Bob Schwartz

Category: Technology

June 14, 2013

The STR-AV1010 Is Dead

Sony STR-AV1010
Five miles out of London on the Western Avenue
Must have been a wonder when it was brand new
Talkin’ ’bout the splendour of the Hoover factory
I know that you’d agree if you had seen it too
It’s not a matter of life or death
What is, what is?
It doesn’t matter if I take another breath
Who cares? Who cares?
Elvis Costello, Hoover Factory

My audio receiver is dead. Well, not exactly dead. But without a right channel, it’s like a Reese’s Cup without the peanut butter. Chocolate is great, but only half the story.

Calling it a receiver is like calling a computer a calculator. The Sony STR-AV1010 is an “Audio/Video Control Center” with “Delayed Digital Surround”. It was the first quality audio component I bought, not inexpensive at the time. You can, if you wish, date it by the fact that it includes inputs for Phono (phonograph) and DAT (Digital Audio Tape).

Don’t let its age fool you. It has remained a powerful and capable piece of equipment. The most sophisticated devices have been added to its army, and it has controlled them like the pro it is.

That’s not to say I haven’t walked down the aisles of a store or browsed online for newer models and technology. There’s plenty out there that’s better suited to the state of the digital art. Sleeker styling and more advanced controls too. It’s not like I’m married to the equipment.

But just when I would get serious about trading up, I’d feel a tug of loyalty and nostalgia. It has sat in a place of tech honor in every house, and has been the master control for lots of great and wild times, along with some quiet and unforgettable ones. Most of all, it was working fine, pumping out awesome sound. Until today.

The sound is still awesome, at least on the left channel. On the right, not so much. Is that enough to displace it from the hub of home entertainment? Is the right half of the audio really that important?

It was a wonder when it was brand new. To me, it still is.

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June 5, 2013

Mountains or Molehills: How to Unflatten the News

Mt Everest - Justin Bieber
Digital access has made the news world flat. Flat as in if you use a news aggregator, there is some attempt on the site to stack the most important stories within a category, but since all categories have the same dignity, you really wouldn’t know, being from another planet, whether the civil war in Syria is more or less significant than Justin Bieber racing his Maserati through his exclusive California neighborhood (hint: it’s not Bieber).

Just as digital has created this unsortable mess and mass of news, such that Hamlet, who insane or not could tell a hawk from a handsaw/heron, would have trouble telling an important story from an inconsequential one (hint: your uncle killing your father to marry your mother is an important story).

Here is a solution. Since it is very easy to adjust type size digitally, stories that aggregators, editors or writers are willing to admit are not earthshaking might be presented in a smaller font, while those that are vital could use a larger one. This was always a convention of print news, and there is no reason that the capabilities of digital information shouldn’t be used to bring this approach up to date. As in:

Top Stories

Civil war in Syria threatens regional and global stability and peace.

Justin Bieber continues to race his Maserati around his neighborhood, despite complaints from neighbors.
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May 1, 2013

The Most Important Document In History

CERN W3
The Magna Carta. The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution. The Emancipation Proclamation. The number of essential documentary moments goes on and on, both here and globally, each one of them a significant next step in progress.

Twenty years ago, what may turn out to be the most important document in history (above) was issued. The website of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) explains the event:

On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web (“W3”, or simply “the web”) technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the web at CERN in 1989. The project, which Berners-Lee named “World Wide Web”, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.

Consider what the web would be like if it was a toll road and not a freeway. That was a possibility, had Berners-Lee and CERN decided to leverage and exploit the technology. But the web was born free and continues to resist chronic attempts to control and monopolize it.

One of the strangest ironies about the freedom of the web is that it was born on a NEXT computer. If you know digital history, you will recognize that NEXT was the company that Steve Jobs founded, in between his first stint at Apple, from which he was bizarrely let go, and his second stint, when he turned Apple into the richest technology company in the world.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee did not get as rich as Jobs. But he did get a knighthood, and recognition as an unsurpassed visionary, and the thanks of billions for shaping the world as few before or after did or ever will.

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March 7, 2013

MLB.com At Bat App

MLB-At-Bat-Splashscreen
About the game of baseball, you cannot say enough great things. No matter how many players in other sports wear John 3:16 eye black or bend a celebratory knee in devotion, baseball is the sport God invented and intended for great athletes to play—proven, among other evidence, by the 60 feet from home to first that is the perfect balance between the speed of a running batter and the speed of a ball thrown from shortstop. Proven also by that fact that very few stars in those other sports have succeeded at baseball, including the greatest of all basketball players, Michael Jordan. If baseball is God’s game, the curve ball is God’s wicked joke.

