Twelve Black Code Monkeys

A user on TreoCentral posted some more pictures of a Sprint-branded Treo 650, the successor to the Treo 600. Most of the pictures are pretty blurry, so I’m not sure if that is meant to keep people from seeing things that may reveal something that they don’t want to be public yet, but if this is the case, why are the pictures available at all? Seems like it’s just to create more buzz, which of course it has! There’s not a whole lot new that these pictures uncover over what has already been rumored. The only new piece of information is that the battery has more capacity than that of the Treo 600, but with a higher-resolution display, that extra capacity is needed!

There is a link from that post to one on PDAPhoneHome where a user talks about playing with a pre-production model, also from Sprint (The Treo 600 initially came out on Sprint, but was soon available on at least a couple of other carriers and eventually made it to all major U.S. carriers except Nextel). A couple of items listed in this second post caught my eye. For one, the phone has RealPlayer built in. This may mean that live video streaming over a mobile web connection may be possible. At the current lower speeds of such a connection, the quality will be pretty poor, but then again on such a small screen, the blurriness from a highly compressed stream won’t be as noticeable. On a similar note, there appears to be support for a new service called Mobitv. This is an additional $10/month service that provides downloadable clips from a number of television sources, like MSNBC, CNBC, Fox Sports, etc. Unfortunately it appears it’s only available via Sprint, probably because they currently support higher speed connections than the GSM carriers. But having RealPlayer may actually skirt around this issue and actually provide a much wider array of content which doesn’t cost extra, except perhaps in terms of additional data fees.

This brings me to a related issue around using phones like the Treo. Much of what I do with the phone – email, web, instant messaging – is very data-intensive, meaning that I am using the special data services to communicate as opposed to the phone. Mobile carriers differ somewhat in their voice plans, but the differences are not huge. One might pay 10% or 20% more on one carrier for a similar number of minutes, but it doesn’t get much worse. This is of course in the U.S. market, I have no clue about how markets outside of the U.S. compare. Anyway, with data services, the picture is different. Mobile phones in general, but PDA Phones like the Treo in particular are becoming more and more data-intensive. Some carriers have made this functionality relatively pain-free to deal with, offering unlimited data and relatively low rates. But others offer such plans at rates that will double your bill, or worse. One plan I saw was actually 400% higher for unlimited data than another. Sprint doesn’t even offer unlimited data, it seems, but even a limited 300MB is $80! Sprint does have higher data speeds, but still. With number portability and data becoming more of a mainstream feature, this disparity between carriers has got to change. Mobile phones are still used primarily for making calls, but soon enough this will be only half of the picture for a majority of users. Customers who view such capabilities as essential will look at the savings of $50 per month or more between carriers and the decision to switch will be a very easy one. Perhaps the carriers who are charging the highest fees aren’t seeing that much interest in data services, but couldn’t this be due to the fact that people who are as a matter of course end up going to the cheapest carriers for such services?

After months of rumor without much official word, there’s finally a bit more hope for those interested in having the Blackberry wireless services for their Treo 600. In other words, Treo owners who need Blackberries to communicate with their corporate offices may be able to throw away their Blackberries and use their Treos exclusively. No word on how much this will cost or whether it will be available for all carriers that support the Treo, but the product seems imminent so we may have answers to all of these questions soon. The newest version of the Blackberry phone actually will be geared more to regular consumers and this has meant that it will be easier for non-corporate users to get the full functionality of a Blackberry without needing a corporate server, so perhaps anyone wanting to have this functionality won’t have to pay through the nose subscribing to a third-party server solution.

While this is exciting, I for one am currently satisfied with a Blackberry-like solution I have on my Treo 600 for email at least. I use a recently updated version of Chatter, which provides the “push” capability of the Blackberry. I have a hosted exchange account through 1and1.com, but really any account that supports IMAP will let you do what I do – I keep all my folders, such as my inbox, my sent items, even my trash, synched between my Treo 650 and my mail server. This does not, of course, let me synch my calendar entries, to-do list, etc., but until I get better at using those tools on a more regular basis, I probably don’t need to synch them more than once a day when I get home.

It’s been a while since the orange juice industry and potato industry decided to go after the low-carb diet movement because of its threat to their business. I haven’t heard much since, except for some in these industries making a decision that instead of or in addition to bad-mouthing low-carb, or even suing it proponents; they needed to adopt a fall-back plan of some version of developing a version of their product that might appeal to some low-carb dieters.

Just a few minutes ago I learned of an organization “dedicated to promoting the health benefits of fruits and vegetables with regard to weight management and disease prevention” which has conducted a poll about low-carb dieting. Their name, Dole Nutritional Institute, gave away who they were – Dole, the huge conglomerate that sells canned and fresh fruits and veggies, as well as other products that use fruits or veggies as at least one of their ingredients – sugar probably being a bigger share on some of these!

