The end of the ink jet printer – and the twilight of printing

My old Canon Pixma IP 4000 is sitting in the office lunch room with a “free – take me” note on it. I’m surprised to realize it’s about five years old, which is ancient by ink jet standards.

The printer works as well as it ever did, which means it suffers from the curse of Canon’s OS X printer drivers. Problem is, I almost never used it. I don’t print many photos, and it was a fussy photo printer at the best of times.

So I was paying for unused ink, even though Canon’s system is much less parasitic than the HP equivalent. More than that, I need the space this printer took up.

I have a hunch it will still be in the lunch room tonight, which means it goes to the recycler.

It feels like the era of the ink jet printer is over. I don’t know sales figures, but my bet is they resemble the sales figures for computer mice.

We still use my four year old Brother MFC-7820N (why can Brother more or less do OS X drivers when nobody else can?). There’s still a lot of paper in our life, and I think we’ll be printing gray scale for quite a while yet.

Still, how much more printing will we ever need? Like photo scanners, printers feel like they’ve reached the end of the road. As we get more display surfaces, from iPhone to iTab to giant LCD, there’s less interest and need for relatively dull looking printed color.

Sure, there’s room for improvement in printer/MFC size, noise, and power consumption. MFC class devices need better networking and standalone (no computer) document scanning abilities – basically incorporating more features from high end office devices. Device drivers, operational cost, and hardware reliability can always be improved.

Still, things will be quiet in this world going forward.

Beyond the end of the ink jet, this feels to me like the twilight of the printer.

Vastitas Borealis water ice - did I slip into another universe?

In this space time continuum we see a blurry satellite image and story about Mars Water-Ice Found at Vastitas Borealis.

In the space-time continuum where I wrote this July 2005 blog post there's a dramatic razor sharp image of water ice at Vastitis Borealis ...

So, umm, what happened here? How can I access my other-timeline post from your universe?

It's terribly confusing.

Marek Edelman, Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dies at 90

From his obit ...

Marek Edelman, Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dies at 90 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

Marek Edelman, a cardiologist who was the last surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Germans, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 90...

... Dr. Edelman was one of a handful of young leaders who in April 1943 led a force of 220 poorly armed young Jewish men and women in a desperate and hopeless struggle against the Germans.

He was 20 when the Germans overran Poland in 1939, and in the months that followed he watched as they turned his Warsaw neighborhood into a ghetto, cutting it off from the rest of the city with brick walls, barbed wire and armed sentries. By early 1942, as many as 500,000 Jews had been herded into the area...

... Then, starting on July 22, 1942, the ghetto population began to shrink ominously. Each day, armed Germans and the Ukrainians serving with them prodded and wedged 5,000 to 6,000 Jews into long trains, which departed from the Umschlagplatz, a square at the southern end of the ghetto. At times they lured people onto the trains with loaves of brown bread...

... On Sept. 8, when according to German records 310,322 Jews had been put on the trains and sent to the death camps and 5,961 more had been murdered inside the ghetto, the liquidation was suspended. There were some 60,000 Jews still in the ghetto. The leaders of the Jewish Combat Organization were certain that the Germans would try to finish the liquidation, and for the next six months the organization planned for armed resistance.

At 4 o’clock on the morning of April 19, 1943, as German soldiers and their Ukrainian, Latvian and Polish henchmen marched through the ghetto to round up people, they came, for the first time, under sustained fire. By midafternoon they were forced to withdraw without having taken a single person.

The fighting continued for three weeks. On one side were 220 ghetto fighters, hungry and relatively untrained youths deployed in 22 units. Each unit had a pistol, five grenades and five homemade bottle bombs. They also had two mines and one submachine gun.

Ranged against them, on a daily average, were 36 German officers and 2,054 others with an arsenal that included 82 machine guns, 135 submachine guns and 1,358 rifles along with armored vehicles, artillery and air power used to set the ghetto ablaze.

Dr. Edelman buried his fallen comrades and used his knowledge of the neighborhood, where he had grown up, to find escape routes for units that were pinned down. Many years later he would say that no one ever established how many Germans they had killed: “Some say 200, some say 30. Does it make a difference?”

