Monthly Archives: April 2013

The best computer ever

Flashback to 1981.


The Osborne 1.

That’s a big claim, so let me step back a moment. The first personal computer which was actually usable by regular people was the Apple II, introduced in 1977. It cost some $2,500 plus lots more for a disk drive and software, appealed to a small cadre of visionaries – rich visionaries – and was out of my price range. When the Osborne I came along, it was some 100% cheaper than a loaded Mac and was quite perfectly ugly by comparison. Ostensibly portable, it would take a Schwarzenegger to justify that claim, for the Ozzy weighed in at 25lbs. Worse, it came with an awful 52 column by 25 row grey-on-black CRT display, quite unreadable to all but F15 pilots with 20-20 vision. So another $100 procured a 12″ green CRT display which was actually usable. The two disk drives were inept beyond belief, two single-sided 5 1/4″ floppy drives, each floppy storing but 360k of data. A few months later a 300 baud modem was made which slotted neatly into the fascia and provided dial-up access to …. well, not very much. I used The Source, a dial-up bulletin board which was great for exchanging use tips. The case, in cream plastic, was poorly made, the seams awful, and closing the box up was not a pretty matter. There was no battery – how much did you want to carry? – and the keyboard/cover was connected to the body with a broad and fragile ribbon cable.

Yet it was fabulous.

You what?

Simply stated, it came with the greatest package of software on earth. And that software was to be inextricably linked with my Unfair Advantage. Where others blew their coin on wine, women and song, I blew mine on what Steve Jobs famously called ‘A Bicycle for the Mind’. Man is a tool using beast, the feature which distinguishes him from other primates (OK, otters are pretty cool), and the Ozzy’s software cornucopia provided more leverage for the mind than Archimedes ever dreamt about.

The Ozzy sported a grand 16k of memory, a good chunk of which was taken up by the CP/M operating system, which had to be loaded from a floppy every time the machine was fired up. Hence the two floppy drives – one for the OS, the other for data. You would fire up the OS, then insert one of the software floppies to invoke the application of your choice. The bicycling mind still thought this was a great return on time invested.

And here’s the magic sauce. The software the Osborne came with still constitutes the bulk of my computer knowledge. It was outstanding in every regard.

The CP/M OS was superb – small, lean, fast, easy to learn as long as you were prepared to type commands on the one line command-line interface, confronted with a small flashing cursor which left everything to the imagination. When Microsoft’s DOS was introduced later, with the IBM PC, it was very much like using CP/M. I do not recall a lockup with either.

Once the OS was up and running, a minute or two of grinding from the left-hand floppy, you pulled the disc and installed one of Basic, Supercalc, Wordstar or dBaseII. What a thrill!

The obviousness of Supercalc, the second spreadsheet app after Apple’s Visicalc, was true magic once you got it. Learn how to input numbers and letters (‘strings’ in the Osborne’s arcane manual), input your first 2+2 calculation then change one of the cells to 3 and …. magic! 5 appeared on the screen. And while the spreadsheet has created more wealth destruction through its undisciplined interface, lacking all control and intellectual rigor, it was a ‘light bulb’ moment. Since then the spreadsheet has been the cause of insane, the tool for massive fraud by investment bankers back-solving for the desired input and continental depression, yet that ‘magic 5’ remains a moment I will never forget.

Continental depression? Why, yes. Just last week it was disclosed that two ‘esteemed’ economists – a contradiction in terms if there ever was one – funded by knuckle-dragging conservatives, had made fundamental formula errors in solving for their desired result. The conclusion from their spreadsheet? That Debt:GDP ratios exceeding 90% meant the end of the world. These ‘distinguished’ economists – two frauds named Reinhart and Rogoff – convinced western Europe that austerity was the only way out of the global recession. The only snag is, had they got their formulas right, they would have come up with a different answer and austerity would never have raised its ugly head, instead of ruining the economies of Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy and so on. So yes, while the magic of the spreadsheet was immediately obvious, it was every bit as obvious that you could work that magic to get to any answer you wanted (investment bankers) or screw up royally and procure additional funding from your masters at the right-wing think tank (R & R).

