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Lack of RAW Is Not DRM

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Free Software Foundation - Anti-Features:

“I was excited to find CHDK recently. In a nutshell, it is a free software firmware add-on for certain Canon digital cameras. I couldn’t help but notice that the top item on the CHDK feature list is the ability to shoot RAW.

“RAW is a sensor specific set of formats for digital cameras that, in many situations (but not all) boils down to a set of minimally processed readings off the sensor in the camera. RAW data is usually uncompressed. While RAW files are not usable without processing — they’re like negatives in that regard — I am told that professionals and most serious amateurs swear by them. RAW is one feature that camera companies use to differentiate their high-end and low-end cameras. Sensors, processors, and even lenses might be similar or identical in two cameras priced USD $100 apart. The difference frequently lies largely in the software, or firmware, that runs on the cameras. Expensive cameras have software that will produce RAW files. Low-end cameras will only give you the preprocessed, compressed, JPEGs.

“Now, what’s so interesting about RAW as a high-end feature is that the data often exists (almost unprocessed) in the camera’s memory for every single picture taken. In so far as RAW is raw sensor data, it exists every time the sensor is used. In high-end cameras, users are given the option to process that data and send it through a JPEG compressor. In low-end cameras, there’s no option; the data is processed and compressed and the raw data is thrown away.

“RAW is an example of an anti-feature. Anti-features are sold to customers as features but are fundamental or unavoidable aspects of systems that can only be removed or withheld through technological effort. Unlike real features, producers of anti-features charge customers for not inhibiting access to their products’ full functionality. Technological and legal barriers that keep anti-features away from the users of intentionally less featureful end up costing all users their freedom. It is more difficult for Canon to make cameras that output JPEGs than cameras that output RAW, and it’s not significantly more difficult to offer users a choice.”

I don’t know who’s more willing than me to complain bitterly about the way camera companies control features. On its face, RAW is a perfect example of something being kept from consumers for little more than a way to differentiate high-end point-and-shoots from even low-end dSLRs. It was very frustrating to see Canon insist on its exclusion for the PowerShot G7 and I would have preferred to see RAW in the S-series PowerShots.

But RAW is a problematic example, too:

On my Pentax k100d, which shoots at a relatively petite 6 megapixels, a RAW file consumes 11MB of storage space. The highest quality JPEG consumes 3.1MB.

Here’s one way those file sizes make a difference:

It takes a lot of time to write RAW out to storage. I can fire off three consecutive shots with RAW, then the camera stops responding as it writes to the SD card, and I’m lucky if I get a shot a second until it catches up. JPEGS might take more processing power on the image processing side, but they don’t tie up the storage bus. I can get five or six consecutive JPEGs, and the camera takes less time to recover from writing them out.

Here’s another:

When I shoot JPEGS, I can fit 167 images on a single 512MB SD card. It can even be a fairly crappy, off-brand card. I can only fit 46 RAW images on the same card and it needs to be a fast one or the camera becomes even slower.

RAW files come with expense, too. It takes software to process RAW photos once they’re off the camera. That software costs money to develop. Yes, Adobe Camera RAW probably processes just about any widely available RAW format on the market, but it isn’t free and there’s no guarantee any given customer has it. Yes, your camera manufacturer could license it, but there’s some expense, there, too.

And where Canon’s concerned, I’m not even sure I buy the idea that RAW is used as a huge price differentiator. MSRP for a PowerShot G9 is $499.99. MSRP for a PowerShot S5 IS is $499.99. One has RAW, one doesn’t. When people went bananas about the PowerShot G7 dropping RAW support, Canon put it back in for the G9.

Why was it out in the first place? Maybe to protect dSLR sales (I definitely believed that right up until it reappeared), or maybe because Canon didn’t think the demand was there to begin with.

While a lot of people like RAW (me included), many reviews (and plenty of gadget bloggers) decry RAW as a bit of gearhead fetishism that creates unnecessarily complex workflows for most peoples’ needs. Some of that is geek condescension, some of it is just true.

So we’ve got a file format that:

  1. Adds complexity to the workflow for a technology people are definitely embracing, but with some reservations about added complexity.

