When the issue hit the newsstands, Greenberg then began posting to the home page of her website a series of photographs of McCain with venomous text on them and in some cases, extensive retouching.   Several of the photos appear to be outtakes, strobe misfires or tests which were particularly appropriate to the text written for them.


On her website, she describes herself as "The Manipulator," and pro-Greenberg advocates point out that she has never hidden either her political leanings or her willingness to use photography to advance her causes.

The fierceness of the text on the images, many of which use language that cannot be reproduced in a family newspaper, led to some fierce debate about the issue.

...Crucial to the issue is Greenberg's straddling of the worlds of commercial photography and art, which intersected confusingly on the project.

The Atlantic's editor James Bennet appeared on Fox News to answer questions about the issue and that clip, an instruction in eating editorial crow with grace, has since been archived on YouTube.


Bennet insists that the published photographs are the only images from the shoot that the magazine stands behind.

The author of the story, Jeffrey Goldberg was not to equitable on the matter.   In a blog posting he notes "These images are, to any reasonably decent person, simply political pornography. 

...Supporters of Greenberg point out that her contractual arrangement with the Atlantic is not in conflict with her subsequent use of the images. 


The photographer negotiated a two-week embargo on the images with the magazine before resale rights were returned to her.

What has really poisoned the editorial well is Greenberg's glee at having the opportunity to stick it to McCain.

In an interview with Photo District News' David Walker, she noted that she did not exercise her usual professional finishing on the image used by Atlantic "I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad," Greenberg told Walker.

...While the public response to this issue is likely to die out quickly in the heat of the US elections, the resonance of it with clients and photographers is likely to be longer lasting.

At the core of the issue is one of trust and intent.   Nothing that Greenberg did with the work she created was wrong under law, but much of it was executed shadily and in extraordinarily poor taste. 

...What we are left with is an artist/photographer who chose to express her political beliefs on a commercial job, first by witholding the best quality of her work for the selects and then by making her art with the unused photography while the approved image was on the newsstands.

This isn't the first time that a photographer has knowingly done a hatchet job on a subject.   Arnold Newman, asked to photograph Alfred Krupp, a German munitions manufacturer, created a startlingly unflattering image.


It also isn't the first time that art has resulted from a commercial project, but it may well be the first time that an act of political subversion has been so carefully choreographed by an artist to synchronise with a related commercial project.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 646 - September 23</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - September 2008</category><dc:date>2008-09-20T13:47:01-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth646.html#unique-entry-id-45</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth646.html#unique-entry-id-45</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The iPhone and Blackberry's mobile phones seem to be in competition for the same market, so smartphone buyers tend to compare and contrast them in the hope of finding the perfect solution to their mobile communications needs.


There's a first generation iPhone and a Blackberry Pearl on my desk and I have to say; the comparison is a little inappropriate.   It's a bit like comparing a luxury gated community apartment with a premium mall positioning.   Depending on who you are, one or the other is the perfect place to be.


...Both Apple and Research in Motion (RIM) realise that creating the right phone with the right features will not only win converts, but will also tempt "dumbphone" users to upgrade.


The second generation of the iPhone extends its software further into the realms of the Blackberry, tying its mail systems into Microsoft Exchange servers and promising the kind of push e-mail technology (through Apple's surprisingly flaky Mobile Me service) that has made RIM's product so popular.


The hot new Blackberry Bold is only a stepping stone toward the forthcoming 9350 model, dubbed the Storm, which will implement a full screen face with touch capability.


...The Blackberry is a fully authorised and supported phone in Trinidad and Tobago while the iPhone must be hacked in order to make it function.   You unpack a Blackberry, set up the e-mail online and within minutes you've joined the legions of folks who have their e-mail appear instantly on their hip.


The iPhone requires deft software skills and a willingness to keep up with new updates in order to keep the phone current. ...  A few days later, the Pwnage Tool guys had rehacked the new protocols and restored jailbreak status to hacked iPhones.

...Now I have to apply all these changes in order to update to the new iTunes and keep the software current.   This is a giant PITA, and remains the costliest part of using an iPhone locally. 

...Both phones send and receive calls with appropriate aplomb, but e-mail on the iPhone is more like using software on your computer than the urgent sparseness of the Blackberry system.   E-mails pop up on a Blackberry like SMS text messages.   Until Apple finally gets push e-mail set up right, e-mail on the iPhone remains a download and read system, a vulnerable to your forgetfulness.


RIM may also be on the wrong track with a touchscreen Blackberry, since one of the great attractions of their device is touch typing, particularly on the larger models that have more spacious keyboards.   You can't type with your hands under a desk in a dullass meeting with a touchscreen, guys. 

...I'm getting three days tops on standby with normal, which is to say minimal, use with the iPhone. ...  The Blackberry will run, with its data ports open for incoming e-mail, for a week.   If you have to change the battery on an iPhone, you must send it back to Apple or crack it open yourself, not a user friendly procedure.   The Blackberry, like every other mobile phone on planet Earth, has a user replaceable battery. 

...The iPhone has the Blackberry beat like a bobolee when it comes to the sheer joy of use and "showoffability."   With more than 3000 applications available on the App Store and fluid graphics, there's lots of stuff to, um, demonstrate.   In just two months, Apple reports that more than 100 million applications have been downloaded from its online store.   Among them is Koi Pond, a gorgeous reproduction of fish swimming in a pond that responds to touch, the kind of thing that simply doesn't exist on any other cell phone.


...If I still woke up early in the morning and tried to tie a noose around my neck with blearly, shadowed eyes before going to work for The Man, I'd be all over the Blackberry.   But I don't do that any more and the iPhone vastly enhances my ageing cool factor...and I can play The Force Unleashed on it. 

...No copy and paste for text on a device that is, in every other respect, a mobile computer.


...Part 3 in a series about using the iPhone in Trinidad and Tobago.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 645 - September 16</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - September 2008</category><dc:date>2008-09-20T13:38:10-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth645.html#unique-entry-id-44</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth645.html#unique-entry-id-44</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[There are far too many silly and repetitive applications on Apple's iPhone App Store, but there are few software development kits that have produced more than 3,000 new products in less than four months.   Among them is Scrabble, just the thing for meetings that are late to start (or boring to attend).


In practical day to day use, the iPhone offers as much as it takes away.   If you're used to the tactile feedback of a regular phone, which allows you to figure out which side is up and where the keypad is by touch, then the iPhone is going to be a bit of a surprise.


The first few times that you hold the phone, it's hard to avoid the feeling that you're holding a half used bar of soap.   Tapping and swiping the screen with your fingers also takes a bit of getting used to, but not as much as you might think.


Zooming in on information in the web browser is so utterly useful (you touch the screen with two fingers pressed together and spread them apart) that not only is web browsing actually useful on the phone's tiny screen, you'll begin to wish that you could do the same thing on your regular computer.


There are dozens of other subtle, seemingly gratuitous touches throughout the interface.   Press any icon on the home screen for a while and all the icons begin to bob like unmoored boats; you can then push them around into the order you wish.


At first, the phone's ability to sense its position seemed limited to automatically rotating the screen when you turn it from vertical to horizontal, but a number of games make inventive use of this feature.


Your list of contacts seems to be mounted in a slot machine display, so scrolling through a particularly long list is simplified by more aggressive swipes of the finger, which spins through the list with a satisfying blur.


The virtual keyboard pops up larger letters when you touch the keypad, offering fast visual confirmation.   Typing by tapping away with a single finger isn't as sophisticated or as fast as you can manage by touch memory on a mini-keypad equipped smartphone, but it's much better than number pad as keypad solutions.


...As the iPhone has matured, so have the enterprising coders dedicated to 'jailbreaking' the device.   Early hacks were complicated and sometimes physical.   I've seen iPhones prised open to retrieve errant SIM cracking sleds (tiny slivers of circuitry that directly hacked the interface between iPhone and SIM card) &nbsp;and watched Matrix style code scrolling on an iPhone screen all in the service of extracting AT&T's claws from the mobile phone's guts.