The Basic app was outstanding. After mugging up on the language it was a simple matter to write your own routines to perform recurring calculations. Sort of a one cell spreadsheet. When the IBM PC came along a couple of years later the only software it shipped with was DOS and ROM Basic, the latter written by none other than Bill Gates himself, and it was what I used to codify bond math to a point where all the user had to do was input a variable and have the result appear instantly. A one cell spreadsheet calculator, if you like. The error, if any, was made at the coding stage, not at the calculation step.

Wordstar was a blast. For the first time I could write – and write copiously – and print the result to a 9 x 9 pin Okidata dot matrix printer. Trust me, that was a whole lot better than my handwriting. The wonderful Toshiba 24-pin variant came along two years later and suddenly dot matrix approximated the one-use carbon ribbon in the IBM ‘golf ball’ Selectric typewriter. Best of all, you could hack the source code with ease, though I still recall one evening when I was adding my own tailored commands to the menu only to come across the programmer’s invocation “You should not be looking here!” buried in the source code. Computing on the frontier was an absolute blast back then. And because you only had some 6k of memory left after the OS and Wordstar were loaded, Wordstar would permit near-infinite length documents by simply paging through them by swapping the contents of memory to that other floppy. Brilliant. Photoshop uses that technique to this day. And you could spread your magnum opus over as many floppy disks as your wallet could afford. Tolstoy would have loved Wordstar.

But all of those pale when it comes to applied rigor and discipline, and the name of this unforgiving teacher was dBaseII. dBase was originally written by Ashton Tate for the CP/M OS and it taught programming discipline like nothing else. Sure, you could carve out ‘if-this-then-that’ rules for special cases, but large populations of data hew to the rules of large numbers, with 80/20 rule sets very much at their core. You did not have to carve out too many exceptions when sorting through large data sets. I taught myself database programming using a book which profiled Fred’s Fish Shop, taking you thorough sales, inventory, receivables, payables and so on, all absorbed on daily commutes on the M104 bus in Mahattan on the way to work. Sure, the bus took longer to get to Wall Street than the RR subway from my Westside place, but it was air conditioned and the extra time was welcomed, dictating only that the alarm clock be set some 30 minutes earlier. When philosophical reflection on the plight of man was called for, all it took was a glance out of the window as the bus labored down Broadway, the passengers alternating between white, brown, yellow and black, then white again. The availability of a superbly powerful database management system for the price of the Ozzy was so overwhelming an economic proposition that I went out and bought Ashton Tate stock without a second thought. The return on that investment yielded my next computer, the first IBM PC.

The rest is history but the Ozzy can fairly be said to have been my greatest teacher ever.

Graphics User Interfaces? That was all much later. 1984 to be exact when the Macintosh arrived. And photo processing on a computer was a dream which did not see reality until 1990 with the introduction of Photoshop, only on the Mac! The first Nikon (not so) affordable scanners came along a few years later and suddenly all your images could be made digital and easily manipulated, be it Mac or PC. But that Ozzy, or more correctly, its software bundle, paved the way for this computer ingénu and all that followed.


The view east toward the MONY building, winter 1981,
as I learned dBase II on the Ozzy from my apartment
at 310 W 56th Street, New York City.
Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64.

The Ozzy passed to my niece at Champaign-Urbana, University of Illinois, upon which she wrote her dissertation which got her a first in brain studies. Or something. Way over my, err… head.

Vizio E552VLE

A bargain.

I wrote of the continuing price reductions in large LCD displays here. Now that I have received my 55″ Vizio E552VLE – the bottom of the line model – a few words are in order.

You can see how the predecessor 42″ version compares for size – the same model Border Terrier appears in each:



The HackMini is the silver box on the right. You can just make out the latest 1080p AppleTV (Version 3) below the left end of the set, the same location where the IR receiver in the TV resides.

While representing 72% more surface area, the practical reaction is that it’s a lot larger. Watching a movie is more involving. Anything closer than 9 feet for viewing distance is too close. The increase from 720p to 1080p resolution is not that big a deal. On the very highest quality programming you can just make out the difference, but it’s not startling. You will not know the difference on most content.

The practical reality is that for $700 you can have a really large screen TV which will do a fine job of showing movie and photographic content and should be easily good for five years.