  2. Places extra and sometimes performance-hampering demand on system resources both in terms of space consumed and storage processing costs.

  3. Is scoffed at by even the enthusiast press at least half the time.

It’s not a shoo-in for an Industry Conspiracy Anti-Feature of the Year Award.

But we haven’t gotten to the whole “choice” thing. People should, in theory, be allowed to choose to deal with the added complexity, hampered performance and increased storage costs. I’d put myself in the set of people who’d prefer to make that decision for themselves.

At the same time, if I get a low-end point-and-shoot, see the option to toggle RAW and do so, I’m not going to complain about how the camera has too many menu options, eats SD cards like bonbons and takes extra time to process. I’m not sure the average point-and-shoot customer is going to be as forgiving and I’ve read enough utterly schizophrenic reviews from the likes of Popular Photography to know that choice is a liability to some reviewers, who will add “large files” to the “cons” column of a review if they can’t think of anything else to say.

So maybe RAW’s an anti-feature, maybe it’s a feature the camera manufacturers don’t perceive demand for, and maybe it’s something deliberately excluded in the name of “protecting the user experience.” That last irritates and frustrates me because I prefer to make my own tradeoffs. I don’t think, however, that most people do.

Lest I be accused of missing the larger point of the essay, which was about how DRM is bad … no I didn’t. I just don’t think leaving RAW out of consumer-grade cameras is at all like technologically circumventing fair use.

(found the link via ed)

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The Things Make Us Stupid

Saturday, November 24, 2007

O.k. So calling the enthusiasts at Engadget “utterly stupid” was not the kind of thing that demonstrates a mild and pleasant demeanor I imagine people would find appealing. And implying that the CNET blogger who passed Engadget’s incurious post about Kindle sales figures was a lazy blog-troller wasn’t friendly at all.

So I sat down after Thanksgiving dinner and took advantage of my freshly stabilized blood sugar to reason the whole thing out. I mean … I do vituperation inside my own head a lot. Not usually when other people are sitting right there, because I’m not that good at compartmentalizing. And I write a lot of angry drafts that I spike well before even contemplating a last pre-post scan. I can see six or seven in the drafts folder right now, all waiting for me to decide there’s no way to salvage them from the animus that drove them in the first place.

The common theme for a lot of them has to do with stuff.

There’s me being mean about thoughtless use of the word “gentrification,” and there’s 500 words that end mid-sentence, spurred on by this paragraph from an article about a sub-prime lender:

“If consumers qualified for a fixed rate mortgage, they often told that their mortgages were fixed for “as long as they wanted” when in reality, they were only fixed for 2 years. In order to fool the applicants into signing up for the pricier loan, fixed rate mortgage papers were stacked on top of variable rate ones. After tricking the customer into signing all of them, the fixed rate papers were discarded.”

And I think back to a series of reviews I read when I was last shopping for a computer where I learned to identify one particular reviewer because she led almost every single review with a variation on “This machine [will|will not] attract a lot of second glances in the airport waiting area” and how I … well… I got sick of the formulation and irritated that I was losing seconds of my life each time I came across one of her reviews.

Bloggers on the Nintendo Wii?

“Wii is a funny name because it sounds like peepee. Hahahahahahaahahaha! They should call it the Nintendo URINE! Hahahahahahaahahaha!”

For, like, MONTHS. And then on to a second life as part of the clumsy lead construct Gawker bloggers have almost universally adopted:

“While we’re still not sure about the unfortunate name, the Nintendo Wii …”

Out in meatspace at Ikea, I watch a pair of women pushing along their carts, yellow loaner bags swaying from the thoughtfully designed holder nubs on the cart handles. They stop every few feet and the more active of the two grabs a kitchen gadget out of the bag and says “I remember the last time I was over … you had a problem finding something to … this would take care of that!” A few more feet and “I got one of these … FANTASTIC!” A few more feet “Didn’t you say you were looking for …?”

Then I lost track of them and ended up behind a pair who were curating the store for each other:

“I don’t know what it is, but people really, really respond to the clean European look!”

“Yes! The birch and metal really attracts people!”

“People just want things to look clean!”

“And the birch and metal looks clean!”