So, you can’t blame me for being just a tad suspicious that this “Doll Poll” as they call it, might be a little, shall we say… biased? And reading through their press release, it amazes me how blatant this bias is. Let’s go through just a few things that should make it clear to most people who can think for themselves that Doll is out only to vilify low carb because it is a threat to their bottom line.

“The brand new “Dole Poll” found that half of all Americans reported that no amount of weight loss from a low-carb diet would be worth the potential negative health impact. According to a recent national poll of 801 adults, the possible side effects of a low-carbohydrate diet such as high cholesterol, constipation, kidney stones, and increased risk of some cancers, “tip the scales” against following such a diet for a full 50% of Americans. In contrast, more than one-third (36%) say they are willing to take the chance to realize some weight loss, with 4% reporting any amount of pounds shed would be “worth it.”

This is the definition of “leading question” and has been used by politicos to plant a seed in people’s mind without actually coming out and accusing an opponent of the thing. “Would you vote for so and so if it turned out he embezzled money and fathered an illegitimate child”? The point is that none of these so called side affects have ever been proven to be associated with low-carb dieting. Please, Doll, anyone, name one study that showed an increased incidence of any of these things among actual low-carb dieters. Maybe some are logical extractions based on faulty assumptions, I grant you that, but faulty assumptions don’t lead to valid conclusions!

“We’ve turned a corner in public awareness,” observed Jennifer Grossman, Director of the Dole Nutrition Institute. “The more people learn about low- carb health risks, the less appetite they have for such dangerous fad diets.” Coming on the heels of The Lancet medical journal’s survey suggesting such side effects as headaches, fatigue and foul breath are more frequently reported by low-carb dieters than those on conventional regimens, the Dole Poll findings are more evidence that the Atkins bubble has burst.”

Hmmm, I see something about “headaches, fatigue, and foul breath” but where are all the other supposed side effects? The side effects that the Lancet describes have been criticized because they are widely known to anyone familiar with such diets as the common symptoms of carbohydrate “withdrawal” during the first two weeks of the diet, after which they subside and in fact a great increase in energy is often noted.

“This backlash is already affecting the grocery industry, with less than half the numbers of low-carb products introduced in 2004 than in 2003, and sales figures showing that many of these products are discounted or off the shelves weeks after introduction. Some industry experts even project that two-thirds of the products introduced this year will be off the shelves by 2006.

We’ve been hearing about the supposed death of low-carb for months now. Part of this is based off the argument that some low-carb products aren’t selling at the incredible rates they were during the first four or five months of this year. Let’s see, could it be that this “fad” is over, or could it be that only those who adopted the diet as the 2004 diet of the year will go back to their old ways? People who aren’t necessarily serious about finding what will work for them and sticking with it, but rather more interested in doing something that’s trendy, and once it’s not new it gets tossed out. Sure, there are a lot of bandwagon jumpers, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s stopped low-carbing. Aside from this, it ignores the fact that the drop in sales for these products may have absolutely nothing to do with overall numbers of people following low-carb diets. All it says is that fewer people are buying these products! But despite what the critics might try to convince you of, you can, and really you SHOULD do low-carb without any of these. Low-carb can be accomplished with simple whole foods, such as meat, fish, veggies, fruit, nuts, and dairy. In fact, I would argue that it’s even easier to avoid processed foods with a low-carb plan than low-fat, because all dairy and much meat is naturally not low-fat, but needs to have that fat “processed out of it” and in its place, at least as far as dairy is concerned, goes other fillers, particularly sugar, in order to hide the lack of taste that the fat used to provide.

Other questions and results included:

Question: As you may be aware, some Americans are trying to lose weight by eating fewer carbohydrates. This is often referred to as the “Atkins” diet. Which of the following aspects of a low-carbohydrate diet do you find most appealing?

27%  SIGNIFICANT WEIGHT LOSS

18%  FACT THAT YOU CAN EAT BIG PORTIONS OF MEAT, CHEESE, AND CREAM AND

STILL LOSE WEIGHT

13%  SIMPLICITY OF THE DIET/EASY TO FOLLOW

2%  THE POPULARITY OF THE PROGRAM/OTHER PEOPLE DOING IT

25%  DEPENDS/UNSURE/DON’T KNOW (VOLUNTEERED)

7%  TOTAL OTHER (VOLUNTEERED)

7%  REFUSED (VOLUNTEERED)

Wow, Dole was brave enough to actually publish one of their questions. Let’s see, where is the answer “It makes me feel good” or “It improves my health”? Of course, they couldn’t have asked that because that might have actually created results inconsistent with what they aiming for. Instead, they give the option that you can eat “big portions of meat, cheese, and cream” – you know the very stereotypical view that critics have of these diets that they only consist of fatty meats and cheese. Also we have “popularity” as a factor, which is not a positive at all. Who is going to admit to doing something only because it’s popular? Obviously not many!

