Soapbox

As far as I can see, the answer is yes.

About a month ago, my two-year old Windows PC game machine started crashing every two minutes in NWN2. This proved the last straw, and I decided to upgrade. One of the games I have, but seldom play is Oblivion, which is graphically gorgeous, but chokes on anything but the most powerful hardware at ordinary resolutions, let alone my Apple Cinema Display HD’s 1920×1200, and cutting-edge video cards are no longer available for the AGP bus in any case.

I looked around for packaged solutions from systems integrators, specialized gaming PC companies like AlienWare, and Dell. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is still much cheaper to build a PC from components than to buy one from a major vendor, $1500 vs. $2500 minimum. Part of the reason is that the vendors flag anyone wanting the absolute best video card as a “cost is no object” customer, add all sorts of expensive components that make no sense in a machine that will only ever be used for games, like fancy DVD burners or flash card readers to jack up the profit margins. As if anyone in his right mind would use a Windows computer for serious work like digital photography…

My configuration is the following: a relatively quiet Antec Sonata II case, an Abit KN9 Ultra motherboard, an AMD Athlon x2 5200, 2GB of Kingston DDR-800 RAM, a humongous nVidia GeForce 8800GTX video card, a 500GB hard drive and a basic DVD-ROM drive.

When it came to choosing the OS, after much trepidation I opted for Vista Home Premium because the 8800GTX is one of the few cards that support DirectX 10, which is a Vista-only feature. I knew Vista would embezzle half the processing power of one core in DRM code that is actually working against my interests, but then again nobody in his right mind would use DRM-ed formats, whether Microsoft or otherwise, to store their music library, so the damage would be limited. Also, Vista comes with “downgrade rights” which allow you to legally install the previous version of Windows.

Vista comes in an attractive copper-colored DVD that is actually quite elegant. Its color scheme is also far superior to the molten Play-Skool set monstrosity that is XP. When I started the Vista installer, I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly it dealt with hard drive formatting (the previous Windows I installed myself is Windows 2000, which will insist on a time-consuming full format instead of the quick format used by the XP or Vista installers). The good impression lasted for all of five minutes. After the inevitable restart to complete installation, the screen promptly dissolved into a scrambled red-and-white screen of doom (I did glimpse a blue screen of death shortly before it rebooted). The diagnostics were completely unhelpful, as could be expected. When the operating system cannot even install itself, you have got to wonder…

Dejectedly, I fished out a Windows XP install DVD. it would not accept the Vista serial number. So much for downgrade rights. Of course, since the package was now opened, no hope for a refund either. I ended up buying a copy of Windows XP, which installed without a hitch. Of course, I still had to install the video drivers, but it did not crash half-way through the install procedure. And Oblivion is now playable without agonizing stutters every two paces.

The 8800GTX is very recent hardware, which did not even have non-beta Vista drivers when I installed it, so I could understand the OS falling back to SVGA mode. There are no other really exotic components here, certainly nothing than XP SP2 could not deal with and therefore Vista should as well. The machine is also well within the recommended minimum configuration (although some experts now advise 4GB of RAM as a realistic minimum for Vista). Crashing during install, when a five year old OS like XP handles it just fine, is simply unacceptable in my book. Even Solaris 10 Update 3, an OS notorious for its limited hardware support, installed without a hitch. Despite the ten man-millennia Microsoft invested in this lemon, they apparently could not be bothered to test the installer.

Conclusion: unless you buy a computer with Vista pre-installed, avoid it like the plague until SP1 is out, just like Intel.

Post scriptum:

Actually, I would not even recommend a PC with Vista preinstalled, as it has terrible backward compatibility. It will not run Office 2000, which is what my company has, for instance. Joel Spolsky has an excellent article on how the new, bloatedly bureaucratic Microsoft lost its way by sacrificing backward compatibility on the altar of useless marketectures. Perhaps they are just trying to force-upgrade people to Office 2007. They should beware: unlike 2002, people have credible alternatives now.

