(Inspired by Living in Dell Time)

Dell has a very, very smart way to make money. This proves that it takes intelligence to find a good business model and to make it work. I call this business design.

Normally computer companies maintain inventory. They stock up on parts, assemble computers, and then sell them. Once you buy it, it comes off the shelf in a warehouse and gets shipped to your door.

Not Dell. They don't build, they don't even buy the parts, until AFTER you purchase. When you click the buy button, they have nothing but air in their warehouse. Only after they have your money do they supply and assemble and ship.

Think about stock, it's dead weight. As soon as you have stock, you are losing money. Stock costs money to buy, and you don't get the money back until you sell it. Even assuming that you sell all your stock, you have two problems. (1) cash flow, and (2) interest.

First you have to have to have a float of cash which you probably borrowed or raised for equity from someone. Getting that cash float and maintaining it is a pain in the ass. Secondly, you have to pay interest on the cash until you sell your stock and get it back. Imagine if you could instead invest that money at market rates for whatever your stock turnover time is. You could make maybe 5%, maybe better. If your stock is worth millions, that adds up!

So stock is expensive. Now Dell turns that around, instead, they get your money first, and pay for the goods later. In fact, as of 2004 Dell was paying for their goods something like negative 10 days after they paid for them. Most companies would be happy to be paid reliably within 30 days after.

This is a bit more of an in-depth article than I've written before. I hope you enjoy it.

I've been researching digital video/cinema partly because I'm curious and partly because I want to build a really kick ass digital home theatre at home. Obviously it has to be 1080p HD. But there's a digital cinema company in Waterloo, Christie Digital, that donated a very high end projector to the Accelerator Centre, with more than 1080p resolution. And, I enjoy reading about how movies are made, and I started to realize that film has a higher practical resolution than 1080p.

A review of Curse of the Were Rabbit in American Cinematographer mentions that they scanned their film at "6K" resolution. That's 6000 pixels wide, three times the width of 1080p, equivalent to an 18 megapixel camera photo for each frame. But can you go higher? Apparently, yes. According to this article filmmakers consider 16K to be adequate. 16K! Awesome!

To put in perspective, the storage required to store that is 21GB per second. It kind of starts to sound like gigapixel imaging, although realistically (a) your eyes can't possibly see all the detail in a gigapixel image anyway and (b) film cannot possibly get the same detail level as a proper gigapixel image.

To go to the perfect digital cinema system, though, resolution alone is not enough. You also need to be able to reproduce, in each pixel, the full dynamic range of light that exists in the real world.

HDR photography is a lame attempt to achieve this. It works like this: you take several photos at different f-stops, recording the brights, the mids, and the darks onto separate digital photos. Then, you use software to selectively compose these multiple photos into a single image. What you get is something that looks completely artificial but allows you to see details in the brights and the shadows that would otherwise be washed out.

More advanced HDR capture uses a single sensor that can simultaneously capture the wide dynamic range of the human eye. Normal digital sensors only record at a bit depth of 8 bits of luminescence per pixel. Waterloo digital cinema company Dalsa has a 4K "Origin" camera that records at 16 bits per pixel depth. That's much closer to the actual perceptive capabilities of the human eye.

You could fix the lame-ness if you could find a way to then display at that bit depth. But no commercial displays can do that yet. Even hyped products like Sony's 1 million to 1 ratio OLED cannot actually come close to the brightness of the real world, because the maximum brightness of the display is only about 600 nits (cd/m²).

Comparatively speaking, maximum direct sunlight is 100,000 lux. Lux and nits are related (oddly enough) by a factor of pi, so 1 nit is equal to 3.14 lux, if the surface being illuminated is perfectly white. (Lux is light cast on something, nits are light cast by something.) 600 nits is nowhere near bright enough to match the daylight it's trying to represent.

Dolby recently bought some interesting technology called BrightSide which can display at 3000 nits, equivalent to decent daylight. You can see the effect in photos that show the old vs. new technology on a side by side basis. There's an image below with an LCD TV on the left and a BrightSide demo on the right from an article by Geoff Richards.





To conclude. 1080p is pretty damned good for now, equivalent to 2K cinema. I'm probably going to aim for whatever is the brightest screen I can get, but I'll definitely be looking forward to seeing something like BrightSide display technology to be available as soon as possible, because I think it will make a huge difference to the viewing experience—make the picture much more like the real world.

[Update: I was thinking that 16K might not actually be enough to ultimately satisfy the human eye. 16K = about 100 megapixels. But these calculations about the human eye make me think that would probably be enough actually. It would really be a question about how much field of vision you want to fill, and the more you fill, the more the eye has to move around to see it all. So 16K would probably be satisfactory for a movie where you would expect to have a reasonably focused field of attention.]

[Update 2: Good god, I've just discovered that there's also a framerate issue. What happens if you are showing a "24p" (24 frames per second) movie on a display that always has to work at 30ftp, like any NTSC TV? They do something called "pulldown" (repeat some frames) or play other tricks. I don't completely understand what these tricks accomplish (3:2 or 5:5 pulldown?) or what exactly the "film look" is (something to do with shutters?), but it seems to me that if you want to have a proper home cinema you should display what the moviemaker intended you to see. It would appear that I'll need to pay attention to frame rate issues to make sure I get that.]