Both pairs left me spinning my wheels, mired in uncertainty. Were the two women with their carts some sort of viral marketing thing? Breathing target demographic mannequins hired to orbit housewares kickstarting the imagination of anyone in earshot? The stretch black workout tights, clean Nikes and ponytails … they were perfect. The second couple? More of the same? Or perhaps just affecting observer’s detachment so they could imagine their true souls were anywhere but the humid scrum of Ikea on a Saturday afternoon? How about me? If I was focusing on them and their strange desire to sell Ikea to each other, maybe that was my way of detaching my own soul from my body, which was purposefully making its way over to the linens section for some guest pillows. See? I even tried to slip in a needless hint of the practical there because the last place I want to be is an Ikea, yet there I am.

Those two Kindle blog entries. What about them?

I don’t read much on the ‘net anymore without pausing to think about the alleged dichotomy between “democratic” bloggers and the “bought and paid for corporate MSM” we’re supposed to take as an article of faith.

So, there’s Engadget … “bloggers” who appear to work on quota and consider a bit of snark about how funny-looking the Kindle is adequately representative of a human voice to justify their layout choices. And the CNET blogger, who spends her days alternately recapping what the “blogging community” says about this or that, or relaying entries from the likes of Engadget.

I used to make a distinction between warm and cool voices … engaged vs. detached, involved vs. analytical. But both those entries struck me as entrants in a third category … warm, cool, and now “warmed over.” Compelled to appear engaged, but not. Interested to the extent a quota demands significations of interest at the rate of n per day, but not deeply involved or engaged, except perhaps on the level of knowing someting about a thing that others might not: That thing is popular, that thing is not popular, that thing is selling well, that thing is not selling well. Consumers like it. Observers do not like it.

One might briefly wonder why they even bother, but that’s easy to answer: The Web’s a big mall, and having almost anything to say about stuff moves ads. Engadget’s content doesn’t matter as much as our perception about its content: A few witless regurgitations of Amazon’s marketing spin coupled with “snarky irreverence” in the form of “It looks FUNNY! Hahahahahah!” and Engadget’s owners can reliably package the site as one where any page view is surely coming from an ENTHUSIAST … part of Engadget’s PASSIONATE AUDIENCE of 18-34 YO MALES who will identify strongly with brands provided they’re exposed to those brands in the context of an apparently enthusiastic community of fellow 18-34 YO MALES.

So, slow down a moment.

The problem I’ve got seems to be the whiff of commerce that’s everywhere. Everyone’s trying to get theirs, I guess, and it boils down to how one responds to being around people who are in the process of getting theirs in the form of getting some of yours: Time, attention, money, capacity to contribute buzz, willingness to speak the name of the brand at the right time.

I’m a lot more willing to part with tangibles. We gave away a lot of stuff the last time we moved. Some of it could have been sold to someone, but it was far easier to freecycle it. I give away electronics without thinking twice. Software … bits of camera gear … whatever. It once cost something, and it’s still of value to someone, but when it’s merely given away maybe it loses something. The thing no longer has a purpose outside of its utility to someone else. It’s not an economic unit … a thing that has an existence we can rationalize outside “it makes someone happy” or “it is useful on its own brute merits.”

But the intangibles? Maybe I don’t like the idea that the intangibles have suddenly acquired value and utility to anyone besides me, or someone who thinks those things — attention, curiosity, time, engagement — are worthwhile merely because they want to know what I think instead of assessing those things for their economic utility.

For instance:

Suppose you make a new friend. Each day you meet your friend down at the coffee shop and spend hours talking about whatever crosses your minds. Your friend is an excellent listener, always drawing you out on this point or that, clearly engaged in whatever you’re saying. Your friend also buys most of the coffee.

One day you ask to pick up a round and your friend demurs, saying “I’m making enough from our conversations: I get paid by the hour for the transcripts.”

But you point out today’s conversation has to be cut short … you have another engagement.

“That’s cool,” says your friend, “I mentioned that video game three times and you eventually made a note of it on a 3×5 card … that’s worth two hours.”

Do you care that your friendship has been exploited up to this point, even though the coffee has been free and the conversation engaging?

What if the free coffee is an upfront perk offered by your new friend in the spirit of transparency, since your new friendship is primarily commercial? Better now?

