• 25% – Things that will never come to market – These are ideas that are either just totally impractical for technical or commercial reasons, or just products that are so poor the company comes to their senses early. I don’t mind when products are impractical to bring to market, at least at the current time. CES is a gadget geek’s auto show. Concept cars are awesome. So are concept gadgets. I like love seeing prototypes. Things that just are so poorly received they never materialize… well obviously boring.
• 50% – Mundane – “OOh, you made a TV 0.5 mm thinner. Clearly the CEO of this company is the next Steve Jobs. A visionary that will change the world. Lets all throw out our TV’s and buy this.” I always wonder what Steve Jobs thought when he read about what was announced and demoed at CES. Lots of what gets fanfare is of the level that Apple releases silently releases with nothing more than taking the Apple Store down for maintenance and a small press release. It’s not just TV’s, phones do the same thing. Being a smartphone in 2012 is just status quo.
• 10% – Things I’d like to try – I’d be unlikely to justify the purchase, but I wouldn’t mind playing with things in this elite category. They include the MakerBot Replicator, I’mwatch, Fujifilm X-Pro 1, Netgear Range Extender. I’d never be able to justify a MakerBot, but I’d like to play with one. I suspect I may hate the I’mwatch, but it seems like it would at least be fun to try. Teathering is a major turnoff however. The X-Pro 1 seems quite expensive for what it is, but I love this high end non-SLR level we’re seeing now. I don’t have a real (read: $90) need for it, but Netgear’s range extender sounds like a good product for those areas where WiFi signals are a little degraded.
• 14% – Me too’s – This year’s “me too” category is the ultra portable laptop. The MacBook Air clones. Unfashionably late, and offering little imagination. Next.
• 1% – Could eventually change the world – I love this elite category. Ion Proton Sequencer is one of these. This particular model may go nowhere, but it’s a great example of where this stuff is headed. It will eventually change and save lives. Read up on it if you haven’t. Amazing. The other device is the Raspberry Pi (they have no booth). I’ve been following it since they announced it. I’ll order a few as soon as I’m able. Being able to make a full computer that small and affordable will change the world. For $25, I can put a computer I can write real software for in a situation where it may not survive or was previously not practical. It’s a giant step forward for computers everywhere. One way or another this will change things. This could change Linux usage.

So that’s my breakdown and what interests me personally so far. I’d be curious what others think of CES announcements this year.

I’m a touchscreen snob, and I bet you are too. I bet every human being is. We get upset when things don’t react as expected and we get frustrated when things aren’t instant. Statistically this page loads on average under 2 seconds and it’s likely still too long for you. It’s not just touch screens. For example, 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1%. We’re an impatient species.

I took the above photo on a 757-200 equipped with touch screens on the back of every seat. I remember the days with only a handful of TV’s, or that big projector thing up front on planes, so I appreciate that a choice of entertainment is an upgrade. Lets take a look at it’s sins as it makes a great example:

Resistive Touchscreen

I’m virtually certain based on it’s poor performance it’s a resistive touchscreen. Unresponsive, and it requires a lot of pressure which the person in the seat in front of you enjoys for 8 hours. Resistive touchscreens are much more cost effective, though I wonder that difference is splitting hairs on a $65-80 million aircraft given there are only ~200 seats and the displays are relatively small.

There was a time when nobody would notice, but even a Droid v1′s touch screen is more responsive, and that phone is extensively laggy.

Poor Contrast

Part of this is likely because of the substrate used for resistive touchscreens, but the poor contrast is obviously an issue. Color reproduction is bad, but that’s not a deal killer, it’s a nitpick. Contrast is critical especially on a vehicle where lighting varies from dark to virtually unfiltered sunlight glaring on the display. Contrast controls are minimally helpful here.

Laggy

I suspect these are units are just terminals, so the performance can sometimes lag. It’s forgivable and likely will not be an issue in future generations. Thanks to the mobile revolution low powered ARM chips can be found everywhere. The need for these things to be dumb to save space and power is drawing to a close.

Sound

I’ve yet to figure out why airlines can’t manage to get rid of the noise in the lines. Sure when you use the $0.25 headsets they hand out you can’t tell the difference. But when you use your own higher quality headset you sure can. Given a cheap mp3 player can manage it, I wonder why this is so difficult. Weight?

My second gripe about sound is the volume differences. The movie is set to a comfortable level. If the crew takes over to show a video of your destination or a safety video, it’s uncomfortably loud. If the captain speaks, it’s painful. This is more than a nuisance, this is actually a safety issue.