At the end of the day, though, the iPhone is really a computer that makes phone calls and the new Pwnage Tool crack both updates the iPhone to the newest software incarnation and breaks AT&T's grip on the phone in a simple fifteen-minute procedure.   It's hacking for dummies.


I had some issues going to version 2.02 of the system update and had to settle for 2.01.   Pwnage Tool is updated frequently though, so I may go back to it later on.


...This is a sweet time to get an iPhone from a US based buddy moving up to the 3G model.   These phones will have been "zapped" by Apple, who demand to see the old phone before allowing reduced cost upgrades to the new iPhone and the process returns them to their factory standard state.


On its own, the new version 2 software offers some subtle but valuable improvements to the interface, but the biggest value of the new software is the treasure trove of new software on the App Store, which is blocked to users outside the US.


For some bizarre reason, Apple has tied transactions on the App Store to the rules of its iTunes Store, which bars payments on credit cards that are not drawn on a US bank.   This makes sense for music and movies, the copyright holders of which have made these transaction demands, but pointlessly limits potential sales for software programmers with wares to sell.   This is, frankly, a bummer, because even the nifty free applications aren't available to iPhone users.


Among the freebies are Audi's free A4 driving game, which proved well beyond my navigation skills, multiple Twitter clients and eReader, which makes it possible to read short stories and novellas in eBook format on the device.


But all is not perfect with Apple's newest product, and competitors are moving fast to offer many of its innovations on their newest devices.


Part 2 in a series about using the iPhone in Trinidad and Tobago.


...Part 3 is here.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 644 - September 09</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - September 2008</category><dc:date>2008-09-08T19:45:25-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth644.html#unique-entry-id-43</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth644.html#unique-entry-id-43</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The App Store, accessible from the built in browser in Apple's iTunes software, offers a wide range of recently created applications for iPhone users.


With its newest software update for the iPhone, Apple has taken its mobile into a new phase of its development.   The product had already cultivated a strong user base on the strength of its Mac OS X based interface, a fluid mix of icons and touchscreen based navigation that's surprisingly easy to master.


The face of the phone is a slab of glass backed by brushed aluminium, an obsidian slate with just a single button at bottom centre.

...There are three other buttons tucked away on the edges of the device, an on button on the top edge, a volume rocker on the left side and a ringtone silencer just above it.


It's undeniably hefty for a phone, but astonishingly small for a device that's just a hair's breadth away from being a full fledged computer.

...Turn on the phone and you're presented with a screen full of bright icons; each of which takes you to software designed to handle one aspect of the phone's capabilities.


The phone has become quite popular with local smartphone users, particularly with those who want to make the best use of their data plans and feel the need for an alternative to the Blackberry.


...I've seen iPhones on the hips and in the handbags of a surprising number of local executives and even on the desk of a TSTT manager who shall remain nameless.


In February, Net Applications, which surveys Internet use, found that iPhone based Internet use in Trinidad and Tobago (compared with other methods of accessing the Internet) placed the country third among nations which are not officially part of Apple's licensing plan, behind Equatorial Guinea and the Ivory Coast.


That rating has slipped recently down to 16th place as other countries continue to adopt the mobile phone, regardless of whether Apple wants them to.


Because WiFi access on the iPhone is a matter of just flipping a software switch, you can clear e-mail and browse the web without having a data plan at all if there's a WiFi transmitter around.


With its version 2 update to the iPhone OS, Apple has kicked down the development door it kept closed to third party coders until just a few months ago, prompting a rush to create applications that hasn't been seen on a handheld device since Palm issued its first software development kit.


There are now hundreds of tiny applications available on the App Store; a subsection of the iTunes store accessible from any installed copy of the company's free music player and synchronisation software.


The iPhone in T&T


An iPhone doesn't work out of the box in this country.   It's SIM locked to the AT&T network in the US as part of that company's deal with Apple, though carriers in other countries have struck their own deals with the iPhone's creator.   Getting an iPhone has also become a little more complicated with the subtle change in the relationship between the two companies when the iPhone 3G was released.


When the iPhone was introduced a year ago in the US, it was very much Apple's product on AT&T's network.   Sold in both Apple Stores and AT&T outlets, buying and activation were two separate actions.   You bought the phone, took it home and activated it online using Apple's iTunes software.

...The newest model, the iPhone 3G, changes that system.   Now you buy a cheaper phone, one heavily subsidised by AT&T, but you must activate it with a two-year plan on the spot.   It's now AT&T's iPhone and the phone company wants to keep calls on the iPhone on its network.


That new wrinkle makes breaking the AT&T link to the iPhone a bit more complicated and the original iPhone becomes a more attractive proposition for non-US use at exactly the time that first generation users are getting rid of their early models.


For Trinidad and Tobago users, the changes between the phones are negligible.   The 3G in the new iPhone's name refers to technologies such as UTMS and HSDPA which are not currently available in Trinidad and Tobago, so the first iPhone is just as capable here as the updated model.


Part 1 in a series about using the iPhone in Trinidad and Tobago.


Part 2 is here.


Part 3 is here.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 643 - September 02</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - September 2008</category><dc:date>2008-09-01T19:41:12-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth643.html#unique-entry-id-42</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth643.html#unique-entry-id-42</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Ten years of iMac

Ten years ago, Apple put the common "i" on its consumer mac and created an icon.

A decade is a long time by any measure, but in the computer industry, which makes dog years feel sluggish, it's an eternity. 

In August 1998, Apple introduced a new computer that changed their flagging fortunes.   It's hard to imagine the Apple of the iPod and iPhone on the ropes, but in 1998, the company looked like a boxer on the ropes, getting pummelled.

This was, after all, a time when Wired Magazine put a multi-hued Apple logo on its cover encircled by thorns with a single word, "Pray."

Back then, there wasn't an "i" anything, only the lingering feeling that the company that had put the personal in computing was out on its feet, too stubborn to fall to the mat.


This was the Apple of the ridiculous Performas, a range of computers that only the most obsessive of Macheads could figure out that seemed to change models with the addition of another stick of memory or a change in hard drives.

In the wider computing world, computing was either done on a desk with a tower and a monitor or on the move with a hefty laptop.

Into this mix of largely beige product, Apple took a desperate but carefully aimed jab with the unlikeliest of machines.

The iMac cometh

The original iMac was a chubby little bulb in a hue that wasn't exactly blue or green that Apple called bondi blue after a beach in Australia.   The first of designer Jonathan Ive's successful designs for the company, it was an agreeable looking computer that looked as if it belonged in a home, not in a cubicle.

The first iMac wasn't the fastest Mac nor was it the best equipped.   It shipped with a middling 233mhz PowerPC processor and 32MB of RAM, the CD drive was read only, a mistake that the company wouldn't correct for years and dispensed with Apple's traditional serial and SCSI ports in favour of the new USB port specification.


This was the Macintosh that shipped with the worst mouse ever made (from the company that popularised the mouse as a computing device), a horrid little disc shaped obscenity that managed to be both painful and clumsy to use.

Long before flash drives, Apple basically killed off the floppy with this model and pointed to the built-in modem with a nervous smile and said, "Internet."

It's easy now to look back and see the obviousness of that move, but it was both unheard of and unappreciated.   New iMac owners went out and bought USB connected floppy drives until Internet speed technologies caught up.

Design drives profit

But none of these daring changes were the reason that the iMac reversed the company's faltering finances.   This was the first Macintosh in years that could be described as charming. 

Channelling the cute utility of the original 128k Mac, it could be moved around using a handle built into the pear shaped case and stood in stark contrast to the boxy sameness of the rest of the company's product line.

The romance built into the iMac went well beyond Apple, inspiring a surge in colourful plastic in consumer devices that still hasn't subsided.


The iMac took Apple from a US$878 million loss in 1997 to profits of $414 million in 1998 and the company hasn't had a loss making year since.

Since the computer's introduction, Apple has evolved the iMac design and technology, building the concept of an all-in-one computer through a 'pot and sunflower' shape to today's flatscreen device.

Along the way, it has driven fundamental changes in the expectations consumers have of a home computer and encouraged every computer manufacturer to think about what their boxes look like as well as what they build into them.