What if you and your friend were both in it for the friendship, but the coffee shop was recording your conversations and selling them to a service that mined them for keywords and sold the information to a marketing firm which, in turn, kept the coffee shop’s prices down by offering a $0.25/cup subsidy? Better now?

Maybe it is, and all I can do in return is offer a polite affirmation of your idea of “o.k.” as being your idea of o.k.

I wouldn’t like it. I don’t like it.

I think I’ve just talked myself into being done with quite a few things now.

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Deductive Reasoning for the Utterly Stupid

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Engadget: Kindle sells out in 5.5 hours:

“Amazon isn’t disclosing how many Kindles it actually had ready to go, but apparently the idea of a tiny e-book reader with free EV-DO and the visual flair of an Apple IIc hit home for quite a few people, because they sold out in just five and a half hours. Amazon’s site says they’ll be back in stock on the 29th, but availability is first-come, first-served, so it looks like you’ll have to act fast if you want to get one before gift-giving time sets in.”

Where “quite a few” is a value somewhere between one and infinity.

Availability for everything else in the Amazon inventory, by the way, is based on a principle other than “first-come, first-served,” so don’t bother hurrying for other popular stuff … your chances are quite good you’ll get one anyhow thanks to a sophisticated random order granter.

Then there’s CNET:

“Despite much skepticism–and some downright harsh criticism–on the part of observers about the looks and marketability of Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader, consumers seem to be giving it the thumbs up.”

I like that “observers” is the new “bloggers.” Sounds less lazy, so I expect it’ll be a hit.

Oh … and Happy Thanksgiving.

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Step 2. Complain bitterly about forgotten passwords

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Speakeasy is increasing the security of your customers password by encouraging you to choose a new, more secure password based on adopted industry standards. New passwords must contain at least 1 capital and 1 lower case alpha character, at least 1 non-alpha-numeric characters (!@#$%^&*()_+??:;<,>.?/), at lease [sic] 1 numeric character and should be at least 8 characters long.

So for me, that’d be something like …

 UH;omdzn

or maybe 

 hbF->,0V

or perhaps 

 npZ<<{sG

Password for the geeks who dreamed this password scheme up and inflicted it on all their “lusers?”

 heh

Bonus “Mike’s other life” link: Practically Networked: Networking Notes: The Password Game, which the author of the password generator covered said “was very lucid and explained both how to use the generator and the reasons to use it much better than I do.”

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Updated: Kindle Launches

Monday, November 19, 2007

kindle_detail.pngYou can buy a Kindle now.

I want it to work. I’m sold on the premise. I like the free wireless connectivity. I’m glad to read that it’ll talk Mobipocket (though not if the Mobi’d file in question already has DRM of some sort applied). It won’t do PDFs, though, which is a bummer, and it’ll “let” you read your Word docs if you pay Amazon a conversion fee.

Also, wireless connectivity isn’t a huge challenge for me, and there are things like the Asus EEE out there in the world, which will also only be getting cheaper and lighter, and they’ll do more. Of course, there are mp3 players out there in the world that are cheaper and lighter and do more than the iPod, and look where that gets them. And Apple didn’t launch iTMS with a particular competency in music merchandising to begin with.

So … something to watch, anyhow. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s shaped by the demands of its first-gen users and holdouts.

Also:

Child in the house?

Update: John doesn’t dig it for things I’m not so enthusiastic about, either; but pithifies it nicely: “Hey - it’s the Zune for books!”

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A Healing Wave of Unsubbing

Friday, November 16, 2007

I think the savagely early presidential campaign season threw me off for a while, there. It’s not like me to subscribe to any purely political sites before the actual election year, but I did for whatever reason and so was stuffed to the gills with news from the likes of Talking Points Memo and, worse, The Democratic Strategist.

But switching to Google Reader caused something wonderful to happen. For a brief while, until I learned the keyboard shortcuts, I was mousing every operation, including “mark all read.” I hate using the mouse, so having to mark a bunch of things as read that I wasn’t reading anymore was just the motivation I needed to get rid of things I don’t actually read most of. So away went all the premature political sites, just before I finally got “A” into my thick skull.