Question: Which of the following aspects of a low-carbohydrate diet do you find to be least appealing?

39%  SIDE EFFECTS LIKE KIDNEY STONES, HIGH CHOLESTEROL, AND INCREASED RISK OF HEART DISEASE

17%  DIFFICULTY TO KEEP WEIGHT OFF OVER THE LONG TERM

13%  BOREDOM WITH THE SAME ROUTINE IN THE FOODS EATEN

8%  SIDE EFFECTS LIKE CONSTIPATION, BAD BREATH OR DEPRESSED MOOD

15%  DEPENDS/UNSURE/DON’T KNOW (VOLUNTEERED)

3%  TOTAL OTHER (VOLUNTEERED)

4%  REFUSED (VOLUNTEERED)

Here we go again! The question is framed as if these “aspects of a low-carbohydrate diet” are proven fact. Please, show me any scientific study that shows an increased risk of heart disease with a low-carb diet. This is something that nutritionists and the medical community have accused Atkins of for over 30 years, so you would think by now they would have proof, right? Cholesterol is often decreased with a low-carb plan as well.

Notably, a full 25% of those surveyed said that they were “unsure,” “lacked information,” or simply “did not know enough” to respond to this question and choose among the four aspects. This suggests the limited popularity of low-carb diets, which have achieved “mainstream” status (available and known to a majority of Americans) but which have failed to realize a critical “mass” in its subscribership (actually followed by a majority of Americans).

Or…. It could just mean that you didn’t give these people an adequate answer which they would have picked, since you loaded it all to make the diet look bad. How they extrapolate this data to determine that there is no “critical mass” in low-carb diet popularity is really unfathomable.

That’s the problem with such a poll. When you have an actual agenda, it no longer is a poll, but a political or marketing propaganda mechanism. And wouldn’t you know it, the company that conducted the poll, “the polling company“, is headed by a conservative talking head (the company also does political consulting), someone used to trying to present a specific viewpoint, not objective truth.

By way of Gizmodo, there’s news of a new portable device by Epson that can display pictures, download them from Compact Flash or SD cards, and possibly play music and videos. The only information available right now is in Japanese, so I’m not even sure when or if this will make it to market outside of Japan, but it looks pretty exciting as a kind of convergence media device. Also, because this is in Japanese, I can’t really be sure of what the device is supposed to offer. What’s included below is just guesswork based on the few non-Japanese words and the pictures, so take what’s below with a grain of salt! And if anyone reading this knows Japanese and do a bit of translating, that would be great help!

The device, called the P-2000 Photo Fine Player, looks like it is designed primarily to view and download images. It looks like one possible feature may be to allow the user to zoom in to a smaller area within a picture and move around, as well as getting a kind of contact sheet of multiple images so that one can quickly move to the an image and display it. Apparently the device can display RAW image files from a series of Nikon and Canon cameras, but no Fuji or Olympus RAW, at least not listed. It looks like one can also hook the device directly to a TV or monitor for displaying pictures or other media, as well as hook the device to a printer (at least one that uses Epson’s USB Direct Print protocol) for printing things without involving a separate computer.

As far as this “other media” goes, all I can see is the mention of MPEG-4, a type of video format that allows for very good compression rates, and QuickTime, which MPEG-4 is based on. There’s also a mention of “motion jpeg” which displays full jpeg images as movies, thus is compressed only to the point that individual jpegs are compressed – it’s not a scheme in use nearly to the extent that QuickTime or MPEG-4 are.

The device also plays audio. MP3 is mentioned as well as AAC. AAC is a file format that like MP3 is lossy, but whose compression scheme is better, allowing for higher quality audio even with higher compression rates. The other big advantage to having AAC support is that this is the format Apple uses for it’s iTunes downloadable music files. However, I’m not sure whether simply supporting AAC also means that one can play such files on this device, since the AAC files that Apple provides have a copy-protection mechanism built in which may not be supported by the device.

While there are other “PMP” (Personal Media Player) devices out there that serve those who want to want to both listen to music, watch movies, and view pictures on the go, this is the first one that I’ve seen that also seems to add the functionality that is critical for serious digital photographers – the ability to directly download pictures from memory cards. The large capacity can hold over 6,000 of the largest files my 6-Megapixel D70 can produce, making it a pretty long-term portable storage device if one can’t take an actual laptop on location or load up on hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of storage cards. Also the ability to hold the files on a more portable device than the camera itself with what looks like a larger screen and the ability to manage the images to some extent would just make this all the better.