“After three weeks,” he recalled, “most of us were dead.”

At the end he found a way out of an encircled position, leading 50 others with him.

Eventually, he took part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, when for 63 days Poles fought valorously but unsuccessfully to liberate their capital from the Germans.

Once the war ended, he threw himself into his medical studies and became a doctor in Lodz. For 30 years he kept his memories and thoughts about what happened to himself, concentrating on his medical work and becoming one of Poland’s leading heart specialists and the author of a much-used textbook on the treatment of heart attacks.

Even after Poland’s anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, when he was demoted at the hospital and most of the remaining Jews in Poland, including his wife and two children, emigrated, Dr. Edelman stayed. He was unwilling, and perhaps unable, to tear himself away from the place where East European Jewry had once thrived and then perished as he watched...

... Marek Edelman was born on Sept. 19, 1919, the only son of a family that spoke Yiddish at home and Polish at work. His father died when he was very young; his mother, who worked as a secretary at a hospital, died when he was 14. While going to high school he was looked after by his mother’s friends from the hospital...

... Dr. Edelman’s wife, Alina Margolis-Edelman, a pediatrician, died last year in Paris. She had worked as a nurse in the Warsaw ghetto. He is survived by their two children, Aleksander, a biophysicist, and Ania, a chemist, both of Paris, as well as two grandchildren.

The Polish title of the book Mrs. Krall wrote about Dr. Edelman could be translated as “To Finish Before God,” with the implicit idea being one of racing with God. But when the English translation was published by Henry Holt and Company, it was called “Shielding the Flame,” a reference to a passage in which Dr. Edelman explained his philosophy both in the ghetto and later as a doctor.

“God is trying to blow out the candle, and I’m quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention,” he said. “To keep the flame flickering, even if only for a little while longer than he would wish.”

HIs God is not particularly benign.

Every 3 days you have a new heart

Carl Zimmer has the most interesting biology essay I've read in quite a while. Emphases mine ...

Secrets of the Cell - Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life - Carl Zimmer - NYTimes.com

...lysosomes are versatile garbage disposals. In addition to taking in shrouded material, they can also pull in individual proteins through special portals on their surface. Lysosomes can even extend a mouthlike projection from their membrane and chew off pieces of a cell.

The shredded debris that streams out of the lysosomes is not useless waste. A cell uses the material to build new molecules, gradually recreating itself from old parts. “Every three days, you basically have a new heart,” said Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, a molecular biologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine...

...The protection humans get from lysosomes is essential not just during famines. It is also vital just after birth. When babies emerge from their mothers, they need huge amounts of energy so that they can start to run their bodies on their own. But this demand comes at precisely the moment that babies stop getting food through their umbilical cord. Japanese scientists have found that lysosomes in mice kick into high gear as soon as they are born. After a day or two, as they start to nurse, the rate of autophagy drops back to normal.

When the scientists engineered mice so they could not use their lysosomes at birth, the newborn mice almost immediately died of starvation...

... It has long been known, for example, that animals that are put on a strict low-calorie diet can live much longer than animals that eat all they can. Recent research has shown that caloric restriction raises autophagy in animals and keeps it high. The animals seem to be responding to their low-calorie diet by feeding on their own cells, as they do during famines. In the process, their cells may also be clearing away more defective molecules, so that the animals age more slowly...

... Andrea Ballabio, the scientific director of Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine in Naples, Italy, and his colleagues have found another way to raise autophagy. By studying the activity of genes that build lysosomes, they discovered that at least 68 of the genes are switched on by a single master protein, known as TFEB.

When Dr. Ballabio and his colleagues engineered cells to make extra TFEB, the cells made more lysosomes. And each of those lysosomes became more efficient. The scientists injected the cells with huntingtin, a protein that clumps to cause the fatal brain disorder Huntington’s disease. The cells did a much better job of destroying the huntingtin than normal cells...

As best I can remember, this is all new since I did med school in the early 80s. Anything that can clear huntingtin is exciting all by itself, no matter how preliminary the research.

