Martin @ Blog

Today I came across a weblog post which is rather funny in my opinion, and also points out how ‘not-innovative’ Microsoft actually is. The weblog has some video’s (I think Quicktime) of Mac OS X with the audio of Microsoft’s keynote speech at CES in San Fransico this month. I already said to many people (but I think I didn’t wrote about it on my weblog, only this is touching the problem slightly), but Vista doesn’t contain very much ‘new’ features when one compare it to existing operating systems, such as Mac OS X, but also Linux. Fortunately, I’m not the only one who is noticing this, and maybe it will make people think about their software (probably not, but everyone has to keep dreaming 🙂 ).
The main problem is that Microsoft has become a to large company with to few really good developers (one could argue if they ever had good developers, but that’s another discussion). Luckily for the shareholders, the marketing deparment of the company is decent (but the company has to do it without a really good chaiman, such as Jobs, who actually can make people believe that nobody can live without Apple products).

Yesterday, I saw a video on Microsoft’s Channel 9 about a new product the developers from Microsoft are working on. It is an applications for managing photo’s and eventually other media files, such as video’s and documents. The video shows an ‘innovative’ feature of the new application which enables people to share photo’s with other people. This feature uses a client-server system where it will be published that someone is sharing photos. When another person wants to view these photos, the actual files are copied using a P2P connection.
This new product will be available in the future, but is currently in heavy development. Ironically, Apple introduced a new feature for iPhoto which is called ‘PhotoCasting’. As far as I understand, PhotoCasting does the same as MS new application, but doesn’t use p2p (which is good, because if many people want to view your photos, your internet connection is probably not usable anymore) and is already available in iLife ’06. Also, the MS application, which has codename ‘Max’, uses the new userinterface features of Vista (called Avalon) which is according to the MS developers ‘impressive’, but for a Mac user ‘not very exiting’ because on the Mac a comparable userinterface is already available.

According to a press-release on DPreview Konica-Minolta stops selling digital camera’s. The company wasn’t already a big player in this market, but their dSLR-camera’s weren’t that bad. Actually, the Dynax 7D and 5D are pretty good camera’s with the unique anti-shake feature which – as far as I know – no other dSLR has. Also, Konica-Minolta ‘invented’ the market for so-called prosumer camera’s with de Dimage 7D and its successors, with the Dimage A2 as ultimate non-dSLR camera. According to the press-release the company will sell its camera business to Sony. Sony was already trying to get a foot on the ground in the high-end photography market with their recently introduced DSC-R1. On the internet, the reactions of the owners Konica-Minolta digital camera’s aren’t very positive (Dutch). I think, that this step isn’t that bad for the market. Sony has a lot more money available to fund marketing and development of new models. The company is working on a dSLR-camera which will be introduced this summer, and based on the reviews of the DSC-R1, the chances are that this will be a very competitive product. In my opinion, the coorporation between Konica-Minolta and Sony is the only way to compete with the two market leaders in the digital camera market, Canon and Nikon.

Unfortunately, my weblog was unreachable yesterday, because of a problem with my internet connection. Now everything should work again, so I’m able to write about the most anticipated IT-event this year until now: The MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs.

Anticipated, because the expectations were that Apple would introduce the first Macs with an Intel processor – and they did. Also, there were rumours that Apple would introduce other existing products, such as a spreadsheet for their iWorks package and even a new version of Mac OS X – these rumours however, were untrue.

So, what did Steve Jobs announced? He began with some sale figures to illustrate the success of past year. He told that the Apple Stores sold for more than one billion dollars last quarter, and because he released this figure (which is information relevant for stock traders) he was forced by his CFO to tell the revenues for the latest quarter, which was 5,7 billion dollar. Steve also told that there were 42 million iPods sold over the entire lifetime of the musicplayer, and that in 2005 the company sold more iPods than every year before (32 million iPods). Of course iTunes Music Store can’t be left out when talking about numbers. Apple sold 850 million songs via IMS and is now selling 3 million songs per day, which means a market share of 83 per cent. This left you wondering where record companies have their guts from to threat Apple with not selling songs via their store, because the ‘prices are to low’ in their opinion. They seem to really don’t want to sell music at all, so they can even complain more about piracy?