Update (2007-08-30):

The paper about how Vista eats up CPU on DRM has been criticized by the generally reliable George You. My point about the inability to even install on a modern machine that XP has no problems with remains. In any case, having the operating system constantly eat up CPU on tasks I do not want it to, whether it is 7% or 100% of one core, is still morally no better than a parasitic botnet.

Cartoons can be the most subversive of genres. The Simpsons has been serving acerbic social commentary from deep within the bowels of the reactionary Fox network for over 10 years, yet they manage to stay fresh when other, more edgy shows like Family Guys struggle for relevance.

One of the main characters in Futurama, Matt Groening’s other animated show, is named Turanga Leela, a transparent reference to Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie. The number of people who have even heard of this fairly esoteric work is quite limited, and those who actually like it (as opposed to professing admiration for it out of conformity) can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. Thus we have established that Groening or his staff are intimately familiar with 20th century classical music.

Last week’s episode of The Simpsons featured the US Army showing a recruitment commercial at the Simpson kids’ school. It starts with a rousing martial score. I have extracted a 4MB clip of the scene (Quicktime 7 required) for those who missed it.

The piece in question is from Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata. The music was composed for the epnymous anti-german propaganda movie by Eisenstein (although, in a little known consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Stalin made Eisenstein produce Wagner’s Die Walküre for the Bolshoi in atonement for the newly inconvenient Nevsky). The lyrics heard can be translated in English as follows:

Arise, ye Russian people,
to glorious battle, to a battle to the death:
arise, ye free people,
to defend our beloved country!
All honour to the warriors who live,
and eternal glory to those slain!
For our native home, our Russian land,
arise, ye Russian people!

Needless to day, the delicious irony is unlikely to be mere coincidence.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS2 on my Mac as my primary photo editor. Adobe recently announced that the Intel native port of Photoshop would have to wait for the next release CS3, tentatively scheduled for Spring 2007. This ridiculously long delay is a serious sticking point for Photoshop users, specially those who jumped on the MacBook Pro to finally get an Apple laptop with decent performance, as Photoshop under Rosetta emulation will run at G4 speeds or lower on the new machines.

This nonchalance is not a very smart move on Adobe’s part, as it will certainly drive many to explore Apple’s Aperture as an alternative, or be more receptive to newcomers like LightZone. I know Aperture and Photoshop are not fully equivalent, but Aperture does take care of a significant proportion of a digital photographer’s needs, and combined with Apple’s recent $200 price reduction for release 1.1, and their liberal license terms (you can install it on multiple machines as long as you are the only user of those copies, so you only need to buy a single license even if like me you have both a desktop and a laptop).

There is a disaffection for Adobe among artists of late. Their anti-competitive merger with Macromedia is leading to complacency. Adobe’s CEO, Bruce Chizen, is also emphasizing corporate customers for the bloatware that is Acrobat as the focus for Adobe, and the demotion of graphics apps shows. Recent releases of Photoshop have been rather ho-hum, and it is starting to accrete the same kind of cruft as Acrobat (to paraphrase Borges, each release of it makes you regret the previous one). Hopefully Thomas Knoll can staunch this worrisome trend.

Adobe is touting its XMP metadata platform. XMP is derived from the obnoxious RDF format, a solution in search of a problem if there ever was one. RDF files are as far from human-readable as a XML-based format can get, and introduce considerable bloat. If Atom people had not taken the RDF cruft out of their syndication format, I would refuse to use it.

I always scan slides and negatives at maximal bit depth and resolution, back up the raw scans to a 1TB external disk array, then apply tonal corrections and spot dust. One bizarre side-effect of XMP is that if I take a 16-bit TIFF straight from the slide scanner, then apply curves and reduce it to 8 bits, somewhere in the XMP metadata that Photoshop “helpfully” embedded in the TIFF the bit depth is not updated and Bridge incorrectly shows the file as being 16-bit. The only way to find out is to open it (Photoshop will show the correct bit depth in the title bar) or look at the file size.