8 Ways to drive a Graphic Designer mad. Oh wow, this is funny. Some people I know might benefit from reading this articles. Others might see their lives scarily reflected back at them.

Via The Cartoonist.

Uh oh, I've been tagged. Now I have to think of 8 things you don't know about me. There's the number 8 again. That's synchronicity.

me on a segway



When I was at DLD last year Google provided the segways. I've been waiting to start blogging again to show off this picture, because I was so good at the segway, you know they say people always fall off them but I was going good right away. And man, it was fun. When I'm filthy rich this will one of the toys I buy.

So that the old weblog archives can be easily accessed here:
http://semacode.org/weblog/archive. All the way back to 2002!

And you can view the archives of the current incarnation of the blog as well.

Here's a list of all of the software I have added to my phone, all of which (so far) is free or in trial mode. Each one adds quite a bit to the phone's capabilities. Not only is there lots of free software out there if you can only find it (I spent days finding all this stuff), but there's a growing list of Open Source software as well. A lot of it is being written in python, which is SO much easier to program for S60.

And don't forget to upgrade your firmware to get new capabilities and a faster phone! (See bottom) No matter how recently you bought it, it probably doesn't have the latest software update yet.

[Update: see the comments, and also I forgot: Nokia's accelerometer kit and the cool software that uses it, truphone for totally integrated VoIP over WiFi, a great minimalist theme, and the Python kit. I'll post more about them later.]

Free Software (open source)

• Frozen Bubble - a popular puzzle game ported from Linux. Nifty. How fast can you get to level 100? (You can save games...)
• LogExport - I haven't used it yet, but it gives you a spreadsheet for your phone usage (call logs etc.) and that sounds useful.
• MobileGTD - "Getting Things Done" app basically helps you manage your todo lists, projects, and so on. Written in python, I think this is the future of a lot of open source S60 development.
• MidpSSH - a nice Free SSH client. Unfortunately, because it's Java, it's impossible to use it as a SCP client. In fact there doesn't seem to be an SCP client for S60/N95, bummer. (I use WebDAV over HTTPS to access my files securely, but it's read-only.)

Free software from large companies

• Opera Mini - a fantastic browser, although you don't really need it on the N95 because it has a good browser built in. Opera Mini probably reduces your data usage substantially though. On the downside, there's no HTTPS (secure connections) because the opera mini server unpacks the data and streamlines it before sending it to you.
• Google Maps - this is a great app, because it has satellite photos built in and also it can give you a rough position when you are inside using cell tower IDs. It also has location based search, but the location based search on the built in GPS software seems to be just as good or better.

Freeware

• Calcium - a really nifty calculator with an innovative interface. Definitely a must-have.
• SExplorer - a file system browser that gives you access to the WHOLE file system, not just the limited bits that the built-in explorer can show.
• Nokia Sports Tracker - a very useful program from Nokia Labs, it uses the GPS to track your sports activities such as walking, hiking, jogging, etc. You can view graphs of your speed vs. time, and other things, and export the route you took to Google Earth.
• S-Tris 2 - a Tetris clone, very well done and faithful to the original. Which is all I want in a tetris app. No crazy "3D tetris" please.

Commercial software with free trials

• Opera Mobile - I'm going to try this out in case it's better than the built-in browser. The built-in browser is very capable, impressively so, but. It has a few annoying "features". 1) No way to save passwords for HTTP authenticated sites. 2) Doesn't remember my zoom level (I like 75%). 3) No way to delete some annoying folders in the bookmarks manager. 1 month free trial.
• Salling Clicker - total remote control over your Mac or PC. Slick interface. Works over Bluetooth, WiFi, whatever. Run presentations, control iTunes, and many other apps. Very cool. Paid version adds more features.
• Lament Island (click "try") - wow, this is a cool game, quite sophisticated level of 3D graphics (maybe like original Tomb Raider) and an extensive story-line. By Chinese company Simlife. Here's a YouTube video preview.

Free firmware updates

• Nokia Software Update has just released the v15 firmware for my 8GB and it adds some cool stuff, notably more speed, a video editor, and support for Flash Video (e.g. YouTube). Nice. You can only update from a PC, which is super annoying. Also, be sure to backup before you update though. Why, Nokia, can't you make this process easier???

If you use Nokia Multimedia Transfer (NMT) and open the Nokia Device Browser, it will synchronize all of the files on your phone into a cache on your computer. The cached files are located in ~/Library/Caches/com.nokia.NokiaMultimediaTransfer/Devices/###/, so you can browse them while the phone is unplugged.

NMT synchronizes with iTunes, but doesn't transfer album cover art that's been downloaded automatically by iTunes. Apparently iTunes stores the art in a database rather than in the ID3 tags as you'd normally expect. In order to have the album covers on your phone, you can use this simple AppleScript to embed iTunes cover art into the files. This works for any N-Series phone, and other devices like Zune etc as well.

Once you install it, select all of your songs in iTunes and go the AppleScript menu and "Embed artwork" it will do the rest automatically.

Apparently another app called Corripio will do something similar but I haven't tried it.