I like Swiss things. They're high quality, very impressive, and not always expensive.
- Swiss chocolate (especially Toblerone, but not just Toblerone)
- Swiss yogurt
- Swiss cheese (not just Ementaler and Gruyère - much more)
- Swiss watches
- Swiss Army knives (both Wenger and Victorinox)
- Swiss airplanes (Pilatus)
- The Swiss postal service
- Swiss railroads and trains
- The Swiss armed forces and military infrastructure
- Swiss mountains, Swiss lakes, Swiss cities, Swiss people
- Swiss computers
WHAT?! SWISS COMPUTERS?!
Where I work, we were looking for a single-board computer for a new project. Single-board computers, or SBCs, have gained popularity, thanks to names like Arduino, BeagleBone, and of course the great Raspberry Pi. But those are all hobby computers. We needed something with real horsepower.
We evaluated about a dozen different SBCs. Most of them were from Hong Kong or Shenzhen, China. Even though they had impressive specifications, we had serious concerns about their quality, reliability, engineering design, and workmanship. In addition, our SBC may have ended up in some government or military projects, and we had serious national-security concerns about designing something made in China into U.S. military equipment.
One of the last SBCs we evaluated, technically a system-on-module (SOM) and not an SBC, was from Toradex. When you go to the Toradex website, you see that they're based in Seattle. But when you dig a little deeper, you find that although Toradex USA is based in Seattle, the parent company is based in Switzerland. And you discover that their computers are designed and built in Switzerland.
Yep. All of our worries about quality, reliability, engineering, workmanship, and sourcing, just evaporated. The End.
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Friday, March 30, 2012
Raspberry Pi: Don't give up yet
I've already written five articles about the credit-card-sized educational computer, the Raspberry Pi. As you know, the first 10,000 units were supposed to go on sale a month ago. A few unfortunate things got in the way.
First, they didn't ship from the factory in China when they were supposed to, for a number of reasons. One key reason was that the factory in China had substituted a cheaper part for one of the specified parts, and the units didn't even work. They all had to be reworked.
Second, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the nonprofit org who conceived and designed this computer as a way to get REAL computer education back into the classroom, started to realize (too late!) that they had underestimated demand, and that their servers would not be able to handle the orders that would come pouring in on March 1st, and so they engaged a couple of worldwide partners to handle the ordering for them. Their partners didn't take the RasPi people seriously, when the RasPi people told them how big the demand was going to be, and so when the gates opened and customers rushed in, the crush of requests shut down the distributors' servers.
Once again: how badly had RasPi, Newark/Farnell/element14 and RS/Allied Electronics underestimated things? Well, the first production run was for 10,000 units. RasPi estimated they'd have 100,000 people wanting to order those 10,000 units. Actual demand turned out to be more like 2,000,000 people. That's TWO MILLION PEOPLE.
Maybe they should be embarrassed. Maybe dismayed. But what they were (and still are, if you read between the lines) is stunned - stunned that they created something with so much appeal. More on that later.
Third, the RasPi principals were expecting the initial 10,000 units to go, not to schools, but to engineers and developers who would produce all the programs and accessories to go with the computer. When they and their distribution partners looked at the demographics (and the GEOgraphics) of those 2,000,000 potential customers, they realized that it wasn't just engineers and developers clamoring for the product. Even though the computer was a bare board, not even in a case, and even though the Foundation were planning on tweaking the design based on feeedback from the first 10,000 users, EVERYBODY WANTED ONE. The general public. The hoi polloi. Regular people. So their partners insisted that they had to get CE and FCC certification for it before they could sell it.
That's unfortunate, but it was something they would eventually need to do anyway, and so it's good that they're taking care of it now. Unfortunate, because that testing ain't cheap, and you don't recover the costs of it until you start shipping product.
So, yeah: delays. But the Raspberry Pi computer is notvaporware! The Foundation have posted photos of the first shipment of 2000 items, on their website. It is for real, and 2000 customers will be very happy, very soon. As soon as the CE approval is granted, that is.