Terrific stuff.

The game changing Apple has done

Yesterday I wrote about the software Apple can't do.

So what can they do?

Every so often, they change the game...

1. 1984 - the Mac. Commercial version of GUI, plug and play network, very advanced ideas on files and application metadata (arguably better than what OS X has now), tight hardware/software integration, usability and design focus (again, better then than now).
2. 2001 (not long after 9/11) - the iPod/iTunes/DRM. The trifecta of a portable music player, the iTunes music management and retail distribution system, and, eventually, an approach to DRM that balanced consumer/producer desires.
3. 2007 - the iPhone. Yes, only two years ago. OS X in the pocket, and it's a phone too. The App Store/DRM model creates a massive software industry overnight.

Now we're waiting to hear about the "iTab". There's a lot of comment on what this might be like, but surprisingly little mention of the likelihood that the iTab will bring Apple's Digital Rights Management to printed material (books, magazines, newspapers).

When the technology story of the '00s is written, it may turn out to be all about DRM (or, as we once called it back when we used CopyIIPC to try out new software, "copy protection").

The software Apple can't do

All I wanted to do was get my son's school account working. They use Google Apps, so it should have been trivial.

Except every browser I tried gave me the same meaningless error "unable to establish a secure connection".

It worked fine from my account, so I had a pretty good idea this was yet another Apple screw-up.

I turned off the Parental Control feature that's supposed to automatically block "adult" sites and it all worked. This is not a new bug of course. It reminds me of another Parent Control related bug ...

Gordon's Tech: Can't select Jabber or Google Talk for iChat? Here's one reason.

...If you enable parental controls, even if all you're doing is protecting the Dock from changes, then iChat can't use Google Talk...

Definitely not new. Apple's messed up on Parental Controls and Simple Finder since the day they were first added to OS X.

These aren't the only things Apple can't execute on. Here's my personal list of failures that extend through multiple releases and many years ...

1. Parental Controls and Managed Accounts
2. Simple Finder
3. File Sharing - due to an obsolete UNIX-style file based permissions model
4. Remote desktop - VNC is pathetic compared to Microsoft's terminal services
5. Calendaring
6. Remember what was great about Mac Classic. (Metadata model, links that auto-opened files on servers, etc)

Of course the interesting question is why Apple can't do these things. I assume they have a finite supply of talent, and these items are handed over to trainees, interns, and outsourced resources.

I really hope Windows 7 is absolutely stupendous. I need Apple to feel more fear.

Good question

One more reason not to get to bother with football ...

Michael Vick Fails To Inspire Team With 'Great' Dogfighting Story | The Onion

..."The only reason the Chiefs scored in the second half was because I was still thinking about what Mike said during halftime about 'trunking,'" said linebacker Omar Gaither, referring to the practice of putting two pit bulls in a car trunk, closing the door, and allowing them to fight for 15 minutes until one is dead. "Why is this freak on my team? Why are people cheering for him? Seriously, answer my questions. Why?

The Decline of America - long distance interconnect pricing

The NYT tells us a little bit about the games phone companies play to extract money from the crazed interconnect payment scheme

... some enterprising phone companies, aided by local regulators, have taken to encouraging entrepreneurs to set up businesses that attract lots of inbound calls. Those include the free conference calling services, free fax lines and telephone pornography. The phone companies rebate some of the high call termination fees they receive to the companies running these services...

So revenues generated from gaming the interconnect system can be used to subsidize phone porn to attract incoming calls and generate interconnect fees.

Now AT&T wants Google Voice to connect to these services so they have to pay up too.

Well, at least now we understand the business model for those flaky free fax send services.

This looks bad enough on the face of it, but, naturally, I think it's worse than it looks.

This kind of institutionalized lunacy is the kind of thing you expect to see in a senile nation. It's of the same cloth as medical bills that have little connection to value delivered or insurance payment received.

If we can't deal with this kind of crap, we ought to invite a more energetic nation to take over our operation.