A couple of pertinent questions come to mind other than the most obvious ones of whether it will actually be sold outside of Japan and if so when. First, the rate at which various other card reader/storage solutions like this can download images seems to vary quite a bit. Belkin makes a couple of devices for the iPod that will do basically everything this will but without any viewing capability. The main problem with it and the reason I haven’t bought it is that the speed they transfer images is exceedingly slow, upwards of a half hour for a 512MB card with 80 pictures. This may be ok for a lot of people, but if you are doing some moderately heavy shooting where hundreds of pictures and several 512MB cards are necessary, this sped just won’t cut it. Aside from which apparently transferring even one 512MB card depletes the iPod’s battery so much that you really can’t use it for more than this without then charging it for a much longer period of time before the next card is downloaded. Other dedicated devices, such as the Flashtrax, are said to be a lot faster.

Then there’s the little question of price. If this thing is priced at a hefty $700 or more, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility given all its capabilities, this could put it out of reach for a most people. Of course professional photographers will probably not be as fazed, since it’s easy to pay twice this for a really good lense, let alone a DSLR camera body. But the average consumer could get just as much use out of this as a professional or serious amateur photographer, since a huge number of people now have digital cameras and it only takes a long vacation to demonstrate how quickly memory cards can be eaten up unless you take your laptop and do daily dumps of your images onto it.

I for one love to see such devices and hope more companies come out with them. One wonderful feature I can think of would be a keyboard so that one can either rename images easily, or change metadata for a given image. The ability to hook the device to a cell phone (via wires or wireless) to upload your images online would be great, although even for one 6MB file, this might take an excruciatingly long period of time with current mobile phone speeds. Eventually, I would hope one could go into a Blockbuster or other such place and download any movie one desires via a kiosk. But I guess such kiosks could be placed anywhere and could also offer any music as well as movie or tv show. Pairing such a device eventually with a smartphone and giving it the ability to communicate via Wimax and/or Wireless USB would enable buying and downloading media virtually anywhere. This is all pretty far away, but maybe not as far away as it seems. The technologies all exist in one for or another and except for the expense in creating such a device and the need for it to be relatively small, it could be created right now, more or less.

Two new standards were introduced today in the real of digital photography. Or I should say, one new standard, and a standards body. Time will only tell whether how these pan out. Standards in technology are one of those sticky issues. On the one hand some companies, particularly huge ones like Microsoft, have decided to use their clout to enforce their own standards because they carry so much market weight. They can create a way of doing something which will simply become a standard by the fact that huge numbers of people use their software anyway. There are definitely good arguments (as there are bad) for a single company leading the way. Standards bodies comprising many interests can take long periods of time to develop a set of standards that have lots of compromises to the point that they don’t really push the envelop much. Too many cooks can ruin the broth when it becomes so watered down. On the other hand, a single company can make a standard that only serves their purposes, or at least gives them by far the biggest advantage. It can close things off to competitors and generally hinder competition.

Adobe, the makers of the premier digital photopraphy editing tool, Photoshop, has come out with a standard format for RAW files. RAW files are a type of file that more advanced digital cameras use to save raw data from the image sensor. The advantage over the much more common jpeg format is that the file is usually basically the exact information that the sensor received when taking the picture, whereas jpeg is a “developed” or “processed” interpretation of this data. So, with a raw file you can change settings as if you were still in the process of taking the picture. You can change white balance, sharpness, exposure, etc., and it’s as if you changed these things before you actually hit the shutter. This is very useful for digital photographers because it gives them the power to kind of “go back in time” if you will and correct incorrectly made settings. One CAN correct these things in a jpeg, but it’s not nearly as effective because the jpeg has already been processed. Think of it as making a copy of a copy, although it’s not quite that bad. RAW files are truly the digital equivalent of a negative, and this is aptly what Adobe is calling their new standard format. The .DNG extension obviously stands for “Digital Negative…” what? Graphics? Not sure. In any case, Adobe has made this format free of restrictions or royalties. Doing otherwise would have killed such a nascent standard. Hopefully everyone’s learned the lesson of CompuServe and the .gif format. Of course, the only programs that will currently support this DNG file are Adobe products like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Acrobat, so we will have to see whether it is adopted by other software makers as well as camera manufacturers (currently it’s not supported by anyone but Adobe, although one can convert one’s old RAW files to the new format via a tool that Adobe has made available). Let’s hope so. This will make it a whole lot easier for software makers to concentrate on features and not have to deal with converter intricacies every time a new camera comes out.

In other news Fuji, Konica Minolta, and Kodak have decided to form a standards body called the “Picture Archiving and Sharing Group” or PASSG. This group aims to develop standards around not just digital photography, but audio and video as well. For digital photographers (and I assume for videographers as well), one of the most challenging parts of the job (or hobby) is what’s referred to as “digital workflow.” This means refers to how the image goes from the shutter release to the end product, whether that’s a print, a web page, or what have you. It involves the process of transferring the file from the camera to a computer, editing the file, or converting it to different formats, archiving it for posterity in various forms and places, sending it to labs, or to a local printer, posting it to an image hosting site or to a more standard website, etc. As you can see, this can become a complex process with many steps many different options and decisions to make along the way. Different people have very different workflows depending on the size of their business (if they have one at all), how they run their business, what they want to do with their photos, or simply their personal style. Having a set of standards around workflow, I would think, can only serve to make it more manageable. This is one of the areas where more choice can be a double-edged sword. Choice in and of itself is good, but too much of a good thing isn’t always a good thing. You can get overwhelmed and this can make developing a simple and straightforward workflow extremely challenging and time consuming.