I feel immense relief. It just wasn’t time yet.

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Parallels to VMware - Conversion Notes

Friday, November 16, 2007

As previously Twittered, Parallels was making me nutty: I’d start it up when I needed it, but I’d sit through the most incredibly long launch times. It got to the point that if I wanted the machine to behave responsively, I’d start it up 15 or 20 minutes before needing it. And it took a performance toll, too, sometimes beachballing the whole computer. At that point, I’m into “Why not just use Bootcamp?” territory.

So I gave the VMWare Fusion trial a look and liked what I saw enough to cough up for the license. It launches more quickly, seems to operate more smoothly once launched, and it’s polite to everything else on the system. It feels like a much better citizen on my computer.

The one regret I had switching was that the Windows install I had running on my Parallels VM was going to be left behind, and that’s a hassle. I’d gone to all the trouble of getting it current on patches, installing the stuff I wanted, etc. etc. But just a few days after getting my VMWare license, the company released a beta of VMWare Importer, which converts Parallels VMs to VMWare.

Some things worth knowing if you’re going to use it:

  1. Give the Importer time to run and expect your system to run slow while it’s running. It’s a pretty disk-intensive operation and it took a while (more than 10, less than 30 minutes) to import a fairly small (~7GB) disk image.

  2. If you let Parallels set up shared folders (which allow your VM’s desktop and documents folders to mirror those on your Mac) you should boot into Parallels one last time and turn that feature off. The VMWare Importer tries to check those imaginary (network) locations for available space then fails out when it can’t. Since I’d already uninstalled Parallels, I opted to fire up regedit and hunt down all the occurrences of “.pcf,” removing the ones that referenced those bogus locations. That worked.

  3. Have your WinXP install disc handy. The newly VMWare-ized VM will find new hardware and it will want the XP disc to install it.

  4. There’s some complaining in the newly VMWare-ized VM about the ethernet interface being in promiscuous mode. That’s addressed in the release notes and it seems to be a function of Parallels’ installation of Kaspersky security software, which puts the interface in promiscuous mode.

  5. Install VMWare Tools quickly. Until you do the mouse acts horribly and transitioning from a full-screen VM to another display is choppy in a “mouse is suddenly 50 pixels west of where I last saw it” kind of way.

  6. There are some odd but minor video corruption glitches in the imported VM. They take the form of misdrawn menus most of the time. I don’t get them in the VM I create in VMWare. I haven’t taken a very close look at the settings on the two VMs to see if I need to tweak something, though.

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googl-ade

Thursday, November 15, 2007

I’ve got to do a presentation on Google Analytics tomorrow and it’s been taking up a lot of my time and attention over the past week. So much so that I’ve felt this stab of irritation every time I’ve sat down to read a few feeds that aren’t work related or go through personal mail.

Along with this, I’m tiring of NetNewsWire. Not because it’s bad or anything, but if I want it to sync between machines, I’m left with either slow-as-hell sftp, slow-as-hell .Mac, or flaky Newsgator syncing. So I’ve been spending more time with Google Reader, trying to internalize the keyboard shortcuts.

So I finally picked my work identity apart from my personal one using Firefox and the work-related Google account I had to set up anyhow. Initially I had thoughts of just using Camino for work, but there are some Firefox extensions I depend on for work, like It’s All Text.

Two Firefox things made it pretty easy:

If you run separate profiles simultaneously, you get two Firefox icons in the dock, and two discrete sessions: cmd-` only works on the windows of one session, and quitting one instance does nothing to the other. The windows of each reflect the bookmarks, privacy settings and add-ons of that profile only.

Now my work and personal identities more segregated, and there’s no cookie confusion if I move from a work-based Analytics session to a personal Gmail session, or a personal Reader session to a work Analytics session. Google gets very crabby about cookie juggling.

[Safari People: rooSwitch Lite does a sort of profile management, presumably by swapping out preference files. ]

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linklog: Tea Leaves: Emacs Key Bindings Make You Retarded

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Emacs Key Bindings Make You Retarded. via Ed

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linklog Linux Tip: Give gedit the Power of TextMate

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Lifehacker: Give gedit the Power of TextMate … by turning it into a Leopard installer. Har.

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