The Shuttle suffers from its own Y2K problem. The system computers run clocks that are set for GMT days: I think today is GMT 49. Anyway, when it gets to December 31, it’s GMT day 365. When it moves to January 1, it goes to GMT 001. This screws up the flight computer. I don’t believe there has ever been a Shuttle flight over a new year. A software fix is possible, but it has never been worth the millions of dollars necessary to fix it.

This actually seems very believable. For a little background, the Space Shuttle originally flew a set of 5 IBM AP-101‘s. In 1991 they upgraded to AP-101S, which has about 1 MB of semiconductor memory (as opposed to the core memory on the AP-101) and 3X the CPU speed. 4 run in sync, and 1 runs a separate set of software written independently for the ultimate in redundancy. They sit in two separate places in the orbiter and are quite rugged and power-hungry at 550W. That’s substantial considering the processing power. Since they mainly handle number crunching for the orbiter’s thrusters and run through things like the launch sequence. They just need to be reliable. They are programmed using HAL/S. The original memory limitations are likely why it uses GMT dates, and the reason to avoid upgrading the software is because of the complexity of the environment.

While a software upgrade would likely fix this issue, upgrading something that needs to be this well-tested would be insanely expensive.

A recent trend has been to blame certain sexist aspects of the industry like booth babes at conferences and other sexist promotions. I’ve even heard a theory suggesting that the popularity of the color blue is part of the problem (looking at you Facebook). While these are deplorable, minus the color blue theory, and I don’t want to make excuses for these 1960’s era holdovers (mind you they are also done by marketing folks), I can’t help but think this is scapegoating the issue that nobody wants to talk about, and everyone seems to want to hide.

Technology isn’t turning away women, it’s finding it almost impossible to recruit them. I’d love it if someone were to survey High School seniors applying to colleges this fall and see how many are considering computer science, and if they aren’t, why not. I’d can pretty confidently say that not one of them would mention sexist t-shirts being used by product marketing. I can also pretty confidently say booth babes won’t come up. I suspect most 17 year old high school girls haven’t been exposed to either. “No other girls” might be a popular reason. “I hate math” may be a big one. I’m sure there will be many reasons of varying popularity, but I suspect sexist marketing and suggestive jokes won’t even make the top 10. Females also tend to be more social by nature (we even see this even in statistics of the number of Facebook friends), the idea of engineering studies and work not being social is likely also a major issue. Tech likely doesn’t have the best work/life balance overall.

The truth of the matter is women represent 57% of college enrollment since 2000. From what I’ve been reading that gap is only expected to increase in coming years and in many schools is well beyond 57% already. Only 25 (7 BS, 17 MS, 1 PHD) or 9.5% of degrees were given to women at Stanford in 2010. The other 90.5% went to men. That means the workforce leaving Stanford and looking for technology jobs is 90.5% male. You could argue Stanford has a history of being male dominated (“Stanford ratio”) but recent admissions are almost 50/50 for undergrads as a whole. Another paper [pdf] suggests 13.8% of BS degrees went to women. That is the source of the gender gap in the industry. It starts much earlier than the attendance of trade shows. I’d also argue most in the industry never even attend these silly things as not many like being attacked by sales people for a few days, but that’s almost another topic.

I suspect the reason why marketers are using booth babes and sexist jokes to attract the attention of men is because nearly 90% of their audience is men. Again, that doesn’t excuse the behavior, it explains it. Lowest cost for the most eyeballs is a skinny 18-21 year old college student who will wear a tight shirt and smile for a few hours and hand out marketing material to get some cash. Men are wired to notice as a primordial reflex. It’s just taking advantage of psychology and evolution.

Want to address the problem? Stop focusing on t-shirt slogans and start focusing on why less than 10% of computer science degrees are going to women and fix that. That is the big problem. If even half the outrage was directed at high schools and colleges for perpetuating the problem, things would be much better off. Searching Google shows a ton of outrage towards booth babes, but almost nothing towards the gender gap in education. That’s depressing and almost seems superficial. As if the goal is to look less sexist rather than increase diversity.

I love that some efforts are being made on the grassroots level. PyStar is a very good idea to plant some “you could do this as a career” ideas in the minds of women who may otherwise just shun it in what sounds like a great environment. Open Source is a gateway drug to software development making WoMoz a great initiative (are there others out there?).