First a disclaimer: I’m no audiophile. I’m a gadget geek who can tell the difference between an MP3 Encoded at 196kbs and… 32kbps? Or between a reporter talking over a telephone line and one talking live. I can make out the extra channels in a surround sound system, and other basic things like this. I’m in no way a connoisseur of audio fidelity.

Moving on, I’ve been trying to set something up so that I could listen to music or audio books in my car on my daily commute without a lot of fuss. Years ago I bought a fairly expensive head unit that gave me a CD player, but not long after that it was stolen. That was the last time I bought something after-market. Until a month ago that is.

The car that I owned for the last five years was in a fended bender in the spring that totaled it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s what my insurance company told me. I was lucky in that a friend was selling one of his cars at around the same amount as the check I was getting from my insurance company. I love the car, which is a Honda Civic, but the one thing I grew to hate about it was the stereo, a pioneer CD player with a non-detachable head. This thing was impossible to figure out how to operate. I could change the channel and the volume, but that’s about it. Even turning it on and off was a pain, and so I ended up just lowering and raising the volume instead most of the time. I could never get the clock to change, despite spending probably a total of an hour (spread out on different occasions). This coming from someone who has a fair degree of familiarity and stubbornness when it comes to figuring out functionality of electronics.

I had been toying in the back of my mind about getting a new car stereo installed almost from the day I took possession of the car, but for some reason I didn’t start to seriously consider it until August. I was using the iTrip FM transmitter to transmit the signal from my iPod to the car stereo. While the iTrip is generally viewed as the best FM transmitter for the iPod, it still can be not the most optimal thing to use. I live in the DC area which has lots of stations and reception changes as you drive through different parts of the area. This means that if I set a frequency at home, by the time I get halfway to work, that frequency may start getting a lot of interference. Changing the frequency, while not terribly difficult, does take a little practice, and is not something one can do easily (or more importantly safely) while driving. Aside from this, the sound quality is not spectacular. It’s probably fine most of the time for audio books, but for music, especially softer stuff where quality matters like acoustical performances, classical, etc., you will definitely be able to tell a difference between it and a CD. Comparing it to a radio station, though, one may come away detecting no real difference in quality.

More than anything else, though, I probably just wanted to get the damn Pionieer out of my car. Actually it is still there as I write this, but in the trunk, where it can’t hurt anyone else. So, I started looking for car stereos to replace it in August, as I mentioned. Really I could have cared less about the CD player. I’ve converted all my CD’s to MP3 and they all sit on my iPod, so unless I want to hear a CD that I buy on the way back from the store – and this tends to be something that happens maybe once or twice a year these days – the CD player is pretty much useless to me. I do, however, listen to the radio fairly often. Seeing as all car stereo head units that I knew of at least had a radio, this wasn’t really an issue. But, as I found out, one can’t buy a unit with ONLY a radio. Sure, maybe they exist somewhere, but not at any major chain store. Next I decided to look for one with a radio-cassette combination, since I thought it would be cheaper than a radio-CD player. But it looks like the cassette really has been completely and utterly crushed by the CD. I was able to find maybe one or at most two cassette players being sold, compared to what, maybe 30 or 40 different CD players?

What I was really looking for, though, was a unit that an “Aux In” or “Auxiliary In” which is just a fancy/audiophile term for a input port in the stereo unit into which you can plug external devices and then hear them through the car stereo. Really, this means any device which has a headphone jack can be plugged in, even including, say, a cell phone. Anyway, what I found was that this “Aux In” feature is not as popular as one would guess, or at least the manufacturers of these stereo units don’t believe so. It also doesn’t seem as it would be the most expensive part of the unit, as it seems it might just be a little more pricey to set up the laser and all the other components in a CD player than what amounts to some metal and wires. Yet, almost all of the units that sported this feature were at least $300, and this in a category where at least half of the units were under this price. Luckily, one manufacturer seems to have bucked the trend, AIWA. This is so even though AIWA is owned by Sony who, as most others, don’t sell anything with Aux In for under $300. The AIWA CDC-X144, their lowest end radio-CD head unit, does have this input. It was being sold by a local Circuit City for the low cost of $100. The reviews on Circuit City’s web page were not stunning, but I thought for $100, how can you go wrong? Plus, anything could be better than the Pioneer that was causing me daily frustration, right?