About the business of baseball, it is more equivocal. As with all sports, teams face daunting changes as the financial stakes have grown exponentially. Some teams have handled the challenge with professionalism, skill and finesse, and with respect for the game, for players, and most of all for fans. With other teams, the terms self-interested and heedless of baseball’s best interests may apply. Right now, a number of Florida fans consider Miami Marlins owner Jeff Loria the poster person for that.

About Major League Baseball, the enterprise overlord that oversees all this, there is even more equivocation. Most of that is centered on the Commissioner. Just as historians talk about the evolution of the Imperial Presidency, the Imperial Commisionership grew out the infamous Black Sox Scandal in 1919, when players on the White Sox were accused of throwing the World Series. The next year, federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed Commissioner to take control, and ever since, the Commissioner has served an increasingly central role in the fortunes (metaphorically and literally) of the game.

The best modern Commissioner, who combined the myth and poetry of baseball with its down and dirty aspects, was Bart Giamatti, whose tenure was truncated by his untimely death. Giamatti knew how to manage huge and venerable institutions as president of Yale, but also understood the soul of the sport as a writer and a passionate lover of baseball. The current long-time Commissioner, Bud Selig, is more controversial, and a bit less generally beloved or respected in some quarters. Selig is no poet, nor was meant to be, but some knowledgeable fans also believe that as the game both succeeded and suffered over the past decades, he was a catalyst for both.

Whether or not you are a fan of the Commissioner, or of the direction MLB is taking, or of the direction your particular team is taking, it is time to give credit where it’s due.

Baseball fans are as fanatic as any—some might say more than any—in delving into the details, past and present. Once upon a time, that might have meant reading the Sporting News, especially as spring training for a new season began. Then magazines began popping up, and then fantasy leagues, and then more magazines to inform the fantasy leagues.

But nothing beats the comprehension and immediacy of digital for any special interest, and baseball is no different. The very thought of having a mobile app to feed your baseball addiction is almost too much to bear. The sad news, though, is that with one grand exception, baseball is not yet successfully mobile. Typical for the mobile realm, there’s a bunch of junk and some almost-decent efforts.

The exception: love, hate or question MLB, you have to admit that the free MLB.com At Bat mobile app is a model of how to serve a universe of fanatics. (As an extension of their online offerings, there are paid premium versions that include live games.) Scoreboard, standings, players, teams, rosters, news—it is all there, in an admirably usable and appealing form. They keep working at it too, with a major overhaul just as spring training began. It is not perfect, but it will do until something better comes along.

If you are a real baseball fan, married to the game, you have reasons to complain and moan about MLB even as you are ecstatically thankful for your bliss. Set aside whatever those complaints are and here, as another season begins,  consider downloading the MLB.com At Bat mobile app today.

Permissions and Privacy: Medium

As with all mobile apps, please read carefully the Permissions requested by the developer. Users should be diligent in weighing potential privacy issues against the utility and value of an app.

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February 6, 2013

American Experience: Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley
Tech history is our history. As enlightening and fun as it is, it is also more complex than learning about cars and trains and planes, all of which we understand, or can learn to. But transistors, integrated circuits and, ultimately, microprocessors are harder to grasp.

But this is also human history, the intertia of brilliant people at rest and in motion. That’s why the background of these digital days is fascinating, and why the new PBS American Experience documentary Silicon Valley is so enthralling.

You know where Silicon Valley is, what it is, and may have been there. How that agricultural Santa Clara Valley became the center of the world is a story. But the real story is how Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove—the godfathers of Intel—and their colleagues, predecessors and competitors changed the way the world worked technically, commercially and socially.

Silicon Valley is that story. It is inspiring, in the way that all risky ventures into the unknown are inspiring. It is also one of the rare worthy arguments for some sort of true American exceptionalism, since there is an inherent sense watching this—as politically incorrect as some may find it—that this is a quintessentially American story. This is what we did, this is what we do.

Silicon Valley is not to be missed.

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January 4, 2013

Walt Whitman Helps Launch Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

Walt Whitman
First it was Abraham Lincoln in the new television campaign for the Lincoln Motor Company (the founder of that firm was a fan of the president, back when the company was started in 1917).

Lincoln Motor Company

Now Walt Whitman, the father of modern American poetry and, coincidentally, a big fan of Lincoln himself, is helping to launch this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (January 8-11).

Whitman will probably not be seen emerging from a mysterious fog as Lincoln does in the commercial, although that would be unspeakably cool.

