Is this the end of the Borg?

Last weekend the NYT published a tough article about Microsoft and about the Borg that made some real fokkin' ripples... I'd be really worried if I were in their shoes. Especially Ballmer's. Is this a pre-announcement of his ultimate going down the drain? With all his billions and stuff? The sad story is that the article is right in most of its arguments. I hold some MSFT stock myself and I can tell you, ever since the Borg took the company's reign in his hands MSFT sucks! And, want it or not, the market is the best judge of a company's management efficiency. Microsofties will tell you that Gates drove the company in disarray and left it entirely confused. However, trust me dudes, during the Gates days Microsoft dominated the headlines every single day - incl. the weekends -, the stock was flying high just like AAPL and AMZN do nowadays, and the world worshipped his Gateness to death! Microsofties will still tell you that the Borg sorted out the mess Bill left behind... Who knows... they might be right. Problem is, today the company looks as gray, bureaucratic, arrogant and incompetent as IBM was before Lou 'Nabisco' Gestner took control.  Among other excuses, the entire IBM executive Board would give you then all the 'proper' executive reasons why they monumentally fucked up in their dealings with a Mickey Mouse company called Microsoft, while its young 'nerd' CEO, William Gates III, wiped away all the relevant IPRs from under their nose, and eventually developed Windows at IBM's expense, to walk out as the richest nerd on the planet less than ten years later. Sounds familiar?

Well folks, Borg's Microsoft smells very much like IBM then... without the innovation bit. Indeed IBM developped some of the most advanced innovations that changed the face of the earth in technology terms. They even got a Nobel Prize (at least one dude on their payroll did, working in their Labs). Microsoft has stolen most of what it's got. In the words of Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. FSJ:

... look, the Borg has never been out ahead on anything. The difference is, they used to be able to catch up. They've always been copiers. That's been their business model from the start. Let others go out and create a market, then copy what they've done, sell it for less, and crush them. They got into the OS business by stealing DOS from someone else. They created Windows by stealing Apple's ideas. They got into desktop apps by copying Lotus and WordPerfect and then having the bright idea to bundle all the stuff into one cheapo suite. They pulled the trick off again with Internet Explorer versus Netscape, in the late 90s -- that was the last time they were able to let someone get out ahead of them and then pivot and copy and give it away free and take them over. By the end of the 90s they had broken through 50% market share in browsers, and that was it for Netscape.

But what happened after that? This is what we were wondering. Larry says two things happened. One, the Borg got slower. They got big and fat and bureaucratic. Two, everyone else got faster. Look at Google. They got so big so quickly that there was no way for the Borg to claw them back. Same for all these other Web businesses. Amazon, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Twitter. They came out of nowhere, and what they were doing was free, so the Borg couldn't just do a crappy knockoff and sell it for less. They were up against free -- the Web companies were using their own strategy against them.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Gates Wisdom

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world..

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world doesn't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

It's all about the glass...

There are many aspects that make a photograph look great. Composition, drama, contrast, color, subject, the scene's content and/or message, the (catching of a) moment. My personal favorite however is sharpness. The level of detail and resolution that is present in a photograph is almost a personal obsession. Especially in portrait photography. I know that most subjects, especially female, don't like their skin texture shown sharply in their portraits; they'd ask the photographer to hide away all little spots and irregularities and definitely avoid showing wrinkles and skin pores. To achieve that in digital photography nowadays is a trivial task indeed, done in a heartbeat, as any Photoshop practitioner can promptly assure you. In addition to any 'corrections' like these, many subjects prefer additional 'soft focus' applied to eliminate skin texture even further.

On the other hand, all great portrait photographers usually go for the sharpest detail their glass can capture. In the days of Kodak and Agfa B/W negatives, they'd boost sharpness and texture detail by using low ISO ratings first, high contrast studio lighting next (usually strobes with honeycombs), and by subsequently underexposing and then pushing development times to achieve sharpest possible texture, and smallest grain possible. Karsh's work is a classic example of this. As most of his work, one of his portraits of George Bernard Shaw was an exceptionally sharp photograph in which you could count one by one all of Shaw's hairs in his beard and mustache... of course the Great Yousuf used large format field cameras with 'huge' surface negative plates that could capture all that detail rather 'easy'. Ten years ago, I saw an original Karsh copy of Shaw's portrait hanging in the... restrooms of the Sterling Software offices at the company's Crescent Court HQ in Dallas, Texas!  I mean, can you just believe this? A Karsh in the restrooms? Self-made Texan billionaire entrepreneur Sam Wyly, owner of Sterling Software, used to decorate the offices with expensive artwork, to the extent a Karsch was only good enough for the restrooms! But this is another story...

Few days ago I came across the shots of someone going under the name Simon_01 on Flickr.  Simon's lucky enough to own an H3DII Hasselblad medium format DSLR. Maybe he won the Euromillions, who knows. These things cost north of 15K euro's the cheapest, incl. a normal focal length objective (80mm) and will certainly produce images of exceptional sharpness quality. Click Simon_01's male portrait above to 'experience' the sharpness we are talking about. Yep, it is an experience!

