Hvor du nu? Du i Danmark
Hvor du nu? F…ing Danmark
Du i Danmark, tro ik’ du er no’et
Ellers ser vi til at du mister ho’det
Så kom ik’ her med evner
Det ku’ ske at du revner
Jantelov, Jantelov troede det var for sjov
Meningen er at dine evner gør dig flov
Så lemmingeeffekten kan trænge gennem som en plov
Og gennemsnits Jensen føler han tog det fulde rov
For hvor du nu? Du i Danmark
Hvor du nu? F…ing Danmark
Kom tilfældigvis forbi Kim Bach . Org » Blog Archive » Missed the Alicia Keys concert, og genopdagede min gamle Jantelovs Rap. Ikke just stor kunst, men jeg synes den var aktuel pga. de oplevelser en veninde, der lige er kommet tilbage til Danmark, har haft - egentlig er der vist mere brug for en Kafka Polka…
When “Sergei and Larry” approached Yahoo with a brand new concept of a “search engine”, they discovered, to their dismay, that Yahoo wasn’t really interested in “search”, but in selling ads. So Google was born.
How I discovered Google
In 1998 I was doing a search of myself, e.g. ego-surfing, using my preferred search engine, Lycos, and I was stunned to see that the top hits were Usenet groups that contained my name, several of them in fact, but worse: they had names like kimbach.slut.slut.slut etc.
I was a bit upset, especially since I, at that point, was being sued over violation of the marketing law by a former employer - a case that was later thrown out - but I assumed that they might have created those groups, to slander me, and I was quite sure that it wasn’t me that created those groups ;-).
I took a look at the content of the groups, and they had very low traffic, I only found some spam, which was rare in 1998, and someone who asked the question “who is Kim Bach” - a question I’ve pondered myself, but it didn’t look like it had anything to do with me.
Eventually I contacted the hotline of my ISP, Image Scandinavia, and they referred me to…GOOGLE.
Doing a search on Google, I realised that it had nothing to do with me, but that the groups had been created by a disgruntled husband, and Kim Bach was his ex-wife!
I also believe that using Google for the first time, immediately made me drop Lycos. At that point Lycos actually yielded what I’d label “better results”, but that changed quickly.
Google, originally, cracked “the search code”, and the world changed.
How I discovered Wikipedia
This I also remember clearly, and it’s quite interesting, I googled it - indirectly!
3-4 years ago I was trying find the English word for the type of dog, that is called “gravhund” in Danish, I somehow knew that a literal translation wouldn’t do, since that would have yielded “diggingdog”, “digdog”, “gravedog”.
So a Google search let me to the English Wikipedia article for Dachshund, and that was what I was looking for!
Seeing Wikipedia was an instant eye-opener, and at that point it hadn’t even dawned upon me, that Wikipedia was pure user-generated content!
Google isn’t interested in “knowledge”
Google won by doing a better job, but now “we, the people” are approaching the world with a concept of a “knowledge engine”, only to discover, to our dismay, that for instance Google isn’t really interested in “knowledge”, but in selling ads.
The difference: “we, the people”, will, surprisingly, transform Google from a “search engine” into a “knowledge engine” as well, no matter what Google does. The algorithm Google uses will give preference to “quality”, at least in the long run, and since “we, the people” are so numerous this will happen sooner rather than later.
Case in point, the best SEO strategy I know of is to create a Wikipedia article, try googling the terms I’ve created Wikipedia articles for (for instance: Kim Schumacher, DB03 and DB07).
You’re brainwashed
Google and the big companies have had us, pretty much, brainwashed to think that we have no say. This is reflected by the response to the launch of the Wikia Search engine, on the historic day, January 7th 2008.
Everyone is trying to compare Wikia Search to Google, and that’s missing the point COMPLETELY, and people should read what Wikia Search are writing:
WE KNOW THAT THE QUALITY OF THE SEARCH IS: “PRETTY LOW” (a polite way of saying that it “stinks”)
The way to help change it, is simply to get involved.