Okay, now back to the creators' emotional reaction to the massive worldwide demand. Believe it or not, they created this computer for altruistic reasons. They're not in it to get rich. They incorporated as a nonprofit org, and all the money they make will go back into the project. I don't think they expected two million people around the world to see the potential in their design, and go crazy over it. The Raspberry Pi is a rock star, and it hasn't even released its first album yet. It's a worldwide phenomenon. It's bigger than its creator's wildest dreams. Yeah, I would expect them to be stunned.
So we can forgive them for stumbling on the product release. They've never done anything like this before, and they're learning as they go along. But if you track their progress on their website or in the Allied/RS forums, you'll see that they're terribly serious about this project and intent on doing it right.
In the USA, Newark/element14 are taking orders, and quoting delivery dates in August. Allied Electronics are not taking orders, but RS Components (the UK/Europe version of Allied Electronics) are talking about setting up a dedicated "Order your Raspberry Pi here" webpage, which will make it easier for individuals to order the units as they become available.
Wherever you end up ordering from, it will be worth the wait. Trust me on this.
p.s. "The creators" are not nameless, faceless people. You can read about them — and read their words! — on the http://www.raspberrypi.org website.
p.p.s. Kudos to the guy posting tutorial videos on YouTube, under the name RaspberryPiTutorials . He helped me fix a couple of virtual machines (totally unrelated to RasPi) that I've been fighting with for a while.
First, they didn't ship from the factory in China when they were supposed to, for a number of reasons. One key reason was that the factory in China had substituted a cheaper part for one of the specified parts, and the units didn't even work. They all had to be reworked.
Second, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the nonprofit org who conceived and designed this computer as a way to get REAL computer education back into the classroom, started to realize (too late!) that they had underestimated demand, and that their servers would not be able to handle the orders that would come pouring in on March 1st, and so they engaged a couple of worldwide partners to handle the ordering for them. Their partners didn't take the RasPi people seriously, when the RasPi people told them how big the demand was going to be, and so when the gates opened and customers rushed in, the crush of requests shut down the distributors' servers.
Once again: how badly had RasPi, Newark/Farnell/element14 and RS/Allied Electronics underestimated things? Well, the first production run was for 10,000 units. RasPi estimated they'd have 100,000 people wanting to order those 10,000 units. Actual demand turned out to be more like 2,000,000 people. That's TWO MILLION PEOPLE.
Maybe they should be embarrassed. Maybe dismayed. But what they were (and still are, if you read between the lines) is stunned - stunned that they created something with so much appeal. More on that later.
Third, the RasPi principals were expecting the initial 10,000 units to go, not to schools, but to engineers and developers who would produce all the programs and accessories to go with the computer. When they and their distribution partners looked at the demographics (and the GEOgraphics) of those 2,000,000 potential customers, they realized that it wasn't just engineers and developers clamoring for the product. Even though the computer was a bare board, not even in a case, and even though the Foundation were planning on tweaking the design based on feeedback from the first 10,000 users, EVERYBODY WANTED ONE. The general public. The hoi polloi. Regular people. So their partners insisted that they had to get CE and FCC certification for it before they could sell it.
That's unfortunate, but it was something they would eventually need to do anyway, and so it's good that they're taking care of it now. Unfortunate, because that testing ain't cheap, and you don't recover the costs of it until you start shipping product.
So, yeah: delays. But the Raspberry Pi computer is notvaporware! The Foundation have posted photos of the first shipment of 2000 items, on their website. It is for real, and 2000 customers will be very happy, very soon. As soon as the CE approval is granted, that is.
Okay, now back to the creators' emotional reaction to the massive worldwide demand. Believe it or not, they created this computer for altruistic reasons. They're not in it to get rich. They incorporated as a nonprofit org, and all the money they make will go back into the project. I don't think they expected two million people around the world to see the potential in their design, and go crazy over it. The Raspberry Pi is a rock star, and it hasn't even released its first album yet. It's a worldwide phenomenon. It's bigger than its creator's wildest dreams. Yeah, I would expect them to be stunned.
So we can forgive them for stumbling on the product release. They've never done anything like this before, and they're learning as they go along. But if you track their progress on their website or in the Allied/RS forums, you'll see that they're terribly serious about this project and intent on doing it right.
