Open Document Formats

Proprietary document formats have earned Microsoft and other companies lots of money for a long time, and still do. Open document formats could be called the opposites of those formats.

An open document format is well defined, non-secret and for anyone to use. That means any company can get the specification of the format and write an application that can read the format and save documents in that format. It doesn't necessarily mean the format may be used without license payments, but sometimes it does.

Proprietary formats are an effective way of locking-in customers. Let's say you have used a very nice application to create lots of documents in a certain format owned by company A. Now you hear of an application from company B, which allows you to create even nicer documents and is so much easier to handle. It also costs much less. You consider buying the new application, but there's a big problem. All those documents you created with the application from company A can't be used by the application from company B. Company A have also updated their application, but it's not quite what you want and they want you to pay for an upgrade. This is a lock-in example.

Open document formats prevent lock-in. They make it possible for the user to choose the application that's best suited for his needs and share the output with others who may be using other applications. The OpenDocument format (ODF) was accepted as a standard by OASIS in May 2005, and by ISO in November 2006, as standard ISO/IEC 26300:2006. OASIS is an organization of companies, i.e. a consortium. ISO is a standardization organization. 

Governments and companies who now spend fortunes on applications with lock-in are the greatest beneficiaries of open document formats. The EU has for several years recommended the use of open document formats and the idea is spreading. ODF is mandatory standard for all documents created within NATO.

There are great benefits for everyone in standardized formats. Just think of the JPEG picture format, which is used almost everywhere. You can take pictures with any camera or you can make pictures in Photoshop and save them as JPEGs and view them on any computer or smartphone. 

There are winners and losers when things are standardized. The losers are companies who own the formats. Everyone else is the winner. Losers don't have to lose everything though, because often they can still charge others for the use of their formats.


Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption

2014 - Chuck Norris Year

Chuck Norris is the all-time favorite of this blog, and for all those who haven't seen the video of the year 2013: Here it is!

What a guy! Just think of what Apple could do with a Chief Designer like Chuck. We would see iPhones, iPads and Mac PC's in almost any color and any size. The vanilla versions (costing just $50) would have one Terabyte of RAM and no permanent storage needed, because Chuck would make sure RAM contents weren't lost at power-down. 

Maximum screen resolution would be one pixel/nanometer. There would be 64 million CPU's in a new Chuck Norris patented configuration and hence all working perfectly together at clock frequencies unheard of. One breath from Chuck would be the only power source the device ever needed. 

All the usual apps would be included, but with a special touch that only Chuck Norris could provide. Chuck would make a handsome profit from the overwhelming sales and donate it to the best run charity in the world, and they wouldn't dare let Chuck down.

I think 2014 will be an important year with Apple bringing new breakthrough products to the market. I expect big screens to be Apple's new thing. We'll see a breakthrough for Apple TV's and anything that needs a big screen. The rest of the market will follow and help the PC industry to rise again. 2014 is going to be the BIG SCREEN year. Chuck Norris will like that, I'm sure.

Happy 2014 to all readers of this blog!!!

G.Fast: Gigabit/s to Your Internet Modem

xDSL (x = e.g. A) has given us very fast Internet through the twisted pair copper wires once drawn to our houses for telephony. It has served us well. Almost anyone with a subscription can plug an xDSL modem into his phone socket and start surfing the Net. But all things must come to an end, and the end is now in sight for xDSL.

ITU, the gold standard standardization organization will soon ratify the G.Fast standard, which will give us gigabit/s through those humble wires that once carried voice only. That's technological development!

The question is as always: do we need it? A no-answer will appear laughable in a few years, so the safe bet is to answer yessss. We don't need it right away, because the services aren't there yet, but they will come. One thing leads to another. TV through the Internet is already there. G.Fast will enable the next generation TV through the Internet, and lots of stuff we haven't thought of yet.

I remember dial-up modems that could carry 2400 bits/s duplex, i.e. both ways. They were an improvement upon those carrying 600 bits/s one way and 1200 bits/s the other way. They operated in the frequency (on the twisted pair wires) that now carries voice. At that time faxing was all the rage. The last standard for fax modems gave them a speed of 28800 bits/s in 1994. But the Internet and its e-mail was about to break through and fax would no longer be needed. The faxing eighties were drawing to an end. By 2000-something dial-up Internet access was no longer acceptable. 

In the eighties and nineties cable-TV had become popular and in the nineties they started offering Internet access and that access wasn't dial-up, but the real thing: constant Internet access. 

ADSL was the technical solution for the phone companies. ADSL transported data in a different way than the eighties modems. It left the lower spectrum to voice and instead occupied the spectrum above. This use of the wires was strictly prohibited by the old phone companies, but that had to change. Thanks to competition the "cable-guys" gave phone subscribers proper Internet access.