The Apple computer of today is much more than the Macintosh, with hundreds of millions of iPods and millions of iPhone in the hands of consumers who use all kinds of computers, but the design inspiration of that game changing Mac remains present in all of Apple's devices and more than a few from the company's competitors.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 642 - August 26</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - August 2008</category><dc:date>2008-08-31T09:10:06-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth642.html#unique-entry-id-41</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth642.html#unique-entry-id-41</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[When technology works, it can be a miracle, or at the very least, great fun.


But, like anything that man makes by bolting one thing to another, things will occasionally come apart, hopefully while still under warranty.


Whether or not your failing tech is covered, you have the right to express your dissatisfaction with the state of affairs that you find yourself in.   Depending on how you handle this stage of your annoyance, you can trigger surprising responses.


I occasionally get e-mails from readers who are upset about one perceived injustice or another, so what follows is an extended version of the advice that I usually offer.


...Do whatever it takes to put a little distance between your feelings and your issue before you compose an e-mail or place a support call.


Shouting, screaming and cursing doesn't help your situation at all and inevitably starts things off on the wrong foot.   You want the person on the other side of the line, as bored and weary of listening to people bitching all day long as they are, to feel sorry for you and feel motivated to take action.


Once I've made contact with a support person, I take a note of their name and refer to them by that name.   As Leonidas noted while his colleagues killed wounded Persians, "there's no reason why we can't be civil."


...You shouldn't simply call the help desk or support line to say "it isn't working."


You may have a problem with a thing, but you're going to be talking to a human being without any psychic powers at all.   In fact, you're going to be talking to a low wage worker with little authority and a long script to troubleshoot your problem, so getting past this stage is crucial.


While your problem is actually happening, take the time to write down the issue as you understand it.   That means noting the steps you normally take with the device/software that isn't responding and what happened instead.


Absolutely critical at this stage is writing down any error messages that you see on the screen of the device.   They may mean nothing to you, but they can be a goldmine of information for a skilled support person.


...Occasionally, you will hit a wall with the person you're dealing with.   They may not be able to understand what you're telling them or may just be having a bad day, but the interaction isn't working out at all.


My usual first step in such a situation is to say thanks and call back, hoping to hit better numbers in the support lottery, but sometimes there isn't anyone else or everyone stalls at the same point in the process.


...Be warned that once you begin to escalate a problem, there's a good chance that you'll have to take it all the way to the top to get satisfaction.   This takes time and effort, so you may not want to invest that much energy to get an alarm clock exchanged.


...Will having a support person visit your home to troubleshoot the situation be desirable?   Do you want the failing device replaced or do you want your money back?


Most companies will make an effort to save their relationship with a customer, but returning your money tends to be at the bottom of the customer care list, it's more reasonable to hope for repair or replace.


...I recently had a memory chip fail in my computer and successfully organised a replacement.   Unfortunately, by the time I paid customs charges on the replacement and shipped the failed chip back, I only saved US$20 over just buying a new chip.


Realising that software that I purchased from a vendor had been end-of-lifed, I politely inquired about a "crossgrade" (basically a discount) to another product they sold that I was interested in.   To my surprise, they simply sent me a serial number to the new product, apologising for halting development on the dead software.


...The Trinidad and Tobago Bureau of Standards is focused on aligning businesses with the consumer interest.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 641 - August 19</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - August 2008</category><dc:date>2008-08-22T23:39:10-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth641.html#unique-entry-id-40</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth641.html#unique-entry-id-40</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Microsoft presents state of IT report


Aime S White, IDC Global Research Consulting Vice President presents the 2007 IDC IT Economic Impact report for Trinidad and Tobago at a press conference hosted by Microsoft.   Photography by Mark Lyndersay.


Just a bit less than two years ago Microsoft presented its 2006 IDC Economic Impact study.   A week ago, Microsoft offered an updated report on Trinidad and Tobago's IT development status.


Much has changed in the intervening two years for Microsoft in the Caribbean.   The regional branch has grown significantly, completed renovations to its offices at the Chamber of Commerce building and realised that early morning breakfast meetings aren't the optimal way to meet the press (it was lonely at the press table in 2006).


This year's presentation was a well covered luncheon upstairs at the Chamber's Westmoorings headquarters that eliminated panellists in favour of a brisk presentation by IDC Consulting Vice President Aime White and a fast paced question and answer session.


What hasn't changed much is the development of Trinidad and Tobago's IT profile.


Three key points remain issues.   Total IT spending as a percentage of GDP, the imbalance between hardware spending and software spending and the development of local IT services.


IT spending


While White characterised the technology industry as being typical of one in rapid growth, the absolute figures aren't so optimistic, particularly when examined against the results for 2005.


According to IDC's figures as offered in the 2006 and 2008 reports, local IT spending has risen from TT$522 million to $542 million.   Expressed as a percentage of GDP, that's just 0.5 percent, as opposed to worldwide averages of 2.5 percent.


Responding to a question, White noted that "two percent would about right for this economy."


Balance of the IT Spend


Spending on IT remains heavily weighted toward hardware.   White's presentation included some interesting slides that addressed this imbalance directly, but they weren't part of the press kit.   Expressed as a chart, there is very little change in the weighting since 2005, with more than 70 percent of spending going toward hardware and just 11 percent allocated to software spending.


White described this imbalance as being attributable to the prevalence of local system builders and software "acquired through alternate means," aka piracy.


White noted that there is a slow but steady in hardware spending, suggesting that growth will increase in software and services, a key lever for local IT development.


For IDC's purposes, software development designed specifically for clients and not offered as an off the shelf product is recorded under IT services.


...The employment base as polled by IDC rose from 3,000 in 2005 to 3400 in 2007 of which 2000 are described as working in the Microsoft "ecosystem."


IT workers in this Microsoft pool stand to be well rewarded.   IDC's study found that globally every dollar spent by Microsoft returned $7.7 to the economy as a result of the virtuous cycle of its business.   In Trinidad and Tobago that figure rises sharply to $23.37.


This sharp return on investment may be attributable to the nature of much of Microsoft's business in Trinidad and Tobago, which is focused on partners and not on retail sales.


IDC engages in some indubitably educated and positive outlook for the future of IT development, but much of it seems influenced by well sung arias from the Government about its IT strategy.


But until lingering issues like widespread piracy and the widespread underground IT service structure that supports it are addressed, there will continue to be two IT economies in Trinidad and Tobago, only one of which is accurately measured by IDC's report.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 640 - August 12</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - August 2008</category><dc:date>2008-08-12T20:47:26-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth640.html#unique-entry-id-39</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth640.html#unique-entry-id-39</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Now that flash drives are evolving from utility to fashion accessory to near invisibility, having media to backup to is becoming more of a no-brainer. 

...A month ago, I had another drive fail completely in my working computer, for a total of two in less than eight months.   In both cases, there was no warning at all, just a system that became unresponsive and finally would not restart.


Anecdotal evidence gathered from calls to a few folks in the repair business suggests that while prices for drives have fallen as fast as capacities have been rising, quality and reliability have also been taking a perceptible dip as well.


There's only one thing you can do about a hard drive that's likely to fail (these days, it seems to be all of them at any time, particularly in laptops) and that is to maintain a reliable backup of your files and software that you can recover from quickly.


Regular readers of this column will know that I've reduced this to a chant, best muttered quietly at the end of a working day; backup, backup, backup.


In planning a backup regimen, there are some factors you'll need to consider...


...Your backup frequency should cover the amount of work you don't want to reconstruct.   I lost three days worth of work when I tried to recover data after the most recent failure, including a major writing project that I was emailing when the system collapsed.   It took more than six days to get back to square one, and it became clear that a weekly backup frequency wasn't cutting it anymore.


...Backup is exactly the sort of thing that software excels at.   You might spend half an hour rummaging through a folder trying to figure out what to copy, but software designed for backup can do it in seconds.   More usefully, the best software can be set to do incremental backups, adding only changed files to your backup stash.   The best backup software can also be set to do its work on a schedule, but even if you don't choose handle things that way, the idea of clicking a button and waiting a few minutes is infinitely more appealing that dragging files and folders around.