In the USA, Newark/element14 are taking orders, and quoting delivery dates in August. Allied Electronics are not taking orders, but RS Components (the UK/Europe version of Allied Electronics) are talking about setting up a dedicated "Order your Raspberry Pi here" webpage, which will make it easier for individuals to order the units as they become available.
Wherever you end up ordering from, it will be worth the wait. Trust me on this.
p.s. "The creators" are not nameless, faceless people. You can read about them — and read their words! — on the http://www.raspberrypi.org website.
p.p.s. Kudos to the guy posting tutorial videos on YouTube, under the name RaspberryPiTutorials . He helped me fix a couple of virtual machines (totally unrelated to RasPi) that I've been fighting with for a while.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Raspberry Pi rollout: I'm irritated but I still want one
News reports that the new Raspberry Pi single-board computer sold out in minutes are inaccurate. The first batch of 10,000 units sold out in seconds, not minutes. According to actual data collected by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Farnell/Newark/Element14, and RS Online/Allied Electronics, projected demand was about 100,000 units (10X supply), and actual demand was 1,000,000 units (100X supply, and 10X projected demand). The rush of people worldwide trying to buy one brought the Farnell and RS servers to their knees. It looked like a DDoS attack on the servers. It was the electronic equivalent of shoppers rioting at a toy store.
I think that the Foundation knew something big was going to happen, but they had no idea it would be this big. And they were unable to convince their new partners to take their advance warnings seriously. The Foundation and their commercial partners deserve some measure of the scorn that has been heaped upon them.
But they also deserve all of the applause that they've gotten. Why? Because the RasPi is a revolutionary idea — world-changing, even — and the real thing looks like a fantastic product. This is something that's never been tried before. Although the RasPi was aimed at teachers and students, interest in it has gone way beyond that intended market. The Foundation is new at this sort of thing, and they will make several more mistakes before they get it right. But I have confidence that will learn as they go, and they'll eventually get it right. And one day, eventually, (as soon as possible!) I will own a RasPi.
Until then, I remain irritated.
But I'll get over it. And I wish them luck.
UPDATE, 12 MARCH 2012: Over the weekend, the website was moved to a different server. Now I can get it day or night, all week long. Cross off irritation number 3, and thank raspberrypi.org and their hosting partner.
UPDATE, 15 MARCH 2012: I had written that actual demand was 1,000,000 units. That was based on the initial data collected on the first day of sales. Now we have some updated numbers. Based on those who "registered an interest" with their two distributors, actual demand exceeds 2,000,000 units. Granted, many, if not all, of those are people (like me) who registered with both distributors, but from what I've read, most potential customers (like me) want to buy multiple units. So I think that the "more than 2,000,000" figure is accurate.
I think that the Foundation knew something big was going to happen, but they had no idea it would be this big. And they were unable to convince their new partners to take their advance warnings seriously. The Foundation and their commercial partners deserve some measure of the scorn that has been heaped upon them.
But they also deserve all of the applause that they've gotten. Why? Because the RasPi is a revolutionary idea — world-changing, even — and the real thing looks like a fantastic product. This is something that's never been tried before. Although the RasPi was aimed at teachers and students, interest in it has gone way beyond that intended market. The Foundation is new at this sort of thing, and they will make several more mistakes before they get it right. But I have confidence that will learn as they go, and they'll eventually get it right. And one day, eventually, (as soon as possible!) I will own a RasPi.
Until then, I remain irritated.
- Irritated that I couldn't get one on the first day.
- Irritated that the reason I couldn't get one was because of the mistakes of others.
- Irritated that the http://www.raspberrypi.org/ website doesn't work during daylight hours in North America.
- Irritated that I can't even order one right now. (And neither can anybody else.)
But I'll get over it. And I wish them luck.
UPDATE, 12 MARCH 2012: Over the weekend, the website was moved to a different server. Now I can get it day or night, all week long. Cross off irritation number 3, and thank raspberrypi.org and their hosting partner.
