Lynne's Take on Tech – Page 16 – Silicon Valley Media and Technology Commentary

No, Photoshop is Not “real life”, Dave

Dave Pogue today reviews the Bushnell binoculars, and just can’t figure out why they’re so blurry. So I told him “it’s obvious”. Here’s why for the rest of you…:
1. They didn’t bother to adjust the focal plane focus of the sensor to coincide with the same focal point of the binocular eyepiece (e.g. a mfr defect).
2. To confirm this, adjust the binoculars slightly out of focus and take shots – I bet you’ll find that it gets better if it is not fixed focus.
3. If it doesn’t change at all, that means they have a fixed focus, and that the focus is set wrong. This is not adjustable by the user easily, but if you disassemble the binoculars and adjust the focus manually, you’d correct this problem.

But wait – there’s more. I have a long list of errata on digital cameras, most recently the Canon SD200-300 on-camera editing issues, for example, discovered by us at ExecProducer over the course of handling production issues. So I’m quite familiar with these and other annoying issues (light level problems, for example, and resolution issues) and how to find the best way of handling them. So another nit with Dave is a very basic one – using photoshop is not “real life”, as anyone in serious astrophotography will tell you.

If You Can’t Beat Em, Eat Em

Ah, in the “tanked” market of consumer video edit software, sometimes a meal is the better part of valour. So Avid Technology a maker of high-end video editing systems is buying low-end rival Pinnacle Systems Inc. for $462 million. Actually, it’s more a stock trade (I’ll give you part of mine for one of yours). Why did Avid do this? They have quite a blue-chip clientele, but Pinnacle and others are making inroads on the cheap, nibbling at their bottom end. So think of Pinnacle as protection for the soft underbelly of expensive custom video editing. No, it usually doesn’t work, but you gotta do something, right?

Women in the Newroom, Women in the Schoolroom, Where Will It all End?

Enjoyed Pati Poblete’s article today “Personal Perspective: Whither the Woman’s Viewpoint?” in the SF Chronicle. It is so true that getting up into management and calling the shots on a news story is rarely a woman’s choice. But this is also true, actually much worse, in industry trade press like the computer industry. It’s hard to have the dual tech and writers credentials, and keep them current given the levels of stress (work, family, finances) and demands of the business post-bubble. But, as the they said during the Blitz, “We’ll muddle through somehow”.

I also was asked today privately about an academic’s work who happens to also be a woman married to another technologist who does similiar work. The question in a nutshell was “Should she be considered part of his work, or is her work separate”?

Kind of an odd question, isn’t it? After all, I haven’t had anyone connected to me except for those nine-months (thrice) when I was pregnant. Amazingly enough, ever since my kids were born they have not been connected to me, let alone my husband. So assuming that a woman, just by marriage, must somehow be “part” of her husband’s work instead of a “co-worker” is really quite bizarre. But of course, this question is interlinked with Harvard, and we all know what’s been going on there. But if everyone is “enlightened” and “talking about it”, why does this question keep coming up? Perhaps it’s simply lack of disciplined thinking… so let’s practice a bit, shall we?

Dump the Java, Brush Up On Your Python -or- You Mean Cover Girl Doesn’t Work for HDTV?

Two amusing little items in media today. The first is a definite win for python (and like, why use Java?). DVD Jon has put together a little python script which intercepts the music file before they’re encapsulated in Apple’s DRM. What’s that mean? That means you still pay for the tune, but you now have the raw file, which means you can play it elsewhere… Of course, Apple’s service agreement doesn’t let you intercept the song and bypass their device protections, so perhaps this little script is moot. But I couldn’t help thinking “Look how far python has progressed”. We use it in-house, and personally I think it’s a lot better than java. Try it today, and see what you can do with it.

The second item is straight out of Gulliver’s Travels, to wit Brobdingnag. Thanks to the miracle of HDTV, pores, sores, and pimples galore can now be your viewing pleasure. And thanks to the Internet, there are critics only too happy to show you how bad it can get. “There is no escaping the naked lens of High-Definition TV. The picture is so clear that aging signs and skin imperfections are clearly visible”. So see if your favorite actor or actress is on their top-ten list. Yes, technology brings with it both pain and delight, sometimes in living color.

Fun Friday: A Tale of Two Women

I was struck by the contrast in reporting of two very different women in Silicon Valley. Matt Marshall writes of Joanna Rees-Gallanter, aka “Alley Cat”, as she goes through a tumultous rolling close of her new venture fund at VSP Capital. As Matt puts it “She’s got an interesting story, and it reveals the kind of grit it takes to get where she is. She told us about how people laughed at her idea of starting a venture firm, and how hard it was to transition from a non-traditional background. She even tried restaurants.” It really is hard in a very male-dominated industry like investment to make inroads. My take to Matt: Rolling closes and last minute sells. Been there, done that. Stress city. I’m glad to see a positive story about a woman VC who’s put together the team and closed the fund. Can’t wait to see what she does with it. Keep these stories coming”.

A very different view on Richard Koman’s piece about Analee Newitz, who thinks the only reason people worked on TCP/IP or open source projects like 386BSD or Apache was to facilitate access to porn. Figures she’s booked with O’Reilly – I suspect this reflects their inside view on women in technology loud and clear. As I put it to Richard: “Hey, so the open source movement has finally got a woman speaker – but instead of a real woman developer or researcher they’ve got a girl talking dirty. Wow! How enlightened they are… However, this strange exhortation to love porn has nothing to do with the real reasons for why new architectures and design in technology are developed, nor does it speak to the motivations of the developers. Just because pimps and johns are ready to exploit any technology at any opportunity doesn’t mean it has anything to do with innovation, provides any value to society, or has any lasting impact.”