...A backup needs to be in two places at once, otherwise, you just have a copy.   For my most important files, I like to have quadruple redundancy, with one copy on entirely different media and one in an entirely different place.


Backups here are now made twice weekly to two different hard drives, once a month to DVD media and once every two months to a hard drive that is kept at another location.


The schedule isn't kept as rigorously as I'd like, but I think of it in tiers, with the twice weekly backups an absolute requirement on Wednesdays and Fridays.


...Like safe sex, it doesn't matter what you use, as long as you use it all the time.   A good rule of thumb is to gather your working files into a single folder and to keep backup media handy that's at least four times larger than the size of that work folder.


Some folks who work regularly with a lot of small files may find hard drives and optical media a pain in the butt for daily backups.   Those users might find a pair of spacious flash drives used in rotation to be the best bet.


My key backup solution spreads three terabytes across four drives and maintains two current copies of my photography files.


...Invest the time to set up a backup system.   Mac users can take advantage of Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.5 or the free iBackup.   Windows users have a range of backup solutions, but small business and noncommercial users might want to start their investigations with NTI's Shadow.   It takes a bit of effort to set up a good regimen and reminders to stay on track.   I have "appointments" to backup set in my calendaring software.   But the payoff in the worst case scenario is huge.


Read more about Mac backup solutions and my own solution to overheating drives here.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 639 - August 04</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - August 2008</category><dc:date>2008-08-04T23:23:27-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth639.html#unique-entry-id-38</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth639.html#unique-entry-id-38</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Adrian Foncette in training with San Juan Jabloteh in July.   Photography by Mark Lyndersay.


Life was good for Adrian Foncette.


He was following his family&rsquo;s tradition as a footballer and his talent as a goalkeeper was beginning to blossom.   Just off a run with the National Under 20 team, he was in training to play with the Under 23 team in May 2007 after a long run playing competitively between the bars in secondary school for Fatima College.


Then everything came to a screeching, slamming halt.

...Just a minute away from home, travelling back from the gym and planning his training day the next morning, a van broke the major road and slammed into the taxi he was travelling in.


Foncette&rsquo;s arm was on the door window when the van slammed into it, and the&nbsp; resulting wound was large and filthy and there was a real threat of gangrene setting in.


Dr Fayard Mohammed first saw Foncette during surgery being performed on the damaged arm.   Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Marlon Mencia called on Mohammed for his advice on covering the wound.


The team employed Vacuum Assisted Closure, a powerful suction device that cleans the wound thoroughly and allows for airtight dressing of the wound.


Another surgical procedure grafted a large strip of skin, roughly six by four inches, from his thigh to cover the wound, a massive gouge extending from his elbow to midway down his arm.


At this point, the Adrian Foncette case had reached an impasse.   Surgery had saved his hand, but muscle had been lost, along with articulation.


The case was presented to Dr Alejandro Badia of Florida&rsquo;s Badia Hand to Shoulder Center and tendon transfer was planned.


Dr Badia has a history of working with athletes and returning them to the field of play, and his work includes surgeries on Indian tennis ace Sania Mirza and Barbadian golfer Sean Edey.


Returning mobility to Foncette&rsquo;s arm required transferring the attachment points of muscles that survived the crushing accident to take the place of muscle that had been lost.


It took five surgeries to transfer the tendon attachment points and four months later, additional surgery to reshape an unsightly indentation in the arm.


Dr Badia is pleased with the outcome.   &ldquo;It is an exceptional result: a combination of technically precise surgery, diligent therapy and a motivated young athlete with good family and community support,&rdquo; he wrote in response to an e-mail query.


Foncette, a gangling, shy young man with a winning smile, says his arm feels the same now as it was before his accident.


&ldquo;At first I was scared to play, the injury was close to the bone and I&rsquo;d be worried that it would get hit,&rdquo; Foncette said.


By December 2007, young Foncette was feeling confident enough in his recovering limb to begin playing again, but he wouldn&rsquo;t begin full training again until May, a year after the crash.


But his youthful exuberance would pay off.   In December, football scouts saw him play and offered him a scholarship at the University of Albany.   The young goalkeeper, currently in training with San Juan Jabloteh, will leave in mid-August to continue his career.


...Tendon transfers are done locally, but successfully healing limbs requires the efforts of a substantial team, beginning with the initial trauma treatment through to the extended physiotherapy needed post-operation.


&ldquo;Locally, the public system lacks the time and infrastructure for many of the super-specialties such as hand surgery, which hopefully will someday be addressed,&rdquo; notes Dr Fayard Mohammed. 


&ldquo;Hand injuries are lumped in with all other trauma and cancers and not given a priority (life before limb) leading to frequent disability that is preventable.&rdquo;


Local orthopaedic surgeon Godfrey Araujo and physiotherapist Lisa Niles are working to improve the situation by forging links with Miami based Baptist Health to deepen the knowledge base of Trinidad and Tobago&rsquo;s limb recovery specialists.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 638 - July 29</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - July 2008</category><dc:date>2008-07-28T20:08:07-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth638.html#unique-entry-id-37</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth638.html#unique-entry-id-37</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[New toll for local telecoms development


A new telecoms e-road will be paved with we money.   The two percent tax will inevitably come out of the pockets of consumers, either through slowed development or delayed cost reductions.   Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.


The draft Universality Implementation Plan for Telecommunications services in Trinidad and Tobago is the action arm of the Digital Divide report released by the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (TATT).


Described as a "consultative document," it outlines a strategy for raising funds through a two percent tax on the total gross revenue of existing&nbsp; ISPs and telephony providers of two percent of their total gross revenue to provide service in areas which have proven to be economically unfeasible.


These local districts, described by TATT as Universality Service Areas, are the parts of Trinidad and Tobago which fall below the country average for accessibility and utilisation.


The Digital Divide report cited the national results of the 2007 survey as follows; a National Digital Access Index of 0.6668 and National Digital Opportunity Index of 0.6315.   That result would put Trinidad and Tobago between the standings of Barbados (#27 with 0.64) and Italy (0.63) as recorded in the 2006 International Telecommunications Union survey.


But no nation is standing still, so true comparisons are almost impossible.


More useful numbers are to be found in TATT's targets outlined in the document, raising the proportion of households with fixed lines from 72.6 percent to 73 percent, the percentage of mobile subscribers from 92.6 to 93 percent and boosting Internet users per 100 inhabitants from 33.2 to 51.


Why woo wires?


Fixed line use is likely to be either static or declining and it seems that almost everyone who wants a mobile phone already has one (or two) and that reality seems to be reflected in TATT's conservative hopes for improvement in these markets.


Boosting Internet use makes sense, but there's a preoccupation with wired connections throughout the plan.


One of the projects outlined in the Universality plan is "affordable fixed telephony services for the purpose of domestic and international call origination and termination" and it's unclear whether the authority's hope for specific items such as a significant expansion in payphone installations would demand supporting wired connections.


The proposed fund will pay for infrastructure expansion in areas that telecoms companies have not found profitable in the past, but how will businesses make money off of what will probably be marginal services, particularly with the axe of TATT mandated affordability hovering over their heads?  &nbsp;


What happens if these businesses run the numbers and decide that even with funding, there is no business case for bidding on these projects?


Need for transparency in execution


Even more challenging is the framework in which the Universality Fund would be managed.


The decision to make the provision of services in under served areas a commercial venture (albeit one paid for by taxes on private enterprise), open to bid must be supported by a willingness to allow providers to fulfil the requirements of the services without prejudice regarding the technologies being employed.


This is worth mentioning because "mobile telephony" services are being specifically excluded from funding.   As of this writing, mobile telephony is taken to mean commercial cellular services, but there's a real possibility that cost effective solutions based on 3G or High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technologies that might be more appropriate to remote, widely separated settlements might be specifically removed from consideration through careless wording.


The accountability in TATT's plan consists of yearly reports on Implementation (specific activities of the fund and projects related to it) and an Accounting report.   There is no specific note on how these reports will be made available to the public.


The importance of transparency in this exercise cannot be overemphasised.   Government hasn't always interfaced with the private sector in ways that could be described as redounding to the benefit of the man in the street.