After these ‘boring’ numbers, Steve announced that Apple will start selling new content via IMS. One of the new series is ‘Saturday Night Live’. While the rumours suggested a new iPod shuffle or iPod nano, Apple introduced only a remote control for the iPod which also includes a integrated FM tuner. The new accessoire is going to cost 49 dollars. Finaly he also mentiond the coorporation with Crysler, which is going to add iPod support to their cars. In order to improve the iPod sales Apple has created a tv-ad featuring the trompetist Whyton Marsalis (who mostly plays jazz, so probably not many people will know him.. actually i do)

After the iPod and music talk, Jobs starts talking about the ‘important’ stuff: computers. He starts with Apple’s new professional photography workflow application Aperture. After a short movie about Aperture, Steve continues to talk about the Widgets which were introduced with Mac OS X 10.4. He introduced a few new widgets from Apple: a Google search widget, a new Address book widget, a weather widget and a few widgets which are pretty much only intresting for US citizens. The new widgets are available with a new update of Mac OS X which has version number 10.4.4.

More software: iLife. Microsoft is currently working on new software for the upcoming Windows Vista, which includes a new music and photo applications. These applications are in functionallity almost identical to what Apple has for a few years: iTunes and iPhoto. These applications are in my opinion the most important parts which makes Mac OS more userfriendly than competing operating systems – one of the reasons I think that Linux distro’s should include Mono by default, because F-spot is the only application which comes near to what iPhoto is and Muine or Banshee are also the best music libraries for Linux.

Steve introduces iLife ’06 which includes new versions of iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, Garageband and a new application called iWeb. The new iPhoto supports more photo’s than previous versions and is faster than the older version. He demonstrates how the new applications works with full screen edition on large screens – it makes you almost want to run to the store to buy a nice 30″ Cinema display (unfortunately I don’t have the money for it and it won’t work on my Mac mini because it lacks a dual-DVI connection. iPhoto has improved support for photobooks, it addes the possibility to create calenders, postcards and features ‘photocasting’. In fact this is nothing more than uploading selected photos to .Mac, where people can subscribe to such a gallery and the photos will automatically be available in their iPhoto. Changes made by the author are automatically updated to the people who are subscribed to the album. You have to be an .Mac-member in order to ‘cast’ a photocast, but everybody can subscribe to a photocast – even if you don’t own a Mac – because it uses RSS to publish updates.

iMovie features animated themes, which enables you to create professionally looking movies with photos, video’s and music without using ugly effects or slideshows. The movie will look more like ‘one piece’. Jobs demoes some of the possibilties with iMovie, which are rather impressive. When you talk about iMovie, you also will be quickly talking about iDVD for creating a DVD of your movie. New in iDVD ’06 are widescreen menus and support third party DVD-burners, which is nice because until now it was only possible to make DVD’s when your Mac contained a build in superdrive. Also Garagaband features some minor updates, mainly focussed on Podcasting. Steve demonstrate it by creating a funny Podcast – you can easily see that this is very good prepared and probably rehearsed several times, because the timing is perfect.

iWeb is a new application in the iLife suite for publishing stuff on the web. This application will be ‘easy to use to create beautiful websites’. The app can create online photoalbums, weblogs, podcast sites and other stuff. Especially creating photogalleries was a missing part of the Mac OS operating system, because Linux has standard applications which are able to do this, such as gThumb and F-spot. According to the screenshots the pages you can create with iWeb look pretty good and will work on IE, Firefox and obviously Safari according to Steve Jobs. For the photogalleries the program uses AJAX to create slideshows which will work on the current browsers. Unfortunately the program also only works when you have an .Mac-subscription. Also a new version of iWorks is introduced.

After the software, Jobs moves on to the hardware – the most interesting part of the keynote. He repeats that he announced that by june ’06 the Macs with Intel processors will be available. Then there appears an from the smoke (in a previous keynote Apple ‘burned’ these dudes) Intel-dude which says: ‘Intel is ready’, to which Steve Jobs replies: ‘Apple is ready too’. Steve thanks Paul Otelini (the Intel-dude) for their support when Apple moves to Intel processors. Then the iMac with Core Duo (Yonah-processor) is introduced, as was expected by rumours, because the design of the last update of the iMac with G5-processor wasn’t as sophisticated as the previous iMac G5. The iMac with Intel-processor is available in the same size and design as the previous iMac, so with a 17″ and 20″ iMac. The other features are identical and the price is identical – probably to emphasize that the change to Intel isn’t as difficult as it seems. The only difference is the speed, according to Steve Jobs. The processor is two to three times faster – Steve also says that this doesn’t mean the computer is two to three times faster, because the disks aren’t faster and the memory isn’t faster. Every application Apple now introduces will be ‘universal binaries’, which means that it will run both on Power PC and Intel Macs. In March all the professional software of Apple will be available as universal binary. Finally it is announced that Microsoft will ship new Macintosh products for at least five years. There is also a tv-ad for the Intel Mac which is verry ‘Applesque’.