Instead, Whitman’s most famous line of poetry is quoted (without attribution) in the official description of the very first CES SuperSession

The Digital Health Revolution: Body, Mind and Soul
January 8, 2013, 9:30-10:30 a.m.

“I sing the body electric” takes on new meaning in our brave new digital world, where devices let us monitor everything from our stress levels to our genetic sequences, and devices with 100 real-time biosensors loom on the horizon. Join moderator Arianna Huffington as she leads four digital health leaders in conversation — on the latest innovations in the field, how those innovations have the potential to change lives, and what the digital revolution means for the body, mind, and soul.

The literarily perspicacious will notice that the first line of copy includes allusions to two groundbreaking writers—not just Whitman, but also Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s Brave New World vision is actually much closer to what is going on at CES than Whitman’s. Unfortunately, Huxley will not be coming out of the mist either, though the thought of his joining up with Whitman in Las Vegas to look at the latest gadgets is mind-blowing—even without Huxley’s Soma or LSD. Add Lincoln, and it is the stuff that dream movies are made of (Steven Spielberg, are you listening?).

Back to Whitman, I Sing The Body Electric is included in his Leaves of Grass (1855). Whitman’s work was a sensation, in part because of his unabashed celebration of the splendor and wonder of the human body and sexuality. The poem is just such a celebration, a spiritual anatomy lesson that is like a painting, whose message is: be not ashamed.

It isn’t clear that is what the CES copywriter had in mind, though writers generally deserve much more credit than they get. If the point is that digital pioneers plan to touch every part of our bodies, that works too.

Meanwhile, Whitman—whose use of the term “electric” was itself quite pioneering—would probably be happy to see his poem alive and well in the context of keeping and making people healthy, head to toe, organ to organ. See you in Vegas, Walt.

For the digiterati and literati, here is the closing section of the poem:

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

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November 1, 2012

Losers and Winners

 


In the first Presidential debate, which Barack Obama lost, Mitt Romney directly attacked the President on government support for energy innovators:

“Now, I like green energy as well, but that’s about 50 years’ worth of what oil and gas receives. You put $90 billion — like 50 years’ worth of breaks — into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1. I mean, I had a friend who said, you don’t just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers.”

Today, that “loser” Tesla won. The Tesla Model S was named by Automobile Magazine as the 2013 Automobile of the Year:

The auto industry is tough enough for a giant like General Motors. What we can say with this award is that Tesla deserves to succeed. It has managed to blend the innovation of a Silicon Valley start-up, the execution of a world-class automaker, and, yes, the chutzpah of its visionary leader [Elon Musk]. The result is the Model S. It’s not vaporware. It’s our Automobile of the Year.

Sometimes picking winners and loser is difficult. Sometimes it’s not.

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October 18, 2012

Android: Eat Dessert Last

 


On October 29, Google will introduce a new mobile device based on Key Lime Pie, the latest and likely sweetest version of the Android operating system.

This is great news for some. But for many Android users, who are looking for a little more sugar, it is somewhat strange.

The strangeness is that a number of high-end and upgradable devices sold just within the past year are still waiting for the last two Android upgrades. Some running on Gingerbread have been waiting for much of this year for Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0). Ice Cream Sandwich devices have been waiting months for Jelly Bean (4.2). Before all that happens for many devices, Key Lime Pie (4.3) will be a delicious reality—for some, but hardly for all.

The cause of the backlog is what has come to be called Android fragmentation (there’s no cute dessert way of saying that). As an open OS, Android is adopted and overlaid by each device maker for selected devices, and the various providers also get involved in the Android experience for each device they choose to carry.

This three-way would be complicated enough if Android were a static OS. But Android won’t stand still—those robot legs may be stubby, but they sure can move. Android is less than five years old, a relatively low-maturity but quickly-developing OS. The striving of the developers is admirable, and they are in the process of evolving Android from good to very good to great.

But every upgrade demands that Android, the device makers and the providers essentially go back to square one, determining which devices are suitable, testing and tweaking so that users will have a positive experience that reflects well on all involved.

That’s the ideal. The reality is that Android and the other players hype the improvements, but then are forced by dreaded fragmentation, and whatever other interests are involved, to make users wait.

It’s not that a piece of Gingerbread isn’t sweet and satisfying; it’s actually a pretty solid OS. And for the luckier ones, they’ve been happy with an Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s just that standing in front of the Mobile Sweet Shoppe, nose pressed to the glass, it’s tough to watch the customers inside scooping out all those colorful Jelly Beans. And now, insult to injury, the shop is passing around slices of Key Lime Pie. Not even lemon meringue, for goodness sake, but Key Lime!