Google Searchmash

Browsing my Reader feeds, I came across one that was last updated in 2006. The very last post read - "Searchmash, an experimental site started by Google. Uses Ajax and some other web2.0-ish features."

I'd never heard of searchmash, so I tried the 3 yo link to searchmash.com. It still works.

Today it reads ... "searchmash has gone the way of the dinosaur".

Techcrunch as a Nov 2008 article on the demise of searchmash. Looks like Google used it as an unbranded lab for a while, before they transitioned to their current "lab" strategy.

Now you know.

Sorry.

My current iPhone wish list – as of OS 3.1

Now that we’re well past 3.0 it’s time to update my prior personal iPhone wish list.

Some of my past wishes have been met, but other items have been on my personal wish list for years (ex. “old”). This time around I’m excluding issues that are clearly AT&T problems (ex. tethering). So this is a wish list for Apple.

They’re in rough order of declining priority …

1. Multiple Exchange Server (ActiveSync) accounts
2. External keyboard support (old)
3. A Calendar API so 3rd party apps can get at Calendar data and manipulate it. (old)
4. Google Voice App authorization
5. Location sharing via Google Latitude
6. Standard synchronization API for 3rd party desktop apps use of USB connection (old)
7. Fix the Calendar note field so it can fit a standard travel itinerary! The iPhone needs a text field that can manage longer notes – especially Calendar and Contacts. (old)

#4 is a novel entry since it doesn’t require any software development. Apple has blocked an App from use with the iPhone because it interferes with Apple’s current revenue (SMS, long distance) and because Apple fears Google.

I’m mildly hopeful about 1, 3 and 7.

Unfortunately 2, 4, and 5 all threaten Apple’s revenue plans, so, in the absence of regulatory pressure, Apple won’t help us.

I can’t guess why Apple won’t do #6.

Campaign Finance Reform - The Publicly Owned Politician

Another day, another multi-million dollar bribe to a senator somewhere. It's hardly even newsworthy any more.

Of course such bribery is only the tip of the proverbial berg. The massive lobbying against health reform is more typical. This is money to get the "right" people elected.

It reminds me of my 1999 proposal to start buying and selling politicians on the open market (this was before the crash of 2000) ...

Campaign Finance Reform: The publicly owned politician

... Campaigns need money. Powerful people need good things. Both needs can be satisfied by transforming politicians into publicly owned corporations. After meeting standard accounting requirements, a politician would be sold through an IPO. The usual futures and options markets would develop. Standard reporting and accounting regulations and SEC enforcement would apply. Cheaters would be delisted, and thus be effectively removed from future campaigns.

There are several advantages to this approach:

1. There are no constitutional issues.
2. It's very simple.
3. It's honest and transparent.
4. It would bring in so much money that other forms of funding and bribery would become irrelevant. Federal, and some state and city politicians, would be all multi-millionaires.
5. We would not need public financing of elections. Politics would no longer be limited to the wealthy.
6. The market would demonstrate a politicians' commitment to his/her owners through the share price. This would be visible for all to see.
7. At election time voters would know what a politician stood for, by knowing who the major shareholders were.
8. Politicians would no longer need salaries or pensions.
9. Politicians would not need to spend all their time raising money -- bending laws, and selling their souls in order to get elected. They would be available to govern.
10. Corporations and wealthy individuals would be able to buy and sell politicians more efficiently. Efficiency is good for the economy.
11. Powerful individuals and corporations would have their necessary control of the political process.

I'd buy a share of Franken.

iPhoto - Apple's stupidity burnz

Size of typical JPEG image in iPhoto '09: 3.5MB

Size of identical image when exported at "Maximum" quality JPEG: 6.9MB

So why did the size of this JPEG image double when it was exported?

 

There’s only one possible explanation. In order to do the export iPhoto is first decompressing the image, then re-compressing it using a 99% or near-lossless JPEG algorithm. This doubles the image size while degrading image quality. (You can’t improve the quality of a JPEG image by recompressing it.)

In older versions of iPhoto the app simply copied the image. Now iPhoto behaves like Aperture.