ADSL was the given solution for households without cable. I remember what a luxury it was to read my e-mails without having to dial-up :-) Now Internet access is almost as important as electricity. What a wonderful innovating world!

Curved Smartphone Screen

How could a curved smartphone screen be an improvement on a flat one? What struck me first was that ambient light would reflect less on a curved screen. Display experts confirm my suspicion, but say there seem to be more advantages. According to iphonehacks.com a curved screen substantially improves screen readability, image contrast, color accuracy, and overall picture quality, but can also increase the running time on battery, because you can do with less battery-draining screen brightness. Here's a picture of Samsung Galaxy Round:

A curved screen improves privacy, since it's less readable from the wrong angle. One disadvantage I can think of is that you'll no longer be able to use it as a mirror, because it will change your looks.

Perhaps a screen with variable curvature would be better. For that you would need a slightly flexible screen. That would keep the advantages of the flat screen and add the curved screen ones.

I think smartphone technology is going to develop very much in the coming years. Speakers have come down in size lately and I expect that small size will be used inside smartphones soon. My iPhone and iPad already have reasonably good sound quality without anything attached, like earphones or external speakers. In a few years that's going to be a lot better.

I read recently that the average smartphone user picks up his smartphone about 150 times a day. That amounts to about ten times/hour. Don't know if it's really been researched properly, but it seems credible. Whatever truth in that, I'm in no doubt that the smartphone is the most popular invention in the last 20 years, or even longer. Its great popularity indicates it's going to develop strongly in the coming years.

References: 
http://www.iphonehacks.com/2013/11/curved-displays-smartphones-gimmick.html
http://www.displaymate.com/Galaxy_Round_ShootOut_1.htm

My Mavericks has arrived!

My MacBook now has Apple's new OS called OSX Mavericks. 5.29 Gigabytes all for free and it took about 3 hours to download. I upgraded from OSX Lion, which means I skipped the Mountain Lion upgrade.

Upgrading is nerve-wracking, particularly if you come from the world of Windows. (Got a touch of deja-vu there. Guess I must've said just that before.) In that world you could always count on the PC becoming slower after updating. In fact that also happened when I upgraded the MacBook to OSX Lion, but I fixed that by doubling the RAM memory to 4GB. OSX Mavericks doesn't slow down at all, much to my relief. 

The new OSX has some nice new features of course. Perhaps my favorite is tabs in the Finder application. I used to end up with a number of Finder views. From now on I can do with just one, because you can copy between tabs. Great! Another Finder feature is colored tags. I'll probably use that sparely. I'm comfortable with just using directories, but I might use tags for a few things.

iBooks on the PC, and not just on iPhone and iPad and iPod touch, is a good idea. Being able to download straight to the PC makes sense. My PC is still my computing hub. Ok slightly old-fashioned to favor a MacBook over iPad, but PCs still are more versatile than iPads, and they don't run away as easily, connected as they are to USB disks, speakers and the rest.

Apple also says Mavericks makes applications go easier on the battery and the same with Safari. That's great news and I'm sure I'll benefit from that sometimes. 

For the next OSX I would like to see an improvement in the performance of the Dashboard, where I have a calculator, a clock and a dictionary. It seems to enter a sleep mode after PC startup, and even after a long time of non-use. It takes a few seconds before I can use the calculator and that's a bit annoying. But maybe I've just missed a trick. If so I can correct it myself sometime.

New iPads are coming

Apple has an event on 22 October. We can expect a new iPad and a new iPad Mini. We can be sure iPad Mini will get a retina-resolution screen. Rumors say that at least iPad will get the finger-print-reading Home button of iPhone 5S. If so, I'd expect the Mini to get that too. I'm guessing that the Mini's only visible difference from its bigger cousin will be screen size.

I've read another rumor that the iPad's frame, or what an artist might call passepartout, will be thinner, and thereby give more screen area. I doubt that would be a good idea. When holding an iPad you need a bit of space for the thumbs. If the frame becomes too thin, you'll see the picture scroll away unexpectedly much more often than already happens. Unless of course unintentional touches can be eliminated somehow.

I'll dream on for a while now. Wouldn't it be great if they'd introduce a book-reading mode on the iPad. At the flick of a switch the screen would start using E-ink screen technology. All of a sudden the screen would consume close to no power, and look almost like paper. You could go on a month's holiday without ever charging, as long as you'd just be reading books.

NumberWizFP sum D90H: Solution

The sum was:
Using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, how do you make D90H out of these six numbers 2, 3, 4, 9, 40H, 80H ?

d90H = 80 x 9 x 3 + (40/4)

Remember: You can buy NumberWizFP in the App Store and generate as many sums as you like. For this privilege you'll have to fork out the equivalent of a full cup of coffee ;-). Extra strong.