This bug is incredibly annoying, and the only work-around I have found so far is to run ImageMagick‘s convert utility with the -strip option to remove the offending XMP metadata. I did not pay the princely price for the full version of Photoshop to be required to use open-source software as a stop-gap in my workflow.

Photoshop will embed XMP metadata and other cruft in JPEG files if you use the “Save As…” command. In Photoshop 7, all that extra baggage actually triggered a bug in IE that would break its ability to display images. You have to use the “Save for Web…” command (actually a part of ImageReady) to save files in a usable form. Another example of poor fit-and-finish in Adobe’s software: “Save for Web” will not automatically convert images in AdobeRGB or other color profiles to the Web’s implied sRGB, so if you forget to do that as a previous step, the colors in the resulting image will be off.

“Save for Web” will also strip EXIF tags that are unnecessary baggage for web graphics (and can actually be a privacy threat). While researching the Fotonotes image annotation scheme, I opened one of my “Save for Web” JPEGs under a hex editor, and I was surprised to see literal strings like “Ducky” and “Adobe” (apparently the ImageReady developers have an obsession with rubber duckies). Photoshop is clearly still embedding some useless metadata in these files, even though it is not supposed to. The overhead corresponds to about 1-2%, which in most cases doesn’t require more disk space because files use entire disk blocks, whether they are fully filled or not, but this will lead to increased network bandwidth utilization because packets (which do not have the block size constraints of disks) will have to be bigger than necessary.

I wrote jpegstrip.c, a short C program to strip out Photoshop’s unnecessary tags, and other optional JPEG “markers” from JPEG files, like the optional “restart” markers that allow a JPEG decoder to recover if the data was corrupted — it’s not really a file format’s job to mitigate corruption, more TCP’s or the filesystem’s. The Independent JPEG Group’s jpegtran -copy none actually increased the size of the test file I gave it, so it wasn’t going to cut it. jpegstrip is crude and probably breaks in a number of situations (it is the result of a couple of hours’ hacking and reading the bare minimum of the JPEG specification required to get it working). The user interface is also pretty crude: it takes an input file over standard input, spits out the stripped JPEG over standard output and diagnostics on standard error (configurable at compile time).

ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>gcc -O3 -Wall -o jpegstrip jpegstrip.c
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>./jpegstrip < test.jpg > test_strip.jpg
in=2822 bytes, skipped=35 bytes, out=2787 bytes, saved 1.24%
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>jpegtran -copy none test.jpg > test_jpegtran.jpg
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>jpegtran -restart 1 test.jpg > test_restart.jpg
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>gcc -O3 -Wall -DDEBUG=2 -o jpegstrip jpegstrip.c
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>./jpegstrip < test_restart.jpg > test_restrip.jpg
skipped marker 0xffdd (4 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd0 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd1 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd2 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd3 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd4 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd5 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd6 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd7 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd0 (2 bytes)
in=3168 bytes, skipped=24 bytes, out=3144 bytes, saved 0.76%
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>ls -l *.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  2822 Apr 22 23:17 test.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3131 Apr 22 23:26 test_jpegtran.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3168 Apr 22 23:26 test_restart.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3144 Apr 22 23:27 test_restrip.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  2787 Apr 22 23:26 test_strip.jpg

Update (2006-04-24):

Reader “Kam” reports jhead offers JPEG stripping with the -purejpg option, and much much more. Jhead offers an option to strip mostly useless preview thumbnails, but it does not strip out restart markers.

One of the benefits of having written my own feed aggregator, Temboz, is that I get to implement the functionality I want to make my life more productive. The most essential one is filtering out articles in subjects I am not interested. One of the first companies to make the cut of those I shun entirely was SCO. I consider them so despicable I don’t even want to hear about them, unlike the hyperventilating Slashdot crowd. Since then, a number of other companies have joined them, most recently Sony. And in the spirit of “a pox on both houses”, I now tune out anything related to either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.