I suspect this back-asswords behavior is related to a surprise of a few months back, when people who thought they were archiving their images to MobileMe learned that Apple's "full resolution" was in fact a high-quality JPEG (about 97% compression). iPhoto was presumably doing a similar decompression/compression cycle on upload to MobileMe. (Supposedly this was "fixed". I'm skeptical.)

Apple's heading for a fall.

Update: If you export as "Current" you avoid the perverse "maximal quality" degradation. Apple should have made "maximal quality" JPEG the same as "current" for images that are already JPEG.

Photo sharing – a vast generation gap

My son’s 5/6th grade camping outing was about done, so I offered to do a class picture. They lined up well, and I zipped off about 15 shots with my fancy Canon lens and dSLR.

Then all the kids ran forward, asking for pictures to be put on their camera. I know the teacher wanted to get going, so I declined. After all, it would be easy to share my fancy picture.

I knew as I said it that I was wrong, but I didn’t know I was twice wrong.

Firstly, I was wrong because I’ve had lots of personal experience that photo sharing doesn’t work – with the one exception of Facebook. I’ve put thousands of photos on Picasa, SmugMug and my own servers, but I think the vast majority have been neglected. Very few, if any, have ever been downloaded for personal storage.

There are too many hurdles for traditional image sharing to work. Only geeks like me can manage downloading images and storing them in photo libraries. Beyond the software issues, a surprising number of families have barely functional computers (XP virus infested typically) and either no net service or one that’s effectively out of order. Lastly, there’s a personal element to acquiring an image – a sense of ownership and obligation that a shared image lacks.

Facebook is different – images I share there are viewed – but only by Facebook users. Very few of the parents or teachers of our 5th and 6th graders do Facebook.

I knew that much, but it wasn’t until the bus ride home that I learned there was another dimension of incomprehension.

I watched a 5th/6th grade girl share her pictures. She held up her camera for all to view. Not surprising, except these weren’t pictures from the camping trip. She had what seemed like years of pictures on her camera. She flipped through her camera album as though she was playing the piano, effortlessly zooming, panning, and navigating a large image collection.

For her, her camera was the photo library and the camera back was her display. She can’t do anything with a shared digital image – except perhaps take a picture of the screen displaying it.

I wonder what she does when she finally hits image 2,000 or so, and fills her 4GB SD card? Probably deletes those she’s less interested in, gradually evolving a set of 2,000 very high value images.

No backups of course, but this generation seems comfortable with ephemera.

Next time, I won’t pretend anyone else will be able to use my picture.

* They seem nothing like 5th grade boys. “Mainstreaming” special needs children is relatively straightforward compared to educating boys and girls together.

The Cloud is slow (so's my phone)

I've a habit of counting seconds whenever my machine doesn't respond instantly.

Quite often, when I do anything with the Cloud, even Gmail, I get to 10 before I can work. On my 3G I get to 5-10 for internal apps, 10-40 seconds for web apps (Emily's 3GS is at least twice as fast).

On corporate SharePoint I don't bother counting, I go for coffee.

I sometimes mourn for those few bright moments when I used a 386 with single tasking DOS 3.1. I've never had any environment so instantly responsive. Sure, you couldn't do much, but you could do a little so quickly.

We know from Google's research on their Search screens that, even if users don't perceive something as slow, even small delays decrease their use. I suspect most users don't realize how slow our modern computing environments are, but it must take a psychic toll all the same.

A billion dollar infographic - terrific

The Billion Dollar Gram (via Gruber) is a sensational infographic from a visualization site (Information is Beautiful).

There are some stretches. The 'worst case' cost of the US financial crisis to US Government only makes sense if you include sub-employment GDP Gap as a cost (which it is, but most don't include it and that's a hit for the US as a whole rather than the Feds). Also the New Deal vs. 2009 bailout doesn't account for the US of 1930 versus a vastly larger and richer nation. Between population and economic growth the US economy is probably at least 20-50 times bigger than in 1930.

I did like $465 to "Feed and educate every child on earth for 5 years" vs. $316 - Bribes received by Russian officials.