The TV comes with internet apps like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon VOD, but these are not well implemented and I find accessing these services through my attached HackMini or the AppleTV to be the way to go. The TV has built-in 802/11n 5GHz wifi, which refused to connect wirelessly, but fired right up with an ethernet cable between the TV and the adjacent Apple Airport Extreme, requiring only that the password be entered to access Netflix. But, frankly, it’s really a solution, and a poor one at that, looking for a problem.

Rather than mess with a plethora of remotes, I am sticking with the $14 RCA RCRP05BR 5 Device Cable Replacement Universal Remote. This is a so called JP1 class remote, meaning that it can be programmed using a Windows PC connected to the socket in the battery compartment, or simply programmed using the keys on the remote itself. The latter is my choice as I do not use Windows. Every button on every TV remote issues a unique IR code, and these ‘extended function codes’ for current Vizio TVs appear in Post #21 on the RemotesCentral site. So for example if you want to program a key on the RCA to open the Vizio’s Input menu, knowing the EFC from the table is ‘00090’ allows you to assign that to any key. You can then string programmed keys together into actions (‘macros’) to permit emulation of all your many constituent remotes into one device. Very handy.

In this way I am able replace the AppleTV remote, the cable box and DVR remote, the Vizio TV remote and the Sony sound bar remote with just this one inexpensive RCA device. The RCA has a ‘learning’ mode where actions of other remotes can be ‘taught’ to the RCA. It works well, especially in those cases where the correct EFC cannot be divined.

Speaking of sound bars, I auditioned a couple to see if I could replace my separate Sony amplifier and bookshelf speakers with a sound bar. The Sony HT CT-60 spoke to my ears and wallet at $125 + tax, also from Costco. The best feature is that all I had to do was run one Toslink optical fiber cable from the Vizio output socket to the input in the sound bar. The latter comes with a small sub-woofer, a tad boomy unless turned down, and has a treble control. The result is excellent definition on speech, decent on music, but maybe not something which will render nuclear blasts or acid rock with the greatest fidelity. That assumes that fidelity is even a concept when it comes to electric guitars. Still, it’s a sight (and sound) better than the internal speakers in the TV set and a lot less clutter and wiring than the earlier amplifier/bookshelf speaker arrangement.


Sony HT CT-60 sound bar mounted on the wall above the TV. 37″ wide, weighing but 4lbs.

The best feature of the sound bar is that when switched to surround sound mode, you really get a much enhanced spatial picture of sound, even though this is not a surround sound system.

You can pay up to $4,000 for a 55″ TV. That will get you a speedier set with LED technology, inferior for off axis viewing to the older LCD technology used in the set described here. You will likely get slightly blacker blacks, the sound will be no better, and you will certainly burn a far larger hole in your wallet with no more assurance of a fault-free set on delivery than with the 5 Vizios the same money gets you. Well, OK, if you get five your chances of every one being bad will be 80% less. Best as I can tell, faulty sets account for some 10-15% of new ones sold, regardless of brand. I was lucky, and returning this behemoth would not be a lot of fun. Not one bad pixel of the one billion on display, no backlight bleeding, no colored patches, nothing. Costco doubles the maker’s warranty to two years, and allows local returns to your retail outlet of choice.

This is an outstanding value, has probably just been discontinued, and I recommend this set with no reservations.

A quick note on installation:

You can wall mount this set in which case you must make sure that the wall mount bracket is retained in wall studs, using a batten if necessary, or risk expensive damage. Mine is free standing and assembly required only the attachment of the very sturdy and very deep base with eight bolts and the allen wrench provided. The set is not all that heavy at 70lbs and here’s a safe and stress free way of getting this very bulky item onto its pedestal. Archimedes would have approved (“Give me a lever and I will move the world”).


The two black boxes which hide behind the set are Mediasonic
enclosures storing 24 terabytes of movies.

The set is picked up by the short end which is placed on one chair cushion. The other end is then picked up and the second chair moved into place. The base is then attached and the whole is gently tilted backwards onto the pedestal. With two people neither is ever lifitng more than 20lbs. Stress and risk free.

Costco: I bought the TV from Costco in Foster City on the SF Peninsula. An excellent buying experience. Knowledgeable in-store help, easy online ordering and delivery in exactly the 10 days promised, shipped from Atlanta at no charge. One day before the day of delivery I was called to schedule a delivery time and then was called again when the truck was getting close. A final call was received when the truck was in the driveway. Very impressive and recommended. I gave the two delivery men $10 each to hump the set to the upper level. I did assembly and installation myself, taking some 30 minutes all told. For an extra charge Costco will do all of this for you, which rather takes the fun out of it.