We know, or hope, that dessert is really on the way. It’s just a little frustrating watching someone else eat it.

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October 18, 2012

I Read Newsweek Today, Oh Boy

 


If we hold a wake for each print publication that dies or goes digital-only, we’d be drinking all the time (which is not a bad response). Newsweek today announced, in spite of recent protestations, that it was indeed ending publication of its print edition this year.

Volumes have been written about this phenomenon, and more will be on the way. You can read them on your computer, e-reader, or mobile device. In the meantime, an observation.

Print media are in fundamental ways different than their digital counterparts as tools. Not better or worse, just different. This is not the conceit of old-school anachronists who defy the new guard to take the paper magazines or books from their (sooner than later) cold, dead hands. To understand how that could be so, read the increasingly unread Marshall McLuhan. The message of the medium is the message is that each medium is particular in granular ways (not sure if McLuhan would have loved, hated, or wished he had coined that buzzword). Those ways are not just meaningful, they are some of the most important meaning. If you can’t make a long list of conceptual, non-practical ways that identical content is deeply different in paper and digital form, you aren’t thinking hard enough, and you haven’t read McLuhan.

Suffice it to say that in ways that matter, the Newsweek that doesn’t require electrons is different than the one that does, even if the content is the same.

After saying all those important and noble things, a small confession of complicity. There was a time when a mailbox full of top-tier magazines was both a sign and a source of erudition. Many news junkies got their start when their parents subscribed to the newsweeklies—one, two or, if you were lucky, all three. Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report every week, highly anticipated and absorbed cover to cover once they arrived.

The arrival of paper magazines is still a thrill. But one by one, the subscriptions were allowed to dwindle. It wasn’t just access to free and instantaneous alternatives; as far as expense, many print magazines priced themselves ridiculously low. It was like a relationship that lapses and fades, even if you know you might well be better off in keeping it alive. It was just the times, the way of the world.

Maybe Newsweek and other print editions would have lasted if subscribers had been willing to make an effort and work on the relationship. But they didn’t. We may look back and see these print magazines as the ones that got away, but we shouldn’t have let them. Just because it’s the way of the world doesn’t mean it’s for the best.

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October 9, 2012

The Goldilocks Test for Phone Size


First things first: You iPhone folks can leave. You have no choice on the size of your smartphone, because Apple has made that choice for you. The iPhone 5 is no wider, but one-half inch longer, than the previous version. Take it or leave it, and millions are taking it.

Android is a whole different world or, as we’ve learned to say, ecosystem. Screens are getting bigger, for optics and utility, and so have the phones. Samsung pushed the limits by creating the Note, half-phone/half-tablet (a “phablet”) with a screen more than five inches in size. Even the same phone may have slightly different dimensions for each carrier. Someone has no doubt charted the dozens of sizes available; it is enough to say that there is probably an optimal size for just about everyone.

But what is optimal? That very practical question arose in the course of handling and comparing two of the most popular and capable Android phones of the past couple of years, the Samsung Galaxy S2 and S3. The S2 is superb, but in almost all respects the S3 is better. The S3 does have a bigger screen, and so is ever so slightly bigger to hold.

Ultimately, the question is not whether size matters; the question is whether it matters to you.

That’s what the Goldilocks test is about. There are three parts, one about style, two about functionality.

The style part requires a mirror. If you are someone who uses a smartphone for voice calls (though fewer now do), hold up the phone to the side of your head. Do you feel that you look cool or silly? Do you feel like a modern version of the 1970s hotshot with a monstrous Motorola Brick pressed to his ear? (see above)

The second part is portability. Without getting stereotypical, this is a divide between women and men. Many women carry their phone in a bag, where up to a point, size doesn’t matter. Men usually carry theirs in a pocket, and depending on which pocket and which clothes, this can be an issue. Jeans and tight pants can be a problem (it is taking unreasonable will power not to paraphrase Mae West: “Is that a phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”)

The final part is the most important: How much does size affect usability? This is where differences in hand size come into play. You want to be able to use a phone with one hand, and that’s going to depend on the hand that’s using it. This is also where the most objective part of the Goldilocks test was formulated.

Put the phone in the palm of your hand. Reach around the middle with your thumb and middle finger. If your fingers touch, you will mostly be comfortable using the phone with one hand. If not, you are on occasion going to find yourself doing some juggling or bringing in the other hand. It’s that simple.

Take the test. You want to be able to say about your phone, as Goldilocks said about beds, as others have said about the height of trees: This one is just right.

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