Right. The actual cost came to around $180 with installation and tax, so it may not be as dirt cheap as I initially made it out, but it still won’t break the bank for most people, especially considering that iPods go for $300-400, and not too long ago up to $500. I’m sure getting your BMW or Volkswagon iPodized or whatever the term is, isn’t cheap either. Anyway, I now simply plug stuff (mainly my iPod) into the Aux In and get sound as if I’m listening with headphones, or listening to a CD for that matter. I don’t have to deal with the sub-par FM reception or sound quality, nor do I have to deal with how the stereo on my old car would cause my cassette adapters (I tried a few) to start to click after things got too hot, which was maybe an hour in Winter, but about 30 seconds during summer.

I don’t know why I waited so long to buy this, but I’m sure glad I did, and I hope this provides people in the same boat some insight that might help them to make the jump sooner rather than later if indeed it makes sense for them to do so.

There’s been a slew of news recently that would have us believe that the iPod will no longer have the easy road it’s been on as the dominant MP3 player over the last few years. I have had an iPod for about a year now, and while I certainly enjoy it, I am in no way the religious adherent that some iPod fanatics are. In fact, I’ve never owned an Apple product OTHER than the iPod. However, I don’t see the iPod going away just yet. I do like all this additional competition, though, because theoretically it will only make the iPod better and cheaper. At the same time certain aspects of this competition can only cause chaos in the digital music world, which is not a good thing, really, for anyone..

Justin Blanton writes that “Obviously The Ipod is Dead” because they are refusing to “converge” with other devices like mobile phones, at least so far. He predicts that phones will eventually have hard drives that will enable them to play as much music as an iPod, or do even more. This may be true, but even now one can buy a “convergence device” like the Treo 600 for which one can buy 1GB memory cards capable of holding upwards of 300 songs each. Samsung will soon be coming out with 16GB cards that would hold more than the smaller 15GB iPod. Hard drives, or even built-in 4GB flash modules will, I’m sure, come to convergence devices in the not too distant future, especially as solid state memory prices continue to plummet. Will this kill the iPod? I doubt it. The problem is that such devices still carry a premium. A $700 phone is a lot more of an impediment – especially for a teen or 20-something – than a $300 iPod. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Treo and use it for tons of things, but at the same time, I recognize that MP3 players like my iPod were made specifically with listening to audio in mind. Of course Apple’s design sense doesn’t hurt either. Apple has just one product in this category and they have worked continuously over the last few years to hone its functionality. On the other hand my Treo can play some formats that the iPod won’t, thankfully, and that brings me to the main thrust of this piece.

In the hunt to consolidate a market share in the digital music arena, Apple introduced their music download store, iTunes. Unfortunately, this store uses the AAC file format for copy prevention, and this format so far is not supported in almost any other player aside from the iPod. The iPod can also play the older and open MP3 format, but it cannot play a more advanced open format called Ogg Vorbis, nor can it play Microsoft’s Windows Media File (WMA) format, which is now supported on the vast majority of non-iPod players.

Two other big players in this arena have stepped up to the plate in an effort to compete with Apple. Microsoft has been pushing their WMA and has gotten it supported by many players (in addition to it’s PockePC devices and phones), and is not introducing its own music service to compete with iTunes. Sony, which has been making audio players much longer than Apple, may finally be thinking about adding MP3 capability to it’s players. Up until now, such devices would only use Sony’s proprietary Atrak format, a format also used by Sony’s new download service.

Sony owns a huge percentage of the popular music out there (not to mention the movies that could eventually make the jump to portability plus downloadability via sites like iTunes), and thus can dominate in this area especially if they finally offer MP3 (and possibly WMA) capability as may be the case. Sony is the king of proprietary formats, though, and the decision isn’t official.

In my thinking, unless something changes, we will eventually see a playing field where people just buy the device based on how well they work, and how programmable they are. Programmers (or hackers if you will) will (they already have in some cases) find ways to skirt both the copy protection mechanisms of these formats and the formats themselves so that they can be converted from one type of file to another, or at least make it so that they can be played on devices they weren’t meant to be played on.

In other words, the music industry still hasn’t learned its lesson from Napster. They should be banding together and offering music in the most attractive form. This means not only low prices, but also flexibility in how people can listen to it. By making things inconvenient and expensive, they are only driving the hackers to fill the justifiable desire on the part of consumers for a straightforward solution that allows them the maximum amount of choice (in terms of both devices and content) possible.

The iPod won’t die because it isn’t any less proprietary than the other devices paired with services out there. It may be relegated to second place, though, if Sony comes out with competing devices that also play downloadable movies. But unless all of these companies stop adhering to a battle-camp mentality where customers have to buy a Sony device in order to hear Sony content, or an Apple device to buy Apple content, etc., they will be fighting a losing battle. Consumers don’t care what company produced the content! They care only about the music (or movie). It’s inevitable that they will want to hear a substantial variety of music whose rights are owned by a variety of companies. Maybe in 20 or 30 years none of this will matter as more and more artists take the Indy route – especially if the trend continues of the content Giants not learning the lessons of history to adapt or hunker down and perish. But for the near future, anyway, this situation will just breed anger and a desire to defeat any restraint these companies want to put around the necks (ears?) of their customers.