Disclosure: No interest in any of the above mentioned public companies.

Update April 15, 2015:

Two years of ownership and daily use, and the set functions as perfectly as it was new, delivering a stellar image and great sound over the Sony sound bar. 4K is not remotely ready for prime time, so if you can hunt one like this down, it is highly recommended.

Update January 11, 2018:

After five trouble free years, the Vizio has migrated to the patio where it continues delivering a fine picture. Details of its replacement, a 65″ LG OLED TV, can be found here, complemented by a high end sound system and the latest AppleTV 4K for streaming 4K content.

The BTS steadicam

Prces fall.

While film director Stanley Kubrick was not the first to use the gyro-stabilized Steadicam rig to allow hand-held vibration-free movie making, his terrifying movie The Shining, using a Steadicam with a low level attachment, redefined movie making. Anyone who has seen the scene with the child riding the tricycle down the dingy hotel corridor will have had a flashback whenever checking into a hotel.

The Steadicam is not cheap, starting at $11,000. Now a new competitor, the Mōvi has hit the market, and my attention was drawn to it by my nephew who is a professional film cameraman. It’s rumored that the first $15,000 version will be complemented by a $7,500 one soon. Doubtless there will be a burgeoning rental market, as that’s a lot of money to have tied up in gear.

You can see the capabilities of this device by clicking the image below. Watch especially for the part where the operator on roller blades (!) hangs onto a moving New York City cab. The camera used is the new and very exciting Canon 1D C, specially made for movie making. That body offers 4K resolution, meaning 4096 x 2160 pixels per frame. Still image quality in a movie camera.


Click the picture for the video.

The director/videographer is Vince Laforet who has been featured here before.

Haswell

No more discrete GPU.

Intel’s Haswell CPU will be released in a few weeks and it shows the direction in which integrated graphics processors are heading. Not only will the Haswell CPU – the latest variant of the i3/i5/i7 common in desktop and laptop computers – use less power than its Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge predecessors, it will also feature a substantially beefed up integrated graphics processor which should obviate the need for a separate graphics card in heavy-duty computers. Intel has made great strides in integrated GPUs and Haswell builds on that with a greater than ever amount of integrated GPU RAM. Specifications suggest that this will be more than enough for all but sophisticated gaming, meaning that the newest versions of PCs, Macs and Hackintoshes will be housed in far smaller enclosures, likely with cool and power frugal SSDs for storage and no need for fan cooling.

No more big boxes the volume of a handful of bricks, just a small device with HDMI and Light Peak/Thunderbolt sockets to connect to your computer display or large screen TV.

The estimable tech site AnandTech has a fascinating article on Haswell which you can read by clicking the image below:


Click the picture.

The erudite and informed Comments to that piece repay reading if GPU/CPU performance is your thing.

I expect the next HackMini chez Pindelski to be the volume of a few sticks of butter, and silent as the grave. Pricing? I would expect the usual i3/i5/i7 pricing – $130/$230/$330 for the regular Haswell, $50 more for the ones with the enhanced GPU. That’s a lot less than a discrete GT650 GPU card which runs twice that amount.

It’s common to see Intel being written off as yesterday’s news, but I would say “Not so fast”. Serious photo and video processing is not about to migrate to tablets, not just yet. We will soon be accessing Haswell-powered servers for every web search. Ostensibly only available in OEM motherboards as it’s a soldered-on design, you can bet that the smart people at Asus/Acer/Gigabyte/Zotac/PNY etc. will be making mobos with these installed for the PC and Hack builder. If I were Nvidia, the leading maker of discrete GPUs, I would be a tad concerned. And you can also bet that Apple – assuming they are not asleep, not necessarily a valid assumption – will be making a MacMini or enhanced AppleTV with this Haswell variant on board. It seems the performance will be better than the Nvidia GT650M already found in many MacBook Pros, a very decent GPU indeed.

As for my use, I can see the excellent 11″ 2012 MacBook Air moving on in favor of a Haswell powered 2013 model, the significant gain being in lower power use in a device whose battery life could always be better. Given the high resale value of these machines the net upgrade cost comes to a modest $300.