Competitive bidding for infrastructure funds and regular, transparent reporting on the activities of this telecoms fund in the media would go a long way toward both reassuring affected citizens that their needs are being met and providing a readily accessible record of the disbursement of the proposed fund.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 637 - July 22</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - July 2008</category><dc:date>2008-07-22T09:03:00-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth637.html#unique-entry-id-36</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth637.html#unique-entry-id-36</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The report's data is intimidatingly thorough, but the visual representations offer real insight into the Internet availability and use in Trinidad and Tobago.   This map offers a guide to Internet use in Trinidad and Tobago.


The final report on the Digital Divide in Trinidad and Tobago, 2007 has been posted to the website of the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago.


Prepared by Dr Patrick K Watson and Dr Bheshem Ramlal of UWI's Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, the 135 page document is pretty much what you'd expect from an academic survey, rich with statistical detail with some timid conclusions.


The report makes a careful distinction between digital opportunity, which findings suggest is acceptably high, from utilisation, which is abysmally low.


In some areas, infrastructure build out is poor, but some services are available using wireless connections via either mobile phones or mobile broadband.


At least three of the conclusions by the authors; improve the communications infrastructure, encourage the use of the Internet and reduce the cost of broadband services are almost annoyingly mundane and have been the backbeat of this column for more than ten years now.


But one of their suggestions, that more emphasis should be placed on mobile broadband Internet service, clearly comes out of the report's correlations between geography and access and is worthy of some commercial attention.   If the government wants to make the Internet more accessible, this is a powerful lever point.


Internet services that focus on the wireless delivery of broadband can leapfrog the mile by mile issues of infrastructure build out and stalling factors such as cable theft.


The Digital Divide authors stop short of anything more potent than advice, but there are no such constraints here.


TSTT is currently the only provider of a truly mobile broadband Internet service but has dramatically slowed its expansion of the service for more than a year now.


The market for such services has also been constrained by the cost to consumers, which suggests that there may be room for competitive challenge of the monopoly provider of mobile broadband Internet by rival ISPs or a Digicel willing to step out of its GSM comfort zone to add 3G or HDSPA data services to its menu of offerings.


TATT has recently begun talking about a Universality fund, which proposes a system of subsidy for underserved areas, but that's a whole other discussion.


Surprising facts about digital T&T


Trinidad and Tobago has more mobile phones in use than there are people on the ground.


Mobile cellular access averages a dollar per minute; Internet access costs 9.6 cents per minute.


The overall Digital Opportunity Index has risen from 0.45 in a 2006 International Telecommunications Union report to 0.6315 in the TATT survey.


According to Ministry of Education figures, 305 schools are connected to the Internet via dial-up and 20 schools which are wired for DSL broadband.   Ten of those schools are secondary schools in St George West.


Nalis reports that 283 people access the Internet monthly at the National Library, with 17,000 users at their other 23 library locations.


Two geographic areas of Trinidad, Canaree and Penal Quinam Beachroad are said to have five or fewer residents.   No information was available to the authors for Pasea Extension, an area bounded on the west by St Augustine South and on the north by Trincity and Dinsley.


Areas of surprising population density to utilisation ratios include Speyside, Chaguaramas and Pointe a Pierre.   Other utilisation hotspots include Tobago in the Scarborough-Bacolet area in the southwestern end of the island and La Horquette and Goodwood Gardens in the northwest of Trinidad.


...Internet connectivity and use varies according to income levels and availability.


Internet infrastructure and utilisation tends to follow population concentrations and heavily travelled traffic routes but rises sharply in higher income areas.


Service providers blew off the report's authors, claiming confidentiality and offering little useful data.   Data was gathered using previous census data and household surveys of 6,000 households.   Information about library Internet access was supplied by Nalis, the Ministry of Education provided information about Internet service in schools and TATT gathered information about Internet caf&eacute;s.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 636 - July 15</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - July 2008</category><dc:date>2008-07-14T22:35:48-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth636.html#unique-entry-id-35</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth636.html#unique-entry-id-35</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Post spandex contemplations


Will Smith as Hancock, superhero bum.


In Hancock, Will Smith works mightily to thread a curious needle, portraying the heroic ideal in a most unheroic manner.


Cinema, as usual, is pretty late to this game.   The era of spandex deconstruction began in the 1980's with the almost simultaneous publication of Frank Miller's abrasive The Dark Knight Returns (1985), and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' obsessively detailed The Watchmen (1986).


Both graphic novels were the result of adults looking critically at the business they were involved in and, presumably, the idols of their youth with eyes jaded by the realities of maturity.


The results were spectacularly profitable for DC Comics and opened the floodgates for more than two decades of introspective, bleak reimaginings of heroes who owed more to the moral ambivalence of Mickey Spillane's heroes than to the polarised ideals of earlier ages of comics.


Books like The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson and The Pro, by Ennis and Amanda Conner examined the off-panel activities of the colourful crimefighting set in lurid detail.


In Powers, by Brian Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, two police officers engage in a procedural crime drama set on their beat, the turf traversed by superheroes and supervillains, who stand revealed in their investigations as largely cut from the same colourful, if decadent cloth.


Apart from the ground breaking Dark Knight (no relation to the upcoming Bale as Batman sequel) and Watchmen, currently in production with 300 director Zack Snyder, the sober keepers of comics' legacy have engaged in some mild revisionist thinking of their own.


Official second looks at the mythos


Marvels and Kingdom Come by painter du jour Alex Ross and writers Kurt Busiek and Mark Waid, respectively, contribute observations of the human perspective of superhumans striding (and floating above) the planet.


More aggressive was the run of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch on Ultimates, a "real world" version of Marvel's flagship supergroup, the Avengers that's influenced more than a little by Bendis and Hitch's Authority, an outrageous graphic novel that took the notion of the supergroup to its logical conclusion and left it beached and wrecked on the rocks.   When Millar and Hitch's Ultimates was turned into a children's cartoon, everything that made the book interesting was removed.   Clearly, publishers realise that 24 frames per second are more dangerous than nine panels per page.


That's seems to be the thinking behind the excisions from Victor Ngo's script, so notoriously unflattering to the spandex set that it bounced around Hollywood for more than a decade before being made into a Will Smith vehicle.


It's worth noting that pretty much every modern day superhero has some kind of chain binding him to humanity.   For Spiderman, it's guilt about the death of his uncle, Batman is obsessed with avenging his parent's murder, Superman owes a debt of gratitude to his farming foster parents and Bruce Banner would really just rather not be the Hulk.


But what if they just didn't care?


Hancock's astonishing first half embraces that notion, portraying what Mark Millar described as a "person of mass destruction," the superhero as surly, poorly dressed drunk wreaking havoc as he intervenes in lawful process.


It's when the film makes its abrupt turn towards the PG-13 required arc of redemption that it almost grinds to a halt.   Despite Smith's impressive immersion in the character and the growing prominence of co-star Charlize Theron, the plot twist seems more required than realistic.


Hancock is worth seeing for that first half though.   It posits, with some passion, that's we're all just one bad day in a cave with flying rats and a bite from a radioactive insect away from wearing our underwear over our pants and beating the unjust to a pulp.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 635 - July 08</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - July 2008</category><dc:date>2008-07-08T13:28:44-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth635.html#unique-entry-id-34</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth635.html#unique-entry-id-34</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The artful downgrader


This imposing list of suggested updates to my Vista installation is only matched by the equally detailed list of installed updates visible to the left in this screen capture.   Vista is pretty good at managing these tiny updates, but Mac users will fare better with the company's regular monolithic updates.


Upgrading was once one of the great sources of excitement in these parts.   The promise of a computer system with new features, faster performance, and more thrills and you'd find at a good amusement park were the big payoff after downloading and installing an update file.


Part of the reason for the cheap thrill was the relative ease of repairing a flaky Macintosh.   In the old pre-OSX days, you could just drag a copy of a functioning System Folder back to your wonky system and be back right where you were before that last ill-advised update.


These days, a messy OSX update is as hard to recover from as a botched Windows upgrade, and it can actually be harder, because you can set Windows to restore older versions of key components of your installation.