That said, this form of shunning could fairly be described as passive-aggressive, not constructive. The fact I will no longer entertain the idea of buying a Playstation 3, and probably many others like me, will probably have some effect on Sony’s sales, but their marketing people analyzing sales figures will almost certainly have no clue their contemptible attitude to DRM is costing them. Much of modern economics is grounded in information theory, specially how markets break down in the presence of asymmetric information. If you want your product choices to have real impact, you need to go further.

Corporations are not monolithic entities, all carefully tailored appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. That’s why the New York Attorney-General, Eliot Spitzer is so effective against crooked Wall Street firms (like his predecessor Rudy Giuliani before him), corrupt record labels and the like. Even if a fine is small compared to a firm’s profits, it has to come out of somebody’s budget, and few careers survive that kind of blow. One fired employee, even a high-ranking one, is not much either compared to the typical large corporation’s staffing, but it will have a disproportionate effect on the remaining employees’ behavior. This has been very visible at IBM and now Microsoft after their anti-trust cases, even if in the latter case it seems to be more of a subconscious hesitancy to get anything done.

The average consumer does not have the punitive powers of a Spitzer at his disposal, but there is another way. Unless a corporation is terminally dysfunctional, it will have clear lines of accountability, all the way to the CEO reporting to the Board. The power we have is to dispel the cloud of obfuscation that some may use to to keep their upper management in the dark about the consequences of their actions.

Writing a letter to the CEO can be surprisingly effective. You have to keep in mind the average public company CEO works upwards of 70 hours per week. That lack of free time, combined with their affluence means they are usually out of touch with reality, and need to be reminded of it. This has to be a letter, preferably on good stationery, typewritten but hand-signed. Emails simply do not carry much weight in the worlds of politics or business, because they are so easily written and thus not evidence of commitment. Usually you want to skip flunkies and go straight to the top, but if the CEO is on record supporting the policies you object to, you will have to copy your letter to the president or the chairman of the Board.

Many companies have started monitoring blogs and forums for possible PR headaches (or subcontract this reputation monitoring work to specialized firms). Blogging about your experiences is another good way to get their attention.

There are limits to what an individual can accomplish. If a corporation is dead-set in its ways, collective action is required. In many ways, the American consumer movement has atrophied since the days of Ralph Nader’s crusade against Detroit, whereas the opposite trend holds true in Europe. There are many fine organizations like the EFF that are fighting for your rights, and sometimes even public officials, local or national.

Harper’s Magazine, a left-leaning (by American standards) literary gazette, is fairly insipid, but it publishes amusing tidbits in each issue known as Harper’s Index. In a similar vein, here are some surprising bits I have read recently.

• All 9 members of China’s Politburo are engineers. Source: IEEE Spectrum
• Western Europe has a population and GDP comparable to the United States, but it has 42% of the world’s WiFi hotspots, compared to 26% in the US. Source: Informa Telecoms and Media.
• Medical Doctors’ median income in the US is $200,000. Often maligned, median malpractice insurance premiums are only $11,000. Source: Paul von Hippel, Ohio State University.
• “Administrative costs” represent 19% to 24% of the cost of health care in the US, compared to about 10% in most OECD countries. Source: University of Maine.
• The French universal medical coverage, despite being rife with abuse and fraud by people who would flunk the means-test for state coverage, costs about 1.4 billion euros per year, slightly under 0.1% of GDP, with approximately 5 million people covered, and health care in general represents about 9% of GDP. Of course, as health insurance is mandatory for all salaried workers, only the unemployed lack coverage in the first place, so the cost of universal coverage in the US would be higher as a proportion of GDP. The French medical system was rated first in the world for general health care by the WHO’s last survey in 2000, so it is not a question of skimping on the quality of care as in the UK.
• The US spends 15% of its GDP on health care, if that were lowered by 10%, by bringing administrative costs in line with Europe or Canada, the savings would easily cover universal insurance for all Americans.
• The Philippines and India are respectively ranked No. 4 and 5 destinations for international telephone calls from the US. India hardly registered in 1991. Source: Telegeography.