UPDATE, 15 MARCH 2012: I had written that actual demand was 1,000,000 units. That was based on the initial data collected on the first day of sales. Now we have some updated numbers. Based on those who "registered an interest" with their two distributors, actual demand exceeds 2,000,000 units. Granted, many, if not all, of those are people (like me) who registered with both distributors, but from what I've read, most potential customers (like me) want to buy multiple units. So I think that the "more than 2,000,000" figure is accurate.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Raspberry Pi launch falls flat
Well, the Raspberry Pi computer officially went on sale today, at 0600 GMT. Customers in the UK and Western Europe had to get up early for the launch; customers in the USA had to stay up late. It was a good time to do the launch: had they done it during business hours on either continent, they would have brought the entire worldwide Internet crashing down around them. As it is, three sites - their own, and two commercial ones - were completely overwhelmed and froze solid for the better part of an hour, and the computer sold out completely in less than a minute.
I think that the good folks at the Raspberry Pi Foundation underestimated both the demand and the enthusiasm for this product. They had some idea what would hit them: they were smart enough to sign up a couple of distributors with worldwide reach to manufacture and distribute the RasPi. But so many people wanted one of the first batch of 10,000 units that they crashed the Raspberry Pi Foundation's .org and .com servers, and they nearly crashed the servers at Premier Farnell and RS Components. I don't know about RS Components, but Farnell has an international presence, doing business as Newark on this side of the Pond, and as Element 14 on both sides of the Pond, and even the Element 14 webpage was having trouble.
According to the @RaspberryPi Twitter feed, Farnell sold out of their units in about one minute, and RS Components refuses to ship their units overseas.
While I am disappointed that I didn't get one of the first 10,000 units, I am pleased that the launch was so overwhelmingly successful. If the RPi Foundation had as much capital behind it as, say, Apple or Microsoft, and the manpower to match them, even if only for 24 hours, the launch would have gone more smoothly. But they're a small nonprofit organization, trying to do this on a shoestring budget.
By this time tomorrow, they'll have a bustling community of 10,000 users, with thousands more trying to get in. Let's hope that Farnell and RS get tooled up quickly, and that the Foundation recovers quickly from the shock and gets moving again.
I think that the good folks at the Raspberry Pi Foundation underestimated both the demand and the enthusiasm for this product. They had some idea what would hit them: they were smart enough to sign up a couple of distributors with worldwide reach to manufacture and distribute the RasPi. But so many people wanted one of the first batch of 10,000 units that they crashed the Raspberry Pi Foundation's .org and .com servers, and they nearly crashed the servers at Premier Farnell and RS Components. I don't know about RS Components, but Farnell has an international presence, doing business as Newark on this side of the Pond, and as Element 14 on both sides of the Pond, and even the Element 14 webpage was having trouble.
According to the @RaspberryPi Twitter feed, Farnell sold out of their units in about one minute, and RS Components refuses to ship their units overseas.
While I am disappointed that I didn't get one of the first 10,000 units, I am pleased that the launch was so overwhelmingly successful. If the RPi Foundation had as much capital behind it as, say, Apple or Microsoft, and the manpower to match them, even if only for 24 hours, the launch would have gone more smoothly. But they're a small nonprofit organization, trying to do this on a shoestring budget.
By this time tomorrow, they'll have a bustling community of 10,000 users, with thousands more trying to get in. Let's hope that Farnell and RS get tooled up quickly, and that the Foundation recovers quickly from the shock and gets moving again.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Raspberry Pi: drooling in anticipation
Well, the 10,000 units of the Raspberry Pi Model B's first run are now in the hands of the testers. That means that we should be seeing a notice of sale in the next few days. The excitement is building over at http://www.raspberrypi.org/ and elsewhere.
And rightfully so. For the nerds among us, the recommended OS for the RasPi will be a remix of Fedora Linux. There are already several other OSes out there, also ready to go. I suggest you buy a handful of Sandisk 2 GB SD cards and put a different OS on each.
Just imagine: all the power of Linux, OpenGL, HDMI, and 10/100baseT, in a $35 package.
And rightfully so. For the nerds among us, the recommended OS for the RasPi will be a remix of Fedora Linux. There are already several other OSes out there, also ready to go. I suggest you buy a handful of Sandisk 2 GB SD cards and put a different OS on each.
Just imagine: all the power of Linux, OpenGL, HDMI, and 10/100baseT, in a $35 package.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
About apples, raspberry pies, and Italian kings
We had a raspberry bush at our house in Oregon. It started as a single slip, taken from a wild bush and transplanted into our backyard. It loved the wet weather, and it grew rapidly. Over the years, it expanded to take over an entire side of the backyard fence, even crawling under the fence and coming up on the other side. If we had let it, it would have taken over the entire backyard.