As a little tidbit, it wasn’t always this way. It used to be considered a woman’s job to program computers. Just ask Grace Hopper (as a sidenote, Grace Hooper had great whit in addition to brains and I encourage reading some quotes). In those days it was viewed as being similar to being a secretary or switchboard operator. Clearly the problem is solvable.

Again, I don’t mean to downplay booth babes and sexist marketing (though I’m sure someone will still attack my inbox for it, that’s just the way it works), I’m just stating that if you think that’s the problem, your in a bubble. That’s a problem we hope to have in 8-10 years of aggressive efforts to change the tide. The problem is much earlier in the chain and is sadly likely more difficult to fix. You could get rid of booth babes and sexist marketing tonight and in 5 years will see no change in gender diversity if that’s the only action taken. Lastly it’s worth noting there are other tracks into the industry (my BS is for Business Administration, I specialized in Management Information Systems). What role do those play? Lets figure out why colleges aren’t graduating even 25% and figure out how as an industry to move that number.

Diagonal width and depth of a TV

People are obsessed with getting the biggest TV, measured by diagonal width and the thinnest TV that they can afford. Of course anyone who knows even a bit about TV’s knows that you can actually an optimal TV size based on the viewing distance in your setup. THX standards are that the back row of seats have a viewing angle of 26-36 degrees. My understanding is that movie theaters standardize on 30 degrees. If your TV is too large for the distance between the screen and the viewer, your angle will be in excess of 36 degrees. That’s a bad thing.

Screen depth is nothing more than a novelty in most cases. Even the larger TV’s on sale today will mount easily and are no more than a few inches at worst (mostly plasma’s). Your paying a lot of money for something you can only see if you stand at the right angle, normally with your face pressed against a wall.

MHz (now GHz) clock speed of a computers processor

This is one of my favorite myths. Apple was right, clock speed really isn’t a good indicator of computer performance. This was true 10 years ago, and it’s even more true today. Most of the time a computer slows down because of memory limitations. When a computer runs low on RAM it uses the slower hard drive (swap). At this point the memory and the disk I/O are the bottleneck, not the CPU. Almost nobody knows what their disk I/O is. Few know how much RAM their computer has or what they really need (hint: today you want 2 GB per physical core).

Bus speed? Number of cores? HyperThreading enabled? 64-bit (makes more of a difference on Mac than Windows since most still run 32 bit)? Turbo Boost?

I’ll take a slower Intel i7 over an Intel Core 2 in most cases. Especially true on a laptop where the integrated graphics will mean better battery life.

In most cases Microsoft’s Windows Experience Index, part of the Windows System Assessment Tool in Vista and Windows 7 is a better benchmark for performance than CPU clock speed.

MP (Mega Pixels) camera resolution

This is another pervasive myth. The higher the MP rating on a camera, the better the camera. It’s largely false. The greater the MP, the larger the file size. It also means you’ll need more memory cards or higher capacity ones to take the same number of pictures. In most cases you’ll end up reducing the picture anyway since no printers out there is printing 12 MP of data onto a 3×5″ piece of paper. Your monitor doesn’t support that resolution either.

The biggest factor in camera photo quality is the lenses. Most consumer grade cameras, especially on the cheaper side use terrible plastic lenses, or low-grade glass at best. Optical grade glass and lenses are expensive. Plastic is cheap.

Most cameras do OK in well-lit situations, they suffer in low light situations. A larger sensor will often (but not always) do better in these cases (large sensors can matter in many ways). A cheap LED used for flash can also be problematic when its color is really off, this is common on cell phones and cheap point & shoot cameras.

The last reason your photos likely don’t look good is because most cameras automatically write JPEG files to your memory card. That’s really nice and convenient, but remember JPEG is a lossy format. Data is lost just between the sensor and your memory card. RAW however uses more space on your memory card but ensures that the whole photo is saved. Then you can save as JPEG on your computer and choose how much data you want to sacrifice for a smaller file size. TIFF can do fine as well. Many people (and almost all professionals) fire up Photoshop or another photo editor and do some basic corrections to get the photo how they want it. Just a few tweaks by someone with a good eye and it can make a bad photo look very good.

Getting a high MP camera just means you’ll be spending more on memory cards, it doesn’t mean you’ll take better pictures.

24kt Cabling

Would you want anything less than the highest quality gold connecting your consumer grade electronics? Of course not. 24kt all the way!