“I doubt we’ll soon see porn queens getting Nobel prizes, writing books of merit, or developing new solutions to problems of hunger, poverty, and injustice. But we will see lots of opportunists jump on the bandwagon as technology changes our society, proclaiming themselves as the “true” innovators as they gull the rubes. This hucksterism has always gone on. After ten thousand years of civilization, it’s amazing anyone sees this for anything less than some oddball carnival sideshow – briefly entertaining, somewhat freaky, and definitely unimportant.”

And that’s why it’s tough to be a woman in Silicon Valley. For every serious woman in business, technology, and investment, there are fools ready to say and do anything for their 30 seconds of Internet fame, and a huckster ready and willing to exploit them. While the Analee’s of the world come and go, it’s time we showed how annoyed we are – using our money – drop a line to O’Reilly telling them you didn’t buy the Perl book and come to an open source conference to hear a woman talk about porn. You bought the book and came to the talks because you want to hear about the tech. Man or woman, demand they book real technologists who love open source. Don’t settle for anything less.

Cookies and Popups and Ads, Oh My!

Another marketing lament on how cookies and spyware and popups and intrusive ads are ruining it for the good marketers ends up in my inbox. Why, oh why, they cry can’t someone come up with a way to make the Internet a wonderful place for selling, and keep the bad guys from ruining a good thing. Alas. 🙂

It’s a matter of architecture and trade-offs, courtesy of those techie types no one can understand. Simply put, online marketing people have to give up on magic solutions like cookies and popups and sneaky tracking – they’re all easily disintermediated by the same tech folks who programmed them in the first place. Live by the sword, and die by the sword.

To paraphrase a famous campaign slogan, “It’s the content, stupid”! Provide good content on the Internet, tailored for your audience, and they will watch it and the relevent ads – just like TV. Rely on tricks, and in “Internet time” someone will put out a way to block you. Amazing thing, the Internet.

Take it from an Internet expert who actually knows the insides of all this stuff – it really is this simple. And it places online marketing back under the control of the online marketing specialist where it belongs.

Inside the Black Box or Outside the Flim Flam

Reading the article today There Are No Black Boxes in Online Marketing, I had to laugh when Tom Hespos laments “To me, it seems ridiculous that anyone in this industry would want to put blind faith in a piece of technology without understanding fully why it works”. Absolutely! It would be wonderful if marketing and sales really wanted to know how things worked inside the “black box”. This would make the bona fide technologist who labored over a real product very happy.

But the reason we have black boxes is simple – the customers don’t want to know anything about how it works – they just want it to give them the results they want when they want them.

This desperate willful ignorance on the part of “don’t tell me about the technology, just tell me how it works” online marketing crowd is fertile ground for the flim-flam product that spews out worthless “results” in pretty charts. Like what you may ask. Gee, like security that isn’t, spam filters that don’t, and software “accelerators” that slow the processor – I could go on for hours, and I haven’t even hit any hardware yet.

Let’s face it – an ordinary sincere technologist doesn’t have a chance next to those magical solutions. If she says they don’t work, she’s told that her competitor has it and it does work. If she argues with her customer, she’s blamed for “losing the sale”.

So until black box results are tied to an online marketer’s performance (and job security), expect more black box solutions and very few honest answers.

Lunch at the California Grill – Malts and Talk

Rick Bentley, a Berkeley physics alum, has been written up by Mike Cassidy of the Merc in a really great article on Rick’s experiences in Baghdad and running a security startup, Connexed. Not that I’m surprised – I introduced Rick to Mike and got to sit in at the California Cafe as Rick told stories while sipping a chocolate malt. I also enjoy seeing a real journalist at work, and Mike writes some really great stories that blend business with the human element in Silicon Valley. It was a pleasure to watch him work.

So read the article, and tell Mike to keep more like this coming. Oh, and stop by Rick’s company site – security is important these days, and unlike some armchair CEO, Rick knows what it is like to live in a insecure world.

Fun Friday: Jimmy Dolittle and the BSD Bomb

BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) has had a long and somewhat checkered history full of avarice and heartbreak. While revered (and still used) by many, BSD releases have been 1) obviated by “better” proprietary systems (e.g. SunOS to Solaris), 2) licensed to death (AT&T / USL / whoever), 3) unlicensed and released to great acclaim and even great expectations (386BSD), and 4) once some flaw is found, dispised, derived, hacked, and then poorly marketed against juggernaut Linux and Microsoft (NetBSD, FreeBSD, YourNameHereBSD,…). Unlike 386BSD, which stayed focussed on the BSD research goals and writings which are Berkeley’s best quality (see 386BSD Release 1.0 Reference CD-ROM: Essays on Kernel Design), 386BSD‘s many “commercial” derivations never achieved the kind of monetary success expected after The Fun with 386BSD we all had.

Why was this? Perhaps William Jolitz chatting with Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher (see How I learned to love Linux and profit from it — Wind River turns from Linux basher to religious zealot) may provide a bit of insight as to why the Curse of Commercial BSD continues: “Back in 2001, met with Wind River’s co-founder and board member Jerry Fiddler, along with John Fogelin at their office in Alameda, about the BSD purchase. It wasn’t a confident feel in the room, and they had no interest in putting any more “wood behind the arrow”. Just then, several B-25 Liberators flew overhead, commemorating Jimmy Dolittle’s raid on Tokyo. As they rumbled past, I recall thinking that the bomb Jerry bought was going to be bigger than the ones Jimmy dropped. Ironically, I was an executive at a Japanese company at the time. But such has been the BSD karma. You can’t say it doesn’t have its humorous side!”