I'm not complaining. It bore lots and lots of delicious fruit, most of which was eaten right there at the bush.
The Raspberry Pi was stuck in my head all night long. I couldn't stop thinking about it. (I still want one, by the way.)
I can see the RasPi becoming the Next Big Thing. It's starting out as a bare-bones educational computer, sold at no profit. The entity making and selling it, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is determined to keep it that way. But I can imagine it becoming more popular than anybody expected, and selling hundreds of thousands - maybe millions.
Eventually, the Foundation will find it profitable to put a version of it in a case, dress it up, and sell it for a hundred dollars or more. The profit from this version will enable them to drop the educational price, thereby offering it to even more teachers and students than before.
Then they will find it even more profitable to license the technology to other manufacturers. This will cause the commercial RasPi platform to expand like my raspberry bush. It will also cause the platform to fragment, like the IBM PC did, which may or may not be a Bad Thing. But on the other end, since they are a non-profit entity, the gobs of money they make from the licensing deals will allow the Foundation to lower the price on the educational model even more, making it even more accessible.
Okay, that's my vision, not theirs. In a way, RasPi is similar to early Apple Computer. Remember the Apple II? (Actually, most of you don't. Tch. Kids.) Well, the Raspberry Pi is also named after a fruit, and the capitalized Greek letter Π looks a lot like the Roman numeral II. Like the RasPi, the Apple II was a hobbyist's computer whose popularity turned the computing world upside-down and laid the foundation for both the Macintosh and the IBM PC. I look for something similar to happen with the RasPi. If they weren't a private foundation, I'd buy a slice of the company. As it stands, all I can give them is praise and publicity. Oh - and my business.
There's another single-board computer out there, also taking the world by storm. Arduino began in 2005 as an educational computer, for students to use with their design and control projects (robotics, for instance). According to Wikipedia, in May 2011 there were 300,000 Arduinos in the wild. However, Arduino and the RasPi are distinctly different. The RasPi is meant to replace the desktop (or laptop) computer, with keyboard, display, and mass storage device(s). Arduino is a microcontroller, meant to control robots, giant billboards, 3D printers, coffee makers - you get the picture. They don't compete - if anything, they coexist.
You can connect an Arduino-equipped appliance to a RasPi computer. In fact, in the near future, you will be able to program an Arduino board from a RasPi board. Now that's cool.
The Apple II moved successfully from the hobbyist and educational worlds to the Real World, and opened the way for others to follow. Arduino moved quietly and successfully from the educational and hobbyist worlds to the Real World. Arduinos are everywhere, but you probably don't know it. The Raspberry Pi will do the same thing. I don't expect it to displace the Mac/Windows/BigLinux boxes, but it will definitely claim its place on the stage.
I'm not complaining. It bore lots and lots of delicious fruit, most of which was eaten right there at the bush.
The Raspberry Pi was stuck in my head all night long. I couldn't stop thinking about it. (I still want one, by the way.)
I can see the RasPi becoming the Next Big Thing. It's starting out as a bare-bones educational computer, sold at no profit. The entity making and selling it, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is determined to keep it that way. But I can imagine it becoming more popular than anybody expected, and selling hundreds of thousands - maybe millions.
Eventually, the Foundation will find it profitable to put a version of it in a case, dress it up, and sell it for a hundred dollars or more. The profit from this version will enable them to drop the educational price, thereby offering it to even more teachers and students than before.
Then they will find it even more profitable to license the technology to other manufacturers. This will cause the commercial RasPi platform to expand like my raspberry bush. It will also cause the platform to fragment, like the IBM PC did, which may or may not be a Bad Thing. But on the other end, since they are a non-profit entity, the gobs of money they make from the licensing deals will allow the Foundation to lower the price on the educational model even more, making it even more accessible.
Okay, that's my vision, not theirs. In a way, RasPi is similar to early Apple Computer. Remember the Apple II? (Actually, most of you don't. Tch. Kids.) Well, the Raspberry Pi is also named after a fruit, and the capitalized Greek letter Π looks a