With pretty much all my work originating on a computer these days, my wanton willingness to explore software's new and thrilling features has been replaced by cautious trepidation.   Wags are kindly asked to ignore any potential parallels here with my romantic potential.


Upgrade gone bad


I'll download an update and hold on to it for a couple of days, checking websites like Macintouch and MacFixit for deal breaking bugs that could bring a working day to a crashing halt.   Annoyances.org offers useful tips for beginning Windows users, and PC World and Infoworld offer deeper resources for upscale Windows users.


All this became a topic for Mr Cautious a few weeks ago, after Realmac Software, the authors of the software I use to create my website, issued an update that quietly broke some mission critical functions that I needed.   It was almost two days in before I realised the scope of the issues and their severity.   What followed was ten days of bug reports, e-mails and even a screencast movie of my desktop showing the bug in action before fixes were in place.


During that time, it was necessary to back down to the earlier version, losing hours of work that I'd invested in exploring the shiny new stuff built into the upgrade because the new software wrote a completely different file format.


Strategic code improvement


So, what have we learned today, then?


Upgrades aren't always an improvement to your circumstances, as Neo learns in the first few minutes of The Matrix Reloaded.   New code sometimes brings new errors, and those coding mistakes and incompatibilities can bring your work to a complete halt.


Both Macs and Windows PCs support automatic updates of the operating system as well as offering larger updates that you can download.   Both Windows Service Packs, and Mac OS .01 updates will bring substantial changes to your existing operating system and sometimes also introduce new incompatibilities with older software.


Own the stuff you make your living using.   Tech support departments aren't terribly interested in helping people who have stolen their software, but tend, in the main, to be very enthusiastic about working with people who have contributed to their salaries.


Small software companies are generally more responsive than big ones.   I can't imagine having happy chit chats with Adobe, but the Realmac guys had a coding geek communicating directly with me as soon as they realised they needed more information about the bugs.


Backup your files before a major update.   Some well-behaved applications will offer to write separate versions of your work when creating strange new document formats, but other software will just overwrite your old documents, making it impossible for older versions of your software to open them.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 634 - July 01</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - July 2008</category><dc:date>2008-06-30T21:06:36-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth634.html#unique-entry-id-33</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth634.html#unique-entry-id-33</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The bug squashing robot of the beta cycle gets the star treatment for the final release of Firefox 3 with a faux movie poster by Nobox.


On Tuesday 17, the Mozilla Foundation released the newest version of its flagship browser, Firefox, with a splashy "download day" which attempted to set a world record for the most downloads by a single software application during a 24 hour period.


The foundation reported that by the end of the day, it had logged more than eight million downloads of the free software, despite a shaky start that left download pages unavailable for almost two hours.


Trinidad and Tobago led the Caribbean (as long as we don't count Puerto Rico) with 5028 downloads, just barely edging out Jamaica's tally of 5005.   There's no shiny cup for this, but you can download a certificate with your name on it, suitable for printing, whether you downloaded on the day or not here.


I routinely run two browsers on my laptop on startup, both of which must be stable enough to run several dozen windows at once for days at a time.   To say that I'm addicted to tabs would, I'm afraid, be something of a monstrous understatement.


My current setup as I write this consists of 46 tabs in Firefox and 82 in Safari, all of which are nestled into a single window per browser.


So technical stuff like memory leaks, a software bug that slowly steals available memory, have a big impact on my working day.


It's been five days since I quit Firefox 2 and reloaded all my tabs in the new version three and along with more parsimonious memory use, there are a number of improvements worth noting.


One that's likely to jump right out at you is the Smartbar, also known as the "Awesome Bar," an enhancement to the URL box that you fill in to go to a new website.   Begin typing a new web address and Firefox 3 will search its history and saved bookmarks to propose several addresses that you can just click on.


More compelling to me are the features that make the browser disappear in favour of the content you're viewing.   Firefox 3 is the only browser out of the top three to provide versions for the Mac OS, Windows and Linux.   Internet Explorer is Windows only and Safari surfs only on Windows and the Mac.

...Firefox 3 embraces its expansive ambitions by changing its "chrome" to more intimately suit the OS it's running on.   The result is a browser that looks less like a Mozilla product and more like a part of the operating system you happen to be using.


Features are nice, but let's not forget what a web browser is for and that's displaying web pages.   The new version of Gecko is a visibly superior render engine to the one built into version 2, and a number of fussy sites that I visit regularly now display with no major errors.


A web browser that's more frugal in its use of memory, loads pages quickly and accurately and gets out of the way of web content?   That's a welcome addition to the choices available for Mac, Windows and Linux users.


...Firefox 3 has an action packed toolbar, full of useful features lurking behind colourful little icons.   Click the little blue star to the right of the link address to bookmark a page, click again and you get tiny but full featured bookmark editor and manager.


Part of the appeal of Firefox is the large number of add-ons available for the browser than extend its capabilities, sometimes into the realms of the absurd.   New to version 3 is a more rigorous theme and extensions checker that is more diligent about disabling out of date extensions.   You may also find that new features in Firefox 3 make some commonly used extensions obsolete.


Need to select text from a web page across breaks and graphics?   In Firefox 3 hold down the Control key (Command on Macs) and you can select non-contiguous passages of text.


...Firefox 3 lets you know what's happening with your downloads with a line of text and an icon at the bottom right of the browser window.


There's lots more to discover in the new Firefox, including improved anti-phishing safeguards and next generation features like improved access to off-line web applications.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 633 - June 23</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - June 2008</category><dc:date>2008-06-23T22:39:34-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth633.html#unique-entry-id-32</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth633.html#unique-entry-id-32</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The owner plans to convert technical manuals for use on the device for reference on client calls...along with a few books. 

...Amazon's Kindle (US$350) e-book reader is a pleasant surprise, a device that takes more than a few cues from the design playbook of Apple's iPod.


The comparison isn't really unfair, although the two products seem to do very different things.   The Kindle and the iPod are both electronic devices that attempt to replace established ways of accessing media.   A single iPod can retain the contents of a few shelves worth of CDs and the Kindle, with an added high-capacity SD memory card, can hold a few shelves worth of books.


Both are saddled with Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues that tangle up the potential of hardware and software that go some distance in making e-book reading an effortless experience.


One of the Kindle's great selling points is its wireless connectivity, which allows the device to connect to a special EVDO network that allows a reader to browse the Amazon store, buy a book and download it to the device in just a few minutes.


E-books, which are largely text documents, tend to be much smaller than music files and transfer with lightning speed on even a moderately fast network.


...Nothing like that works in Trinidad and Tobago, so it's a blessing that the Kindle acts like any other USB mass storage device when you connect it to a computer.   It simply mounts on the desktop like a big white flash drive, and you can copy compatible files to the appropriate folders on the device.


But "big" doesn't really describe the Kindle very well, and neither do its press photos.   The device feels like a slightly oversized paperback book, but even that description doesn't do it justice.   It's slim and light, much lighter than the average paperback book and the tapered edges make it even smaller than it actually is.   This is a device that you can, without effort, hold in one hand for hours at a time and page forward and back with your thumb if you hold it left hand.


...It's clear and crisp with minimal ghosting, but there's no backlight, so you'll need to use it with the same lighting that you'd expect to use with a regular book.


Pages scroll with a mild flash as the screen refreshes, but it's only midly disconcerting at first and you get used to it quickly.


If you can get the content you want for the Kindle, it is an extremely convenient, usable alternative to traditional books, particularly for novels that you have no sentimental attachment to.


...The Kindle reads plain text files directly and files in Microsoft Word, HTML and all common graphics format can be sent to Amazon for conversion to Kindle format and plays standard MP3 files natively.


The selection on Amazon that's available to potential local owners without access to a credit card drawn on a US bank is troublingly slim, however.   The books that you can access can be purchased and the file will be posted for download.


...Many classic novels are available at the Gutenberg Project <www.gutenberg.net> as text files, though the volunteer nature of the initiative can result in wonky formatting of the documents.