And the last thing of the keynote is the introduction of the PowerBook ancestor, the MacBook Pro. This new laptop has obviously an Intel processor, namely a Core Duo. The powerconsumption of these processors is significantly lower than the consumption of the G4 and G5. The speed is four to five times better than the previous PowerBooks. It is the thinnest laptop from Apple and available with a 15,4″ widescreen with high brightness and iSight webcam. The laptop come with a remote control and Frontrow. Also it feature MagSave, which is a powerconnector which is magnetically held in, so when someone pulls on the powercord, it yanks right out from the laptop. This feature is ‘patent pending’ according to Steve. The MacBook Pro is available with a 1,67GHz Core Duo processor and a model with a 1,83GHz Core Duo processor.

An editor at Tom’s Hardware Guide wrote a column about the pointlessness of current game journalism. The writer argues that the major part of game journalist, both for online as offline media, are an extension to the PR-machines of the gaming companies. The previews and reviews they write are most of the time a constant flow of positive statements about the product and only some minor part of the article is critical, becaus the magazine or website is afraid of not receiving new products for review purposes.

I think the editor of Tom’s Hardware Guide has a point and I think this problem doesn’t only exists in the gaming journalism. In a small country like the Netherlands, were the pr-organisations of manufacturers of computer hardware are pretty small, most publications are very afraid of losing their ‘good relation’ with the pr-people. Many journalists (where one can argue if they deserve the therm ‘journalist’) are very afraid of publishing negative stuff about new products or services. Very recently I heard about an article about new products from a certain company which weren’t officially introduced yet. The editor who wrote the article did receive a press release, but at the end of the press release was stated that there was a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) which provided publication of the information before a certain date. The editor or the organisation he was working for didn’t sign this NDA, so it was an real ‘agreement’ and in fact no reason for not publishing the information. However, the organisation decided to conform to the NDA because it could potentionally damage the relations with the pr department of the company. I think this is not a good thing. Something ‘unimportant’ as a product announcement isn’t a major thing, but what about news about vulnerabilities of certain products? Are they also not published if the producer of the vulnerable software asks it?

Today Intel introduced the Centrino Duo platform which is the successor of the current Centrino platform, codenamed Sonoma and based on the Pentium M-processor with Dothan-core and i915-chipset. The brand new Centrino Duo platform comes with the much anticipated Yonah processor which is a dual core processor for laptops, but incorporates the energy efficient technology of the previous Pentium M processors. The codename of the new Centrino platform is ‘Napa’, and apart from the Yonah processor, it exists of the Intel Mobile 945 Express chipset and the PRO/Wireless 3945ABG wlan chip (don’t know if it is already supported on Linux, probably not).

Of course, the most interesting part of this new platform is the dual core processor. According to benchmarks of AnandTech is the performance of the processor better than its predecessors. Not only speedwise the processor is better, but despite its extra core and other enhancements, the energy consumption is lower in comparisation of the Dothan core.

The expectations are that Apple will introduce new systems based on the Yonah processor coming Tuesday. Rumours are that probably the iBook will be renewed, but also the possibility of a new Mac mini are discussed. The new Mac mini should be powered by the Yonah processor and include a iPod dock.

One of my collegues of Tweakers.net, a guy from Belguim, was elected for participation in the Dutch TV-show ‘Het groot Dictee der Nederlandse taal’. This show consists of a ‘dictee’ (don’t know the English word for this, and can’t find it either) of the Dutch language and is recorded in the buildings of the Dutch parliament. This ‘dictee’ contains several words which are pretty difficult to write. The program is broadcasted on Nederland 3 at 20:15.