Every-time you do a search on Wikia Search, you’re offered the option to edit a “Mini Article” on the search. A “Mini Article” is just a Wiki article, that explains the search term. The “Mini Articles” will be used to improve the search index.
“Unfortunately” people seems to have been using a search on themselves as a benchmark, meaning that a lot of the “Mini Articles” are links to private and small web-sites, but that reflects the community.
Ego-surfing was also one of the first things I did, and the first hit that could be attributed to me was result number 8, and that yielded the photos I’ve taken, that are in the Flickr pool I created for Sjakket, my former place of work.
Is that my major contribution to the world? Well it’s not that far from it, bordering that I believe that it could be.
Getting involved - choose a community to “work” for
My criteria are:
Not for profit, open, free, strong community, sustainable.
The beer isn’t free however, so you’re allowed to make money, but take into consideration how the money is being made, if it is sustainable etc.
Personally I’ve chosen these organisations
Kim Bach . Org - My personal Internet presence with community support (some call that a blog ;-))
Currently I’m mostly involved in Wikia Search, I’ve found it really intimidating to be a contributor to an Encyclopaedia, so my contributions to Wikipedia have been quite limited, Wikia Search is much less intimidating, and right up my alley.
Where would you put your money (e.g. time)?
In ten years, Google has gone from no to 16.000 employees, but “we, the people” will, in ten years go from no to 6,5 billion, or how many it is that “we” are in 2018.
Where would you put you money (e.g. time)? It will only cost you time, and you’ll be involved in building a beautiful shrine to knowledge and human achievement.
Together we’ll do Google one better: crack the code of “knowledge”, and the world has changed forever.
Free at last, free at last, oh God almighty we’re free at last.
And “we”‘re hiring! No need to submit a resume, come join the fight!
I really need to “get out more”, since I’ve only just now discovered the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), and I LOVE it!
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
Say what?
FOAF is an important part of the so-called semantic-web, and FOAF is just a so-called RDF specification of who you are. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is one of the basic technologies of the semantic web, and it’s nothing more (or should I say less) than an XML schema condoned by the W3C for describing resources.
Think of RDF as “the mother of all links”, RSS and Atom actually uses RDF.
The problem with links
So what is that RDF does better than the tradtional link?
When you create a link, you rarely remember to provide important information about what it is that you actually link to. At best you provide an ALT attribute (description) to an image tag. Google actively uses the ALT tag when indexing images, but if the link to an image contained more information, eg. semantics, Google could do a much better job.
Semantics means that you provide information about content and context, not just a link to it. You could call that metadata, abstracts or just “data”.
Many CMSes uses the URI of posts to provide some semantics, it’s often called SEO (search engine optimisation), the URI of this post has FOAF in it, meaning that a link to this article indeed contains some semantics.
A common standard for the WordPress CMS is that it uses year, month, day and the title of the post to generate the URI.
The problem is that this information should be provided in a structured, machine readable and - most importantly - open format, in order to make it possible to provide semantics.
I actually despise the concept of SEO, since it amounts to cheating, the only valid SEO is:
“provide interesting content”
A semantic “you”
A number of standards for providing semantics exists, one of the most interesting, especially in this day and age of social media, is the FOAF format.
FOAF is a format that describes you and your connections to provide semantics about people (you) and your connections (friends), in a standardised way, using RDF.
The FOAF file contains information about who you are, how to contact you, but most interestingly it contains links to your friends, and their FOAF files.
The beauty of FOAF is, that all you have to do, is:
Create a FOAF file, for instance using FOAF-a-matic
Put it on a server
Provide the URI
Make sure that it can be found by others (e.g. by posting a link on a page you know is indexed)
Chances are that the FOAF spiders will have a feast on your FOAF, sooner rather than later.