Fictionwise, where I've bought Palm compatible short stories and novellas for years, has upgraded their service to include the Kindle in their comprehensive list of supported e-book formats.


...When you bought a book or a CD, there was a fairly limited circle of friends or acquaintances with whom you could share it.   Not so with digital files.   An MP3 file can zoom around the world to thousands of people in the time it would take to call a friend to brag about the new Gnarls Barkley album.


To limit that potential, publishers now demand that digital content be locked down to the purchaser.   In spite of these limitations, the iTunes Store has now surpassed Walmart as a retailer of music and Amazon hopes to grow its resource of books available in digital format.


DRM is a function of both ownership and geography.   Publishers like to carve up the world into regions, as evidenced by the region encoding that's long been an irritating aspect of DVD sales, so trying to buy DRM protected music from outside the region tends to be blocked.


It has long been a great irony to me that because of DRM restrictions, the works of VS Naipaul available on Audible, a supplier of downloadable audiobooks recently bought by Amazon, cannot be purchased by a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 632 - June 17</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - June 2008</category><dc:date>2008-06-16T23:03:41-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/emeagwali.html#unique-entry-id-31</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/emeagwali.html#unique-entry-id-31</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Colour among the circuits


Phillip Emeagwali, photographed at the Hyatt hotel.   Photo by Mark Lyndersay


Phillip Emeagwali is a smart scientist and something of a rarity in technology circles, a scientist who has done most of his ground breaking work alone, working his way from theory to practice in long 16 hour days of programming.


That he is black should be something that's beside the point of all that work, but it isn't.


Emeagwali was born in Nigeria in 1954, was forced to drop out of school at age 12 and was conscripted into the Biafran army to fight in the war torn nation at 14.   He completed his high school equivalency through self-study and came to the United States in 1974 on a scholarship.


Photographs of the young student at the time show a gawky young man with a huge afro and horn-rimmed black glasses in a dashiki, a nerd of colour.


In 1990, he was in San Francisco, the sole black face save for his wife, Dale to receive the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for his work programming the Los Alamos Supercomputer, winning in the "Price-Performance" category for his work on oil reservoir modelling.


"I'd read a science fiction book years before about a weather prediction system that linked 64,000 minds together, and that set me to thinking about a solution," Emeagwali said at our interview the evening before he spoke at the Kwame Ture Lecture series.


Many processors, one task


"Nobody believed that it was possible to link all those processors together to work together, but I imagined it as a 16 sided hypercube in which each processor would talk to its 16 neighbours in executing the instructions."


Emeagwali set those 65,536 processors humming away on what he described as a "planet-sized problem" the flow of oil beneath the surface of the earth.


His work became part of the foundation of a technology that we now take for granted, parallel computing, the science of setting multiple processors to work on a single set of computing instructions.


In a world in which computers with two processors are almost a norm and quad and octa core systems cost just a few hundred dollars more, it's hard to imagine the world of 1990, when supercomputers were a resource you had to apply for access to and the physical boxes spanned four tennis courts.


It's compelling to note that when Phillip Emeagwali and his wife arrived in San Francisco, he chose to keep his identity quiet until the very moment that his name was announced and he rose to go to receive his award.


"I had some fears and doubts," Emeagwali said.   "Would they find some reason to withdraw the award?   I don't remember much about what happened, but my wife told me afterward that the room was full of shocked faces, and the presenter almost dropped the award."


Asked about his experience being black on the frontier of technology, there was a surprising response to a question he didn't seem practised in answering.


"You have to deny your black identity," he responded.   "If you don't, you end up just being the only black scientist."


Difficult background


There are some troubling aspects to Phillip Emeagwali's career as even a cursory Web search will uncover.   There is some doubt regarding the status of his doctorate degree and in this interview, he persisted in describing the Gordon Brown award, a prestigious achievement in its own right, as equivalent to the Nobel prize.


Emeagwali's story cries out for tidying up because the important, unassailably vital material isn't front and centre, his Web site is dated and the repetition of silly claims like being described as the "Bill Gates of Africa" are simply counter productive.


Asked directly about his doctoral degree, Emeagwali responded tangentially, "I've been a student all my life and will remain one.   I created new knowledge in the fields of physics, applying Newton's Second Law to oil flows, mathematics, writing the equations to support it and computing, programming 65,536 computers to work on the task.   You don't have a discovery until you apply theory to solve a problem."
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 631 - June 10</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - June 2008</category><dc:date>2008-06-14T14:02:40-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth631.html#unique-entry-id-30</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth631.html#unique-entry-id-30</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A 3D rendering of the Iron Man suit  meets Drew Struzan's pulp inspired Indiana Jones.


It's almost impossible to explain the concept of a double feature to my nephew and nieces.   They grew up in Houston and have only ever known the experience of the multiplex, the cinematic iteration of America's mall/superstore sensibility.   Visit one building, choose among many options, eat.


But the idea of double features, once the mainstay of Saturday afternoon cinema, not just in Trinidad and Tobago, but also in the US and in many countries around the world, is at the root of what has got to be one of the best examples of the form that I've seen in years, the pairing of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and "Iron Man."


It's an unlikely match up, to be sure.


Crystal Skull is the fourth entry in a franchise long thought to be done.   The most miraculous feat that the film accomplishes is putting Harrison Ford, twenty years older than he was when he wrapped "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" in his mid-forties, in an action adventure that isn't an embarrassment.


Iron Man is a second tier comic book character from Marvel, one without the immediate cachet of Spider Man or the Fantastic Four in the public mind, but remains an intriguing character, not least because he manages to juggle creating intricate technology with heavy drinking.


Marvel's recent history with bringing its films to the big screen has improved significantly, but the run has hardly been hardly flawless, so Iron Man proves to be a more than pleasant surprise in its execution.


Two can make the thing go right


What sends this pairing over the top, apart from the undeniable bargain of getting two first run films on one ticket, is their shared respect for their source material.   It would have been the easiest thing in the world to play an ageing Harrison Ford for laughs and to turn a known substance abuser into an object of camp laughs as he lurches around drunk in a massive metal suit.


Neither film is burdened by a particularly complicated plot.


Dr Henry Jones Jr is almost instantly hurled into an almost non-stop sequence of carefully choreographed hijinks that are, ultimately, the point of the movie. 


But enormous red bachacs, ancient stone contraptions and mysterious magnetic skulls are hardly the most frightening, if largely bloodless terrors in Crystal Skull.


The film makers, and George Lucas is as involved with the adventures of Dr Jones as director Spielberg is, manage to find the time to contemplate America in the 1950's and the real menaces that leave Indy and his audience leery are the overwhelming paranoia of Communist fear and the rise of science that seems as supernatural as Indy's traditional threats.   The science angle offers two clear moments of pivotal menace, one atomic, the other interstellar, that bookmark the traditional adventuring.


Shia La Beouf, whose movie presence I usually find either annoying or readily ignored, turns in a winning and enthusiastic performance as the only young person in a cast that largely couches the ageing Ford in with his peers and returns a surprisingly sprightly Karen Allen to the screen.


Heavy metal Iron Man


Where Cate Blanchett works hard with the intractable stiffness of Russian bad girl Irina Spalko, Gwyneth Paltrow spins a small role as "Pepper" Potts in Iron Man into the stratosphere.


James Rhodes (Terrence Howard) may get in a few entertaining male bonding sequences with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr), but it's Potts who gets all the zingers, starting with a breathtaking exchange with one of Stark's conquests in the first ten minutes of the film.


What ensues thereafter is much of what one comes to expect from a superhero film, the hero's understanding of his life's role and his past failings, the forging (pretty much literally, in this case) of his new identity and his embrace of truth, justice and the American way.


Which in Stark's case, largely includes stiff drinks, hot hamburgers and fast iron, as he moves quickly from a zippy Audi R8 into a shiny metal suit.


With any double, the question is always about which film trumped the other.   Iron Man is fast and snappy and Robert Downey Jr plays the role as if it were his last, but Crystal Skull has the history and doesn't deny it.   Hell, the film manages to sneak in a cameo for Denholm Elliot, who played Dr Jones' eternally patient principal in the first three films.   No mean feat, since he died in 1992.