The Dutch language has the interesting property that there exists an official orthograpy (I think the English word ‘spelling’ is also appropriate here, but I’m not sure). This orthography describes exactly how words should be written and which rules should be followed for situations which are not documentened, e.g. the use of words of foreign languages in combination with a Dutch word.

This orthography is defined by an institute called ‘De Taalunie’, which is a government funded, not for profit organisation with people who know very much about language, and the Dutch language in particular. In 1995 this institute introduced a new definition of the Dutch language, which was controversial. The aim of this new definition was to solve ambiguities and inconsistencies which existed in the Dutch language since 1954 (which was the year of the latest update until 1995) in order to make it easier for people to determine how words should be written. This new orthography caused that some words were written different than before, especially the combination of two words.

This year, there is another update to the orthography of the Dutch language. This update will be effective somewhere in 2006 (not sure when) and should solve some incosistency problems which are still there since the update of 1995. Last week some Dutch media institutions announced that they will ban this new update, with the arguments that the new orthography lacks consistency, makes it to difficult and is ‘not logical’. The Dutch national paper ‘De Volkskrant’ and the Dutch broadcast institution ‘NOS’ (which produces the Dutch news program) say that they will not use the new spelling. Personally, I think their arguments are very weak, and the examples they are use to justify their decision, they mainly come up with words that are hardly used, such as ‘Nazitop’ (the leaders of the German NSDAP party which only existed until 1945 or something), havenot (I personally even don’t know what this word means) and some other words which are not used very often.

While the newspapers are ‘heavy’ users of the Dutch language, and generally are able to say something meaningfull about the new orthography, a big group of ‘normal people’ on the internet have their verdict ready about the new orthography. This is ok, when you have some arguments for a certain statement, but obviously most people really don’t know where they talk about.

Statements as ‘this is already the third time I have to learn the Dutch language again, while I’m only 19 years old’ (when he’s 19, there is only one ‘new spelling’ introduced since he’s alive) are typical. On the forum of Tweakers.net is a complete topic with (mostly) people who really have no clue what they are talking about.

One of the moderators of the forum, however, explains exactly my problem (I don’t feel like to translate it into English, sorry):

Ten eerste wordt de spelling niet om de vijf, maar om de tien jaar aangepast, een lekkere demagogische leugen, dus.

Ten tweede was de spellingswijziging van 1995 de eerste sinds 1954. Die van 1954 maakte een einde aan de ouderwetsche spelling die zoo verouderd was dat hij niet meer gebruikt werd.

Probleem dat toen geintroduceerd werd was de “voorkeurspelling”: je schrijft kopie, maar je mag ook copie schrijven. Dat was dusdanig onduidelijk dat er decennialang tegen geageerd is, omdat simpelweg niet duidelijk was wat de status van de voorkeurspelling was.

Ook de 1954-regels betreffende de tussen-n waren dusdanig verwarrend dat veel mensen ervan overtuigd waren dat het iets te maken had met een meervoud.

In 1995 is er geprobeerd (en met enig succes) om wat meer duidelijkheid te scheppen in de spelling. Ondanks de initiele bezwaren tegen pannenkoek (want dat kon niet, want meervoud, en meer van dat soort ongeinformeerde onzin) lijkt het allemaal best wel werkbaar.

Nu wordt er geprobeerd een aantal onvolkomenheden uit 1995 recht te trekken, waarbij inderdaad een paar rare situaties ontstaan. Goed kans dat die voor augustus nog rechtgetrokken worden, zoals ook het groene boekje uit 1995 een rectificatie kreeg. Maar de paar overtrokken voorbeelden tussen de duizenden woorden worden natuurlijk graag breed uitgemeten in de sensatiepers omdat het volk nu eenmaal zijn brood en spelen moet krijgen.

And

Zolang ik mensen (onder andere op dit forum) nog hoor klagen dat de d/t-regels zo ingewikkeld zijn betwijfel ik ten zeerste of zoveel mensen terecht kunnen claimen dat ze een verschil gaan merken.
Als jij inderdaad moeite hebt gedaan je alle wijzigingen uit 1995 correct aan te leren dan is het inderdaad zo dat je een aantal van die dingen nu weer aan moet passen. De overgrote meerderheid is echter nooit verder gekomen dan de verontwaardiging over pannenkoek, en het adagio dat niemand meer wist hoe je paardebloem moest spellen. Alsof dat een woord is dat de meeste mensen dagelijks gebruiken.