Truth is, if you have consumer grade gear, you’ll likely get no benefit from these insanely expensive cables, than from the cheap stuff on MonoPrice.com or Amazon’s house brand with no mention of what purity the gold plating is. Your equipment isn’t that sensitive if you bought it during a 4th of July sale at a national chain and got a coupon for 50% off 1 DVD with your purchase.

The reason gold is used for the connector is that gold has good conductivity but doesn’t corrode. Silver is actually best but tarnishes which could impede your connection. In most cases aluminum, steel, or copper will do just fine and never corrode on you.

In many cases those generic cables are made in the same factories as the brand name ones. They just don’t carry the branding and marketing hype.

Make your internet faster with 802.11n

802.11n is up to 300Mbps! Your old 802.11g is only 54Mbps. ‘n’ comes after ‘g’ so it’s better! You’ve seen that before. Just remember this: Most consumers even in good areas have connections that burst at up to maybe 20Mbps. Unless you have some serious broadband you won’t see any benefit speed wise. 802.11n does have better signal strength thanks to MIMO, assuming you hardware supports it, and you actually need it. Most devices that support both 2.4GHz and 5GHz aren’t dual band. Instead they are selecting one or another which doesn’t help as much as a true dual band access point. Most people won’t see anything other than placebo effect at best. They may have faster CPU’s but generally speaking they shouldn’t consume much CPU anyway. My 802.11g averages around 1-2% with a fair number of firewall rules.

5Ghz can benefit some folks, as can faster local network access if you move lots of data within your network. For most people however the benefits just aren’t there today despite what the numbers will make you think. It’s a Ferrari in a traffic jam at best.

Linen thread count

Linen lately is all about the thread count. The higher the thread count, the better quality and strength. Largely this is actually true, at least when taken at face value. Of course there’s diminishing return somewhere around the 300 mark. Truth is that many actually lie about their thread count. Shocking right?

Conclusion

People buy things and make insane purchases simply based on a number which they presume is all-encompassing and correlates with quality. In practice however, this is often not the case.

If you ever find yourself fixated on a number when shopping for something, stop and wonder if you’re falling for this trap. Marketers use this very effectively. Just a little digging about what the number really represents will generally show you that the number is a marketing decoy.

The teens who pay their own phone bills are more likely to send “sexts”: 17% of teens who pay for all of the costs associated with their cell phones send sexually suggestive images via text; just 3% of teens who do not pay for, or only pay for a portion of the cost of the cell phone send these images.

I suspect this is because someone else sees the bill.

An average bill for a heart attack was $45,000 in 2004. Assuming 7% annual inflation of health care costs that works out to roughly $67,500 in 2010. I believe the US health care inflation rate is actually higher that. It is estimated at 9% for 2010 alone. That’s conservative estimate.

A $100/month plan for 10 years comes out to a mere $12,000. Adding a line to a family plan obviously costs much less than that.

Seems like it makes financial sense to put your teenage daughter under your cell phone plan. Your welcome kids. Feel free to show your parents the math and remember: you can’t put a price on health.

Now the UN is reporting in India more people have access to cell phones than toilets.

To briefly recap:

1. I called it.
2. I still find it disturbing.

People say that money is the root of all evil, but I think that evil is rooted in competitiveness, and money is just the yardstick.

The whole thing is worth a read, but that sentence just stuck me.

To put this in perspective 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water (WHO/UNICEF [pdf]). The same report notes 2.5 billion “are without improved sanitation”. Roughly 1.17 billion (18% of the 6.5 billion population in 2006) still use “open defecation” or to put it in more crude terms, they crap in the woods, fields, streams, and rivers under the open sky.

There’s something a little disturbing about these trends. In my ideal world more people will always have access to toilets that don’t contaminate their own drinking water than use cell phones.

What did they find? It’s actually the $500 OPPO BDP-83 inside a new case. Literally. They put the entire chassis inside, not just the components. Then they did some audio measurements and found they also matched. Not just close but identical.

The Lexicon BD-30 is THX certified while the OPPO BDP-83 is not, however THX certification requires paying licensing which OPPO Digital declined to do. People who bought an OPPO BDP-83 apparently got a THX worthy system for a fraction of the price though Audioholics deputes if the device is totally up to par.

This reminds me of the $500 ethernet cable. Or Gizmodo’s case against Monster Cable.

Lots of people assume a higher price tag equals better quality. That’s often not the case.

[Hat tip: The Consumerist]