But the score is what tips things in Skull's favour.   When Iron Man roars into action, his rocking score, abetted by Tom Morello, is has all the appropriate heavy metal snarl, but when Indy cracks his whip, he soars on the third of John Williams' adventure scores (after Star Wars and Superman), and that, my friends, is a music bed of roses.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 630 - June 03</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - June 2008</category><dc:date>2008-06-02T18:30:02-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/dieflash.html#unique-entry-id-29</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/dieflash.html#unique-entry-id-29</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[At the CSS Garden, web designers work from the same HTML file and add their own design, images and CSS stylesheet to redesign it.   Each of these four images shares the same base HTML code.


Flash, Adobe's software for building sophisticated animation for web pages, is the dominant method for distributing motion based content on the Internet.   It is the foundation of the YouTube phenomenon, and the cornerstone technology of almost every website created to support a movie.


...In 2008, the technology is beginning to feel like a clumsy kludge, unsupported on the iPhone, not very well supported on most mobile phones and a figment of the imagination on Linux distributions.


In addition, Microsoft clearly isn't happy with the product's dominance, and has crafted a competitor, Silverlight, which it hopes will displace Flash or at least match its functionality and appeal to Internet users.


The product was introduced in 1995 as Futuresplash Animator from Futurewave, originally as software for doing cel based animation.   Macromedia bought the product in 1996 as an adjunct product to its multimedia products Director and Authorware, which were, respectively, designed for CD ROM delivery of entertainment and for building educational content.


Macromedia renamed the product Flash and inadvertently killed off both of its existing products.   Director still exists, after a fashion, but Authorware was officially spiked in 2003.


...At the same time that faxes, a crude method of transmitting a picture of a page from one point to another were being marketed to the public, a far superior way of transmitting data, the first nodes of the Internet, already existed.


It is no accident that the screeching sounds that a fax made while connecting seemed so similar to those of the earliest modems.   Both technologies operated by turning data into electronic pulses that could travel along phone lines before reassembling them into readable documents at the other end of the connection.


But fax machines were cheaper than the earliest computers, easier to explain and the technology delivered something that was usable, if only barely.   Flash forward, so to speak, to 2008, an era in which e-mail is finally pervasive and the fax as a data transmission tool is slowly dying off.


The arc of Flash popularity is beginning to show a similar trend, as new coding techniques begin to replace its role.


In its earliest days, the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that defined much of the World Wide Web was pretty crude, but it was also relatively easy to understand.   You could, with a bit of effort, figure out how to bang out a straightforward web page without reaching for a pocket protector.


Over time, the design needs of the web led to various hacks that worked around the annoying flexibility of web pages, such as frames and invisible images that brought structure and reams of additional code to the typical web page.


It was in the midst of this chaos that Flash arrived, allowing not just motion graphics in a controllable environment, but absolute, repeatable design that stayed the same from browser to browser.


...Now most serious web designers use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a coding system that brings the principle of document stylesheets familiar to hardcore word processing users and page layout specialists to the web.


Unlike typical word processor stylesheets, which typically affect just the formatting of text, CSS can also control the positioning of items on a web page with startling flexibility and accuracy.


This is something that's actually harder to explain than to show.   Visit the CSS Zen Garden for a stunning display of just how much flexibility CSS coding can offer a web page designer.


From the user perspective, CSS means no plug-in to download or update, you just need a browser released within the last two years.   It is worth nothing, however, that most browsers have various inconsistencies (bugs, dude) in CSS rendering.


From the designer's perspective, CSS adds another layer of complexity to the code of a typical web page, but it's nothing that an experienced hand coder would find insurmountable.   More compellingly, CSS is another step toward separating web page design from content, which makes redesigns less of an intimidating prospect.


With more flexible options available for designing the look and feel of pages, Flash will, with any luck, be relegated to the purpose for which it was originally built, packaging content in a controllable window.   There remains much room for improvement even in that function as the quality of a typical YouTube video would suggest.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 629 - May 27</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - May 2008</category><dc:date>2008-05-26T20:29:46-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/vistauptake.html#unique-entry-id-28</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/vistauptake.html#unique-entry-id-28</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Microsoft&rsquo;s dilemma


The Windows Vista desktop is slowly taking over PCs but the XP experience has been hard to let go. 

...Pity the publisher of Windows for just a moment.   To succeed with its operating system strategy, Microsoft must kill its own operating system, the stuff of Greek tragedy.


Microsoft wants to put an end to Windows XP, but users aren&rsquo;t cooperating.


Just a bit over 13 months since the launch of the newest revision of its flagship operating system, Vista is finding heavy competition for customers from...

...The logs for my website from January 2007 through last week show that Windows XP is the dominant OS in use by visitors, installed on 55 percent of visitor&rsquo;s systems.   Windows 2000, released almost a decade ago in February 2000, holds a 3.4 percent share of visitors with Vista users at a distant 1.6 percent share.


This aligns roughly with statistics offered by the web survey organisation Net Applications, which as of April 2008, has published statistics that put XP users at 73 percent of Internet users, followed by a 14.5 percent share for Vista and a 2.4 percent share for Windows 2000.


The lingering presence of XP long after Microsoft would have liked to see it go away can be explained by several factors, but chief among them is support from its publisher.


As long as software is still being updated and supported, there is a real possibility that people will just keep on using it.


The Support story


Windows 2000 continues to be used in corporate installations, the slowest adopters of new operating system technology, and that product enjoys an extended support period which will end on July 13, 2010.


Officially, Windows XP fell off the support list in September 2004, but if you keep the software up to date with Microsoft&rsquo;s Service Packs, it qualifies for extended support.   Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for the operating system this month.

...On June 30, the company will end over the counter sales of Windows XP.   System builders can continue to license the product for inclusion on a system until January 31, 2009.


In an intriguing new twist, Microsoft has extended the product life of XP for the new ultra low cost computers (ULPCs, though Microsoft calls them ULCPCs) which are becoming interesting solutions for the classroom and for ultralight mobile use.


The most well-known of these products, the XO, a computer produced by the One Laptop Per Child project and the Asus EEE PC.


I&rsquo;ve had a chance to fool around with both of these devices, and they are tiny but functional objects, barely larger than a hardcover novel, a PC shrunk down to its functional essence.   Both computers were introduced with preinstalled versions of Linux.


...According to Max Briones, Windows Client Business Group Lead for the Caribbean & Central America, &ldquo;Windows XP Home edition will only be available to those Direct OEM partners manufacturing ULCPCs and (who) are doing the pre-installation of the OS in these machines.&rdquo;


Qualifying ULPCs must have a screen size no larger than 10.2 inches, one gigabyte of RAM, a single processor running at 1GHZ or less and a hard drive no larger than 80GB with only a few minor exceptions.


By imposing these restrictions, Microsoft seems to be striving to keep the market between mainstream PCs and ULPCs distinct.   Leaked documents from the company suggest that it will license the OEM version to system builders for US$26 per copy in emerging markets and for US$32 in developed nations.


So Windows XP, making a slow but steady exit from computers through attrition finds new life on systems that stand no chance of running the robust, good looking but resource hungry Vista.


In the midst of all this turmoil, Microsoft is ramping up development of Windows 7.   Mark Hamburg, the architect of Adobe&rsquo;s Photoshop Lightroom has been wooed to do design work on the new Windows, but the ghosts of Windows versions past keep haunting the company&rsquo;s plans.


If you&rsquo;re a customer who wants to use Windows XP, you have just over a month left to buy a copy.


There's more on this story here.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth 628 - May 20</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - May 2008</category><dc:date>2008-05-19T19:41:58-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth628.html#unique-entry-id-27</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/writing/bd/08_files/BitDepth628.html#unique-entry-id-27</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Nikon's 9000 ED Scanner is a massive hunk of technology roughly the size of small microwave, but a drum scanner, the next best device for scanning film costs far more. 

...There was a book knocking around at the turn of the century called "Start with a scan" that hopeful photo buffs bought hoping to be able to turn their old negatives and prints into digital files on their computers.


Seeing it, I thought about how many of my images actually sta