Think about that: Simon's portraits are shot from a distance of 3 to 5 feet from the subject, minimum. As you check out the sharpness captured by the Carl Zeiss glass on the H3DII-31mpx sensor, you just can't believe the level of detail. You can count this guy's pores and hairs hands down. I mean, to be able to observe most facial details shown on that shot on the live subject, you'd actually need a magnifying glass a few inches above his face, right? These cameras capture almost medical level detail from a distance that certainly qualifies as non trivial! This Zeiss glass is capable of the weirdest sharpness ever seen on a photograph! No wonder pro's like Erwin Olaf use no other than Digital Hasselblad gear with Zeiss glass in their studio work!

Anyways, as I can't afford an H series Swede or I ever will, I went to test the next best outfit I could afford. A Nikon D200 with a 'portrait' ideal lens, the Nikon 60mm 1:2.8D. I used a ten sq. feet Elinchrome softbox as my front lighting, and a secondary strobe with honeycomb on the model's left side. I shot a few pictures at 10mpx resolution, which is one third of Simon's H3DII-31's full pixel range. I used as low an ISO rating as I possibly could. The level of detail achieved this way, without any software sharpening involved (see picture to the right), is still impressive by normal DSLR standards. Click on each of the two shots shown here (Simon's and mine) and compare. You can then see why a Hasselblad will still cost you seven to ten times more. Remarkably far better resolution and sharpness, not to mention dynamic range and skin tones.  Nevertheless, the question still remains. How obsessive should someone be about technical quality in photography to still keep dreaming about owning one of these ultimate boxes? That is the question...

UPDATE: For those of you who are curious about whether one could further improve on a captured image and create the illusion of better sharpness by applying some minimal level software corrections (via On-One and Lightroom tools), take a look at an 'improved' version of my previous image with sharpness and color balance adjusted.

Everything you'd like to know about Telenet but you were afraid to ask...

Well, I'm not gonna be as ambitious as this blog title suggests, but I reckon, some of the things I learned by riding a road full of bumps in my quest to make an Internet of Things working in our house could benefit a few, especially those living in this country and renting Triple Play from Telenet, one of the largest and certainly the fastest local cable broadband provider.

I have reached a moron geek status to such a degree that I use, not one, not even two... but three (!) glorious Digital TV set-top boxes, two of them with recording capabilities and one without, just a channel decoder. The recorders, called Digicorders by Telenet, offer additional interactivity by connecting via Ethernet to Telenet's residential cable modem. Now that I'm thinking about it, the simple decoder, a.k.a. Digibox, might do the same too... I could verify this in a heartbeat, but right now I'm kinda lazy to leave my desk...

In fact, as the Telenet cable comes in thru the wall, it meets a splitter that separates the signal into one group riding the coax cables towards our TV sets, and a second entering a dedicated 'modem' that is used to provide service to the remaining two components of our Triple Play, i.e. Internet and Telephony. The Internet connectivity from that point on relies on just one Ethernet output on the modem itself. Thus, if one wants to connect routers and/or any other Ethernet appliances to that same output, one will have to use a separate 'port multiplier' hub. I've got one of these myself, and use it to connect my two Digicorders, and one Apple Time Capsule router. All three of them  instantaneously receive their unique IP #'s as soon as they get plugged into the hub. This is very much an improvement, as in the past with Telenet, at least for routers, if you happened to change the device that they had recorded in their databases via its unique MAC address, you had to wait three quarters of an hour to get a new IP reallocated. They just didn't want you to serve multiple computers those days (the days before routers, that is) or else you had to buy multiple access subscriptions (horny bastards). A huge hemorrhoids pain, if you ask me. Now this is gone and IPs are generously distributed as soon as you connect your cables.

What I found out the hard way though is that the theory often breaks down on the following detail: Having Digicorders and routers plugged into the same hub, and especially, if your router(s) were the last to connect, IP allocation conflicts may occur and prevent routers from receiving a valid IP address from the Telenet Mothership. You have to connect these devices in the following order sequentially to avoid any problems:  routers first, set-top boxes next, one by one.

Second thing I recently experienced, and I'm not quite sure if this is happening to everybody else in a similar situation, the moment a second set-top box gets plugged-in the hub, the router 'loses' its IP address and disconnects from Internet. I repeated the experiment a few times yesterday with always the same result. Not much of a deal though, as I am not using set-top box interactivity a lot anyway, so one connected box out of three will suffice.

Morale of the story: If you are a tech-geek nuts like me and you're using similar appliances as I described above, beware of too many Ethernet boxes seeking IP # allocations, when connected via the same hub. They might jeopardize your PC/Mac Internet connectivity and you'll think most of the time that the problem in in the router and/or your computers and even your Ethernet cables. It might still be there, but try some experimentation first before you condemn the wrong appliances and boxes, like connecting your computer(s) and router(s) directly to your cable modem (bypassing your hub) to see if they still can get a legitimate IP adress that way.

... Sure! ... You're welcome!

My grapes of wrath are... getting popular!

I recently moved them grapes into a Flickr group where members post their masterpieces painted with iPhone Brushes. All of a sudden, months after their original upload to Flickr, my grapes of wrath, that I first 'painted' last spring, instantly became quite popular among the "experts". I keep getting emails every other day from Flickr about new comments posted to my few digital drawings, 'painted' on my iPhone with Brushes and on my iMac with a Wacom pen and tablet. With a little more than a dozen comments on just a few digital drawings this is by far not such a big deal, if you think that really popular postings, mainly photographs, receive hundreds of comments by viewers. However, this is the first time postings of mine receive any attention whatsoever. One needs to start somewhere, innit?