Wat vind jij er nou eigenlijk “niet bepaald leuker” op worden? Dat je van woorden die je niet of nauwelijks gebruikt nu makkelijker kunt bepalen hoe je ze moet spellen, in plaats van ze altijd op te moeten zoeken omdat er geen duidelijke regels aan de spelling ten grondslag liggen?
Zelfs de discussie over het afbreken van Frankrijk vind ik zwaar overtrokken. Afbreken van woorden dient normaliter zoveel mogelijk vermeden te worden, in het groot dictee mag het niet eens, en buiten dat dictee zal er niet vaak iemand over vallen.
Verder vraag ik me af waar de meeste mensen zich druk om maken. De spelling volgens het groene boekje is voor de overgrote meerderheid van de Nederlanders hooguit relevant als ze een sollicitatiebrief schrijven. (En dan is de spelling van paardebloem meestal weer niet relevant.)

The (IMHO) most important improvement is the fact that concatenations of words are now clearly defined. For most people it was unclear if one should write ‘open-sourcesoftware (which was the correct version), ‘open source-software’, ‘opensourcesoftware’,’ open source software’, ‘open-source software’ or ‘open-source-software’. Now, it is defined that a concatenation should be written without dashes or spaces, except when there is a ‘klinkerbotsing’. So, when the new orthography is introduced, it is ‘opensourcesoftware’. This is a lot more ‘logical’ then it currently is.

By the way, the Dutch minister Van der Hoeve has the opinion that the media is very late with their complaints. The new orthography was already presented in April this year, and now, more than a half year later, they come with complaints.

One thing I noticed yesterday was the following. The Gimp uses the file extension to determine the format of picture when you save an image. So when you used ‘bla.jpg’ it will be saved as an Jpeg-file and when you use ‘bla.png’ the file will become a Png-file. Yesterday I edited a picture in Adobe Photoshop (It was not my own computer, so The Gimp was not installed). Whe I saved the picture, I used as file extension .jpg, assuming the picture will become a Jpeg-file. However, when I was reviewing it in another application, it complained about the file format and that it was not possible to open it… Investigation reveiled that the picture was saved as an Adobe PSD-file with the extension .jpg. Not very useable..

Yesterday, my server again losts its internet connection. It seems that dhcp is causing the trouble, but I can’t put my finger on the exact cause. However, I read on the website of our provider about the possibility to get a fixed ip-address, so I sent an e-mail asking if that is also possible for our connection. I hope this will fix the problem and has probably as added bonus that port 25 for outgoing traffic is not blocked, so I’m able to run a ‘normal’ smtp server.

I also wrote an article for Tweakers.net about the release of version 1.0 of Ruby on Rails. This project exists for only 15 months now according to the project website, but is very popular with webdevelopers. Mainly, because of its strive to ‘not repeat yourself’ and the adaption of ‘webdeveloper trends’ such as AJAX. According to some people it is a decent replacement for J2EE with Hibernate, but I think currently it is mainly a competitor for PHP and maybe Python. According to what I read about RoR it force the developer to create a good strucure for a webapplications which very likely will make RoR applications better maintainable than their PHP counterparts. Maybe now it is a good time to step on the RoR wagon?

While wikipedia is critized a lot recently, a comparisation of the online encyclopedia with Britannica reveiled that the quality of articles about science topics are about the same within the two encyclopedia’s. Both contained errors, which is not suprising for Wikipedia, but actually is surprising for Britannica. Most people regard ‘printed’ encyclopedia’s as the golden standard when talking about accuracy. Wikipedia had four major errors in 42 articles, while Britannica had three errors. However, the text quality is sometimes very poor on Wikipedia.

Finally, via Planet Gnome I saw this video. I think there processor isn’t usable anymore (however, a clockspeed of more than 3,8GHz on a AMD Duron processor _is_ impressive).

On photography now: Last Tuesday I bought a Canon Speedlite 430EX flash and yesterday I used it. My girlfriend had the final presentation of a project about floors with light tiles. Because this project is rather ‘hot’ on the university (yesterday there was even an article about it in the Dutch national paper ‘De Telegraaf’ and someone is making a documentary about it), I was going to be the ‘photographer’. Some pictures are not very good, the shoot is not bad.