Maybe Audible.com would be a good example for such companies. Audible.com provides downloadable audio books from a great number of publishers – either producing the recordings themselves or converting earlier books on tape or CD to their, yes, PROPRIETARY format. Yet, Audible has worked with many manufacturers since it’s inception in the late 90’s to make drivers for a huge number of devices. They didn’t just pick one brand and refuse to work with other companies because of some “strategic partnership.” And because of this one can listen to Audible.com content on Treo Cell phones and their competitor PocketPC phones, on Apple’s iPod, and on its competitor hard-drive based as well as flash memory MP3 players. Audible is now more successful than ever, at least if you view stock price as measure of success! True, Audible does not manufacture any devices themselves and this makes it easier for them to work with multiple manufacturers, whereas Apple offering iTunes for Sony devices would be creating more competition for their own iPod. But perhaps what this means is that companies should either sell the content that people want to hear or see, or they should make the devices, but not both. If they make both, there is just too much interest for them to create a firewall where they pair their device and content and make both incompatible with all other content and devices.

I am no big fan of low carb food products that try to mimic high-carb foods like bread, candy, pancakes, and countless others. They tend to be highly processed with dubious claims based on the iffy status of sugar alcohols. Nevertheless, the recent decision by Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to outlaw any kinds of supplemental labeling that denotes the Atkins approval or even signaling that the product is low in carbs is, in my opinion, just unfair.

Has labeling signaling the lack of fat (even in nutritionally bereft foods like candy) been banned too? If not, then to be fair, it should be as well. As it stands, manufacturers will have to relabel lots of product and what’s on shelves now will become illegal to sell. Will manufacturers decide that it’s worth it to take the effort to relabel their product and then try to sell it when they can’t even advertise what is admittedly a major selling point for the millions of low-carb dieters out there?

Perhaps the end effect, even if it does strip Canadian consumers of options, is a double-edged sword. Low-carb dieters, especially those fairly new to it and who haven’t bothered to understand the mechanics behind a healthy low-carb plan, often tend to use these products as a crutch to continue to eat the way they feel accustomed to instead of truly adopting a new way of thinking about food and nutrition – a more holistic and natural way that involves few processed foods and mainly whole foods like veggies, fruits, meat, fish, poultry, nuts, etc. On the other hand, these products do have their place as an occasional treat instead of the full-carb alternative. The danger is that consumers see “low-carb” and decide this means they can eat as much as they want, just as consumers did with low-fat products.

What gets me is that these Canadian Agencies just used a U.S.-based entity, the Institute of Medicine (this was the first time I’d heard of them) to make this decision. Not only that but the recommendations from this institute that they are following came out a couple of years ago, before many studies supporting a controlled-carbohydrate regimen were published. So the science backing this not only is unoriginal, and only coming from one point of view, but in addition is old! Plus it almost seems like these agencies are renouncing responsibility for doing any work themselves by using someone else’s recommendation.

The regulations are said to take affect in December of 2005, by which time there will be even more studies out, and the recommendations that are the basis for these regulations will then be over three years old! It will be interesting if, as has happened over the last year or two, even more nutritional and medical experts start looking critically at the old assumptions of carbohydrate-centric diets as the model and decide that there may just be some benefits to controlling carb intake.

Update: Katherine Prouty at Low Carb Fredom also posted a piece about this (thanks for the link, Katherine!), with links to lots of scietific studies that support a reduction in carbs for health and weight loss.

Well, after driving me and countless other Sidekick users away due to their idiotic and anti-customer policy of not offering a product that had already been developed, T-Mobile has finally decided to offer Outlook Synch for this device. Unfortunately it is just too late for many of us, and really a slap in the face to those who fought so hard to get this capability only to be told that it wouldn’t happen.

For those few who are unfamiliar with this debacle, Danger, the company that designed the Sidekick, promised the capability for users to synchronize (or “synch”) their phone’s information (contacts, to-do’s, appointments, etc.) with popular personal information management software like Microsoft’s Outlook. Back in August of 2002, right before the first black and white Sidekick was released, Danger said that synch would be available “soon.” Rumors and unofficial responses from the company for the next year or so promised that synch was just around the corner. Finally, in the Spring of this year, it was learned that at least one mobile provider outside of the U.S. was already offering this capability. In other words, it had been developed and implemented elsewhere, but T-Mobile, for some reason, was refusing to offer it to their customers. Neither Danger nor T-Mobile would comment on when synch would come out or why it wasn’t currently being offered. I myself decided to make this issue a bit more public and so I initiated an online petition to get T-Mobile to offer Synch. This finally garnered the first official comment from T-Mobile: “Sidekick was chosen for its appeal to consumers who want one integrated, standalone communication solution at an unparalleled value. We are aware of the petition and continue to evaluate new Sidekick offerings, but at this time, do not have plans to launch PIM synch.”