Create your FOAF file
It’s quite simple to create a FOAF file, all you need to do is go to FOAF-a-matic, fill in a number of fields, generate the FOAF file, copy it to a text-editor, publish it on your web-site.
Below is a screenshot of the FOAF-a-matic page.
Take back your profile, it’s…YOURS!
No need to register with social networking sites, your profile is YOURS.
Who owns the information about “who you are”? You do! Should that information be made available in an open format? You bet! RDF and FOAF is the way to go.
And don’t take my word for it, just take a look at the people who are promoting and developing RDF and FOAF…
So how did the chicken cross the road
I’ll provide you with the story about how I found FOAF, since it’s interesting to say the least.
My good buddy Sebastian Lund just recently set up his blog, Silence is deafening, and I’m looking forward to following it, he’s using a beautiful theme, the Dilectio Theme, developed by Design Disease.
Design Disease has a number of free WordPress themes available, and you can test them, when I tried that, their “Lorem Ipsum” turned out to be an article by no other that TBL, timbl, Tim Berners-Lee, Mr. Web himself, and he was writing about blogging and FOAF…
Now I need to think of a good URI for my FOAF file, TBL suggests this:
A lot of people have published data about themselves without using a URI for themselves. This means I can’t refer to them in other data. So please take a minute to give yourself a URI. If you have a FOAF page, you may just have to add rdf:about=”" and voila you have a URI http://example.com/Alan/foaf.rdf#ABC. (I suggest you use your initials for the last bit). Check it works in the Tabulator.
This could have been a much more interesting blog post, about a completely different, and important subject, but that happened in an alternative reality, so this is what you get:
In 2007, after some “fumbling” around, in a totally, to me, strange element, I got this “advice”:
“You should rather buy a new gadget”
This blog post, painstakingly, documents that that was exactly what I, Kim Bach, aka. “FJUMMER”, did…
Nintendo DS Portable Gaming Console
I had read an article in Wired Magazine about how you, literally, can shave several years off your, perceived, age by training, and changing habits and lifestyle.
The author had, for instance, used the Brain Training software on a Nintendo DS to improve his mental capacity and youth.
I was intriged, but my purchase of the DS was, eventually, a total impulse purchase. It was triggered by general ignorance, fear of growing up and taking responsibility, I really can’t claim stupidity, just foolishness, meditating on my old mantra “if it feels right, then it must be right” - well, let the record show that it never is - will I ever learn?
Interestingly, solving Sudoku puzzles, which I learned using the DS, actually brought me some of the best moments of 2007.
It should also be mentioned that the DS was a stunning success with the children at the school where I worked, the math-problems and the competitiveness of the Brain Training games, really catered to the children, and I’m sure that regular use of the training programs can increase your ability, to do basic arithmetic, dramatically.
Nike+ Kit
2007 also saw me picking up running. The Nike+ Kit transforms the iPod nano into a tool, where you can track your runs. It’s more that a toy, the genius of the Nike+ solution is the great web-site where you can run against other Nike+ users, track your progress, analyse your runs etc. The community is a great motivational factor, and it even worked on me.
In my first month of running I managed to log 40+ kms, and I could feel how my stamina improved, it amazed me how quickly that happened.
Unfortunately I got a little overconfident, and a small injury that caused me to gear down, I have learned that I should not try to do training that involves rapid changes in tempo.
Olympus SP-550UZ Digital Camera
I was tired of not having a zoom-camera, and the Olympus has 18x optical zoom, but I still prefer my Canon IXUS i5, since I can carry it around all the time, while I did take some wonderful pictures with the Olympus, it’s just too bulky for my taste. Eventually I’ll get a DSLR, but it’s not high on my wish-list, it’s more likely that my next camera will be another Canon IXUS.
Nokia N800 Internet Tablet
It looked cool, and I wanted to get one before a friend. The N800 is an interesting concept, with a Linux based OS, but it’s not ready for prime time. Battery life is it’s biggest problem, and the form-factor isn’t perfect, and I very rarely use it.
Nokia 5500 Sports Phone
Mount Vesuvius “killed” my Nokia 6070 - SERIOUSLY that was what happened, and you can’t live without a “presence device”, at least that was what my rather (understatement) confused mind dictated, as I wrote in a previous post “I was not in my right mind”.
The Nokia 5500 is a Symbian S60 based smart-phone with some clever motion based applications, for instance it has a step-counter, and the music player can be controlled by tapping it, to trigger the motion detector.
Telia Navigator
Extremely well designed GPS solution. It integrates with a 411 online directory, meaning that you can perform searches by name and address. It automatically stores the most recent destinations, and the external Bluetooth GPS device, that comes with a good rechargeable battery, works great with all Bluetooth devices.
The strongest feature of the solution is that it downloads the maps dynamically, meaning that the solution runs perfectly on relatively lowly hardware, with limited storage, I’ve used it with the Nokia 5500, and that is a great combination, the only downside I can think of, is that the solution only works with Telia’s accesspoints.
My favourite feature is the compass mode, and since it doesn’t require download of maps, and you often have pre-programmed your way-points, using Telia Navigation in this manner made me feel adventurous.
Lenovo V100 Laptop
For a while I thought that I could switch to Linux, and the Lenovo V100 is a fantastic platform for just that.
I did encounter some stability problems with the wireless networking support, the biggest issue with Linux as I see it, and that was hampering my productivity, so I’m back with my PowerBook
The Lenovo has been donated to a worthy cause, it’s now being used to control the digital whiteboard at the school where I used to work.
Samsung SP-P310ME Pocket Imager
My projector lamp burned out, but instead of replacing the lamp, I had to get one of the ultra-compact Samsung SP-P310ME projectors. It’s not really suited as a TV, since it needs a darkened room to operate, but I can now bring a projector everywhere I go, it’s amazingly portable, and can even run on battery power. The good thing is that the long life of the solid state technology of the SP-P310ME, means that it will take a long time until I have to replace it.
Nokia E65
Finally I went on the 3G bandwagon, and the Nokia E65 is a sleek 3G handset handset that even supports WiFi. I use the E65 all the time, it’s the perfect client for the Jaiku online service, that I’m sort of addicted to. Did I need a new phone? No, but it felt right, and it’s actually the only, truly useful, gadget investment of the year.
Making 2008 a healthier year
HEY! There are some signs, that I’m not going to be spending that much money on gadgets in 2008, first and foremost I’m actually feeling (mentally) healthy, and all of the purchases above were based on pure impulse (bordering mania), and right now it’s completely under control. And you know: the “advice” to “rather buy a new gadget” I got was “lost in translation”:
One of the first compilers I worked with, VS-Pascal, had a very “HAL-like” confident behaviour, after it had finished a succesful compile, it wrote:
“No compiler detected errors”
I found that almost rude, but it was also something to keep in the back of your mind, and today I remembered this clearly.
For the last week or so I’ve had a mysterious ASP.NET/C# problem on the back-burner. I’m trying to populate a drop-down list on a webpage. The list is based on a list of documents. For that purpose I had an entity class with a constructor, in the Page_Load code of the webform, I’m initialising the drop-down with a desciption and an id from the document list.
The list was populated just fine, but when I did a post of the form, I was consistently told that the first item was selected, even if I selected item number 2, 3 or 4.
This was very frustrating, especially because I have two drop-downs, and the other was working just fine.
Today I couldn’t postpone the problem any longer, and I tried a number of things, including moving the drop-downs, and finally I started doing websearches for bug-reports, but it’s extremely unlikely that ASP.NET has such a fundamental bug, so I was clearly doing something wrong.
When you’re using frameworks like .NET, a lot is done behind the scenes, luckily I know HTML so I finally hit View/Source, and to my surprise all the option values in the select tag were set to 0, why was that, I knew that my list was initialised to values from 0-4, but it was consistent with the test-results.
I was clearly doing something wrong. Below is the C# source-code for the entity class, can you spot the problem?
public class ShredYearDocument
{
private int _shredYearId;
public int ShredYearId
{
get { return _shredYearId; }
set { _shredYearId = value; }
}
string _shredYearDescription;
public string ShredYearDescription
{
get { return _shredYearDescription; }
set { _shredYearDescription = value; }
}
public ShredYearDocument(int ShredYeadId,
string ShredYearDescription)
{
_shredYearId = ShredYearId;
_shredYearDescription = ShredYearDescription;
}
}
I’ll give you a hint: there are no compiler detected errors, but I’d argue that the compiler should,at least, have generated a warning, because I have something that could be likened to unused, or uninitalised, local variables.
Another hint: Remember that I always had the id set to zero (0), no mater what.
But shouldn’t the compiler generate a warning here?
Software development can be extremely frustrating, and it might be true that the computer only does what you tell it to do, but these days a lot of people, besides yourself, are telling the computer what to do, a fact that complicates matters “somewhat” (understatement of the year).
The following experience documents a case, where I was sure that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and you could argue that I didn’t, I just didn’t know any better, but thanks to the community I solved the problem.
The setting
I’ve recently begun doing some PHP programming, and I like it a lot, mostly because of all the wonderful community. it’s my gut feeling that I find answers to my questions much faster when I have PHP related questions, compared to .NET questions.
So I was experimenting with generating some XML code from PHP, but when I gave the URL to the W3C validator, it told me that the XML wasn’t well-formed, and that it was the header that was the problem.
I couldn’t see anything wrong, until I took a closer look. There was a mysterious space prefixed the output when I did a View/Source, a space that I for sure knew I didn’t echo. Hmm…
I tried several things, including flushing the output, but nothing helped.
Then it dawned on me: it’s very likely that someone else has had this problem, and if they did, for sure they would have the generosity to share it, so Google to rescue.
It turns out that PHP is quite sensitive if you, by accident, leave prefixed or sufficed blank spaces outside the starting and ending php tags.
So I went through my PHP files, luckily I only have two, made sure there were no leading or trailing blanks og lines, and I get well-formed XML now.
This is a rather annoying bug in, or should I say feature of, PHP, and it exists in both PHP4 and PHP5.
Once again the community came through, without it I’d still be drawing blanks.
And I love the drawing on the memento site, it doesn’t get geekier, and I think I’ll remember to strip leading and trailing blanks now.
I’m still looking for a modern development environment for PHP development (e.g. sourcecode debugging). PHPEclipse, a plug-in for the Eclipse development environment, should provide a relatively modern development environment, even though it’s not up to the standards set by Microsoft VisualStudio, that I’m so accustomed to, Microsoft has spoiled me.
OK, you’re on your own, it’s late
Your girlfriend is on another date with the hero in your dream
Turn around, ask yourself. So, you think you’re gonna win this time Manchild?
Is it the pain of the drinking
Or the Sunday sinking feeling
The car never seems to work
When it’s late your girlfriend’s on a date
And the hero with her in your dream
In your sleep it seemed like you
Turn around ask yourself
Turn around ask yourself
Chorus:
Manchild, will you ever win
Manchild, look at the state you’re in
Could you go undercover
And sell your brand new lover (could you)
Be someone else for a night
Maybe someone else will love you
You’d sell your soul for a tacky song
Like the ones you hear on the radio
Turn around ask yourself
Turn around and ask yourself
Chorus:
Manchild, will you ever win
Manchild, look at the state you’re in
Manchild, he will make you cry
Manchild, Manchild, Manchild
From Monday down to Friday
You’re working on another man’s car
Or is it in the factory?
It doesn’t matter where you are
Just turn around and ask yourself is this communication
Accentuate the positive to give some illustration
See Manchild, you’re no one, I turn the microphone on
Control communication when I’m kickin’ it and so on
To the point that I need, the air that I breathe
Into an audience that’s waiting and ecstatic to receive
For the meantime another mean rhyme, I keep on sayin’ it
I know what the time is in the crowd we’ll keep on playing it
Through the speaker boxes loud’s my diagnosis
‘Cause I believe in miracles and words in steady doses.
Enough R-E-S-P-E and C-T
Respect yourself express no stress the mike is easy
Just believe that all you need is the air that you breathe.
(Turn around ask yourself)
Chorus:
Manchild, will you ever win
Manchild, look at the state you’re in
Manchild, he will make you cry
Manchild, Manchild, Manchild
He’s the apple of your eye
Once bitten twice shy, why don’t you bite me again
Just take it in the right and go tell your friend
Are you ready for the words I turn the microphone on
A figure of speech to reach you at the back and so on
The style I’m stimulating dance floors
Raise your body temperature now and
This demands for power in the amp you know loud’s my diagnosis
‘Cause I believe in miracles and words in heavy doses
“Advarsel”: Dette er jo et politisk indlæg - oh well, nu er valgkampen jo ovre, så man kan jo tillade sig at tale politik igen
Jeg føler mig hensat til fiktionens verden, takket være et brev jeg modtog lørdag:
[...] Erhvervsvirksomheder med mindst én ansat og offentlige institutioner skal betale medielicens [...]
[...] Hvis adressen skal tilmeldes, kan i indsende dette brev i den vedlagte svarkuvert. [...]
Dette er et udsnit af det rent Kafkaske brev som jeg har modtaget fra DR.
Og det slutter:
[...] Hvis denne adresse for nylig er blevet tilmeldt til medielicens, beder vi jer se bort fra dette brev og undskylder ulejligheden [...]
Hvad mon der sker hvis man ikke reagerer på dette, og undlader at returnere brevet, som man bliver “opfordret til”?
Jeg mener ikke at jeg er pligtig til at betale erhvervs medielicens, da jeg betaler privat, og da mit firma kun har en adresse, fordi man ikke kan undlade at have en. Herudover har mit firma ikke udbetalt løn til den eneste ansatte, yours truly, i over 1,5 år.
Der er dog næppe tvivl om at jeg, ifølge loven, er pligtig til at betale erhvervsmedielicens, men jeg orker, helt ærligt, ikke at undersøge om jeg er pligtig til at betale den - for DR Licens har ikke fremsendt reglerne, dem skal man selv finde på Internettet. Jeg har tænkt mig bare at afvente, og “se hvad der sker”.
Noget helt andet er, at jeg ikke mener at det p.t., giver mening at tale om mobiltelefoner som licenspligtige, da man, i praksis, kun kan bruge dem til at hente indhold fra DR, hvis man f.eks. tegner et 3tv abonnement.
Jeg antager at jeg har modtaget dette brev fra DR, enten fordi de sender det til alle ikke registrerede erhvervsvirksomheder - nogle skal jo betale for det skandaløse, og helt unødvendige, mediehus - eller også er det fordi jeg er blevet 3 kunde.
Jeg tror på det første er tilfældet, da brevet er påført et KOB id og en virksomhedstype (ApS).
En ting er sikker, KOB har tjent rigtig gode penge på at agere mellemmænd i denne sag, og fantastisk timing, brevet kom efter valget.
Jo kreativiteten er i højsædet hos etaten.
Tak medielicens, og navnet er K, Joseph K., eller var det Dent, Arthur Dent?
Welcome to ICT Mythbusters Episode Two - this time we’ll be investigating the myth that Microsoft is just copying Apple. The post is indeed subtitled “Attack of the Clones”, but bear with me, I have to take a detour to the world of digital typography, before returning to the real topic, so if you’re the impatient type (pun intended), just proceed to the end of the article.
ICT Mythbusters is inspired by the great Discovery show Mythbusters, and you’ll find Episode One here.
Is Microsoft just copying Apple?
Among Apple Macintosh faithfuls, it’s considered common knowledge that Microsoft, with Windows, just made a bad copy of the Apple Macintosh, but who’s copying who?
What triggered me to revisit this myth, that I’ve covered in detail before, was the screening of the great documentary, Helvetica, that I went to yesterday.
In the Helvetica movie Apple Computers was very much the supporting actor, and Apple was indeed mentioned in the credits. More prominently one of the Gurus of Type design, Erik Spiekermann, stated, as a fact, that Microsoft Windows was nothing more than a clone of the Apple Macintosh.
Spiekermann’s statement sounded just like the Apple marketing hype, and the fact that it was being stated by a very influential person in the industry, triggered me.
Firstly: I was somewhat surprised to hear this in a documentary about type. There’s no doubt that all the graphic designers interviewed for the documentary were already using Apple hardware, but I found it strange that Spiekermann’s statement didn’t end up on the cutting floor.
Show some love for the Mac
First there’s no doubt that Microsoft, and Bill Gates always has been great fans of the Apple Macintosh, as the clip below documents:
To create a new standard, it takes something that is just not a little bit different, it takes something that is really new, and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve seen, is the only one that meets that standard
Case closed: Bill Gates just admitted that Windows is nothing more than a cloned stormtrooper.
Now wait a minute…As you might notice the clip is quite old, and at that time Microsoft was working on creating one of the key selling points, even to this date, for Apple hardware, the Excel spreadsheet.
Excel was originally developed for the Macintosh, and it wasn’t released for Windows until the the dying moments of the 1980ies. In fact, Microsoft has done more for the proliferation of the Apple Macintosh than any other software manufacturer, and you could argue that the commitment to the Macintosh platform that Microsoft guaranteed at the famous MacWorld keynote in 1997, was a pivotal turning point. Steve Jobs even declared:
We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to loose. [...] The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft, as far as I’m concerned that is over.
And then Jobs went on to establish the fact that Apple and Microsoft, together, is the standard with a combined market share of 100%. Whatever Apple and Microsoft does is the standard.
Well I’m sure the $150 million investment by Microsoft, and the televised image of Bill Gates in the background, had something to do with it, but Steve Jobs was just saying exactly what the stockholders and board-members wanted to hear.
What’s your type?
The market for Apple Macintosh was very much created by the fact, that the Macintosh Computer was the first desktop computer capable of doing print quality design, this revolutionised publishing.
Really it wasn’t so much Apple’s technology that helped create this market, as it was the PostScript technology developed by Adobe.
Until PostScript, all fonts used by desktop computers were so called bit-map fonts, it meant that the fonts were digitised to a specific resolution, and they looked horrible if you tried to scale them to a different point size than the one that was provided with the operating system.
Another problem with the bit-map fonts was that they required a lot of storage, laser-printers use a resolution of 300 DPI (dots per inch), a point in typography is 1/72 of an inch, meaning that 12 point X roughly requires 50 x 50 pixels = 2.500 pixels, and you needed that matrix for all 256 possible characters in the character sets used until the 90ies, a rough calculation yields 640.000 pixels, in bytes that is 80.000, meaing that you’d need approximately 80KB to represent a 300DPI bit-map font. Multiply that by several factors, because the italic and bold versions need their own representation as well, and that should once again be multiplied by the number of fonts installed.
Today this doesn’t sound like much, but remember that the first Macintosh came with only 128KB of RAM, and NO harddrive. In those days a Linotype typesetter had a resolution that was a factor 16 higher, so Houston we have a problem.
Mathematics to the rescue
The PostScript technology used mathematics to describe the fonts (quadric Bézíer curves), making them scalable to all sizes, and a special “hinting” algorithm that reduced the processing power needed when rendering the types.
The technology is known as Adobe Type 1. Adobe had also secured licensing deals with Linotype, the dominant player in the type-foundry business, and owner of a huge share of the mainstream fonts.
The fact that that you could do close to print quality proofs on the desktop, and then simply send the PostScript files to the Linotype typesetter, for print quality, and be confident that the result would look the same as the proof, was nothing short of a revolution.
Fight the power - TrueType this
So heavenly bliss, we had scalable fonts of “infinite” quality, and thanks to the software Adobe Type Manager (ATM), type 1 fonts also worked on the screen, delivering the holy grail of desktop publishing, true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).
So what was the problem with this? The problem was the exorbitant licensing fees that you had to pay Adobe to use the technology and Linotype for the use of their copyrighted fonts.
One of my favourite parts of the Helvetica documentary, is in the scene where we’re taken to the “holiest of holy”, deep below the HQ of Linotype, where they keep the original Hass designs for Helvetica, it’s their “precious”.
Another problem with Adobes technology was that it was very processor intensive, making the screen rendering of the fonts quite slow. Anyone that has ever used ATM on early 90ies hardware will know what I’m taking about.
So Apple was developing a competing technology, TrueType, and later Microsoft and Apple worked together to create an alternative to type 1. Microsofts work included the introduction of replacements for the predominant fonts of the day, Helvetica became Arial, Times Roman became Times New Roman and Courier became Courier New.
Microsoft has contributed a number of major enhancements to TrueType, mainly ClearType, which is an anti-aliasing technology to improve the readability of screen fonts. The technology, which is bundled with Microsoft Reader, has failed to make to much of an impact, but anti-aliasing of screen fonts is the standard today.
Back to the real topic - who’s stealing from who
Oh well, this was a long talk about type, fonts and technology, and proof that the competition between Microsoft and Apple mostly takes place in the minds of the faithfuls (devotees?) of the “Church of Steve Jobs”.
Why is it that neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs really want to talk about copying, well it’s because Windows AND Mac OS both are clones.
The work that is the foundation of all graphical user interfaces was done at the Palo Alto Research Center of XEROX, but XEROX being a hardware company, also developed hardware, and the XEROX Documenter or XEROX 8010 Star that really was the first modern computer.
The Star was introduced on April 27th in 1981, several months earlier than the IBM PC. The Macintosh, Windows and GEM shipped 4 years later.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t until the introduction of the NeXT computer, that the mainstream computer industry delivered anything remotely akin to the Star, XEROX failed to make the Star a mass-market product
Attack of the clones! MYTH BUSTED!
Today most people are oblivious of the fact that the Imperial clones were ordered by the agents of the Empire, the ICT equivalents of Count Dooku and Palpatine: Apple and Microsoft. The praise for creating the fantastic tools we have in our hands today should go the XEROX, the Palo Alto Research Center and the amazing people that worked there, for instance Alan Kay, whom Steve Jobs often quotes.
The picture of the real myth busters, Adam Savage and Jamie Heyneman, actually is a banner add, but I make ABSOLUTELY no money from it, if you click it and make a purchase, all proceeds go to the Jamie, Adam and of course Café Press. I hope this will settle any copyright issues with them.
The picture of Erik Spiekermann above, is a still from the Helvetica film, and it is copied from the official site of the Helvetica film. The picture is copyright Gary Hustwit, but I consider my use here to be fair use.
The picture of the XEROX 8010 Star is copied from the wonderful DigiBarn website. The picture is copyright DigiBarn, but since it is under a CC-NA-SA license, I can use it - the wave of the future!
The MYTH BUSTED picture was copied from the webiste of MARIJNBOSCH.COM, there’s no copyright notice on the site, and I consider my use here to be fair use.
knew that a literal translation wouldn’t do, since that would have yielded “diggingdog”, “digdog”, “gravedog”.