Of course, this comment made it clear to many, including myself, that T-Mobile could not be relied on to EVER offer synch. Maybe they would, but there was no guarantee, and since it had been years since first promised and months since it had been offered through other carriers, the possibility seemed remote at best.

Because of this, when a friend offered me his Treo 600 (the Palm platform has offered synch since it’s first models from almost 10 years ago) for a much discounted price, I jumped at the chance. I wrote a review of how the Treo 600 compares to the Sidekick, and at least for me, the Treo won the battle.

Now the Sidekick II has been released, and with it this synch software. While this is finally a big step in the right direction, it does seem like a slap in the face to previously loyal Sidekick users who clamored for this functionality for years only to be told coldly that there were no plans to offer it despite it having already been developed and implemented on other carriers’ services. The Sidekick II promises to be a much better device than it’s predecessors even aside from the synch issue, but the Sidekick platform as offered by T-Mobile has some inherent problems that just aren’t seen with the Treo, or for that matter any Palm or PocketPC-based phones.

The main issue here is competition. Most phone manufacturers provide their devices to multiple carriers. Danger, on the other hand, was too small to go it alone and received heavy funding from one company - T-Mobile. Because of this T-Mobile is still the only Carrier to provide the phone in the U.S. (at least in markets that it competes in). T-Mobile has basically been able to hold the Sidekick hostage. It makes the decisions of what to offer when, and in too many cases this means deciding not to offer something for unknown or blatently selfish reasons. Other than synch, the example that comes to mind is the ability that was developed almost a year ago in an operating system update that would have allowed users to use any sound file as a “ringtone.” One could have recorded various people or oneself saying “John is calling,” send it as an email attachment, and then use it as a ringtone for when John called. But T-Mobile didn’t want this, they wanted to sell customers ringtones at $1-2 or more a pop, and giving users the ability to do this might have allowed them to actually record songs they owned and transfer them to their Sidekick, oh my! So the capability was hastily deleted before the update was released to the general customer base.

The other big problem around the Sidekick and T-Mobile’s domination of the device has been application development. The “catalog” was initiated almost a year ago. It was supposed to be a way for Danger to provide additional functionality to the device without going through what has become very long and drawn out process of updating the operating system. But despite setting up a big development site and many developers creating new applications for the Sidekick, the new applications came out in a pathetic trickle - perhaps one every couple of months. Many of them were games or ringtones that did not really enhance the capabilities of the device. If one signed up to be a developer, one could not only see but download some of the applications that T-Mobile was not offering, despite their obvious maturity and usefulness. Many developers ended up throwing countless hours of work away and leaving the effort because so many hoops had to be jumped through even to get consideration for their work to be considered. Compare this to the wide open development environment of the Treo (or any Palm or PocketPC device for that matter), and this situation becomes laughable, if it wasn’t so sad. The Treo 600 is not only my phone and internet device, but I also use it to run a GPS for my car, and listen to audio books, among many other things. The Sidekick may be more slick looking, but at this point in my life I would much rather choose function over form, especially when there is such an immense gulf in that area between the two devices.

That all being said, we are trying to get hold of a Sidekick II for my wife, who inherited my old Sidekick. I promised to eventually compare the Sidekick II and the next Treo (the Treo 650) when they were out. The Treo 650 isn’t out yet and I’m not sure if it will be in my budget for a while, but maybe I can find some way to get a loaner so that I can review it side-by-side with the Sidekick II, as I did with the last versions of these phones.

Nikon recently announced its flagship 12MP DSLR, the D2X, close behind Fuji’s S3 Pro. Now Canon has gotten into the fray with it’s latest and greatest, the top-of-the-line professional EOS-1DS Mark II. The highest priced of these cameras it is also one with the highest resolution in terms of pure pixel elements – a whopping 16MP, which should be enough to equal or surpace that of 35mm film, maybe even some medium format film. The CMOS sensor is a new one, and with a full-frame 35mm size it promises to have minimal amounts of digital noise, but it otherwise is does not use any innovative new designs like the Fuji S3’s or the Sigma’s Fovean models. Like the D2X, the 1DS has new WIFI capability. At a cool $8,000 retail, this camera is not for the amateur. Well, unless the amateur has lots of disposable income! Lots of sports photographers use the EOS-1D Mark II as it is very competitive in terms of fast frame rates, but the 1DS actually has a lower frame rate, at least at the high resolutions, so I wonder whether such photographers or magazines will want to invest in something the main benefit of which (higher resolution) comes at the loss of speed. And let’s face it, the highest these images are going to be printed for the vast majority of applications is 8×10, for which a 6MP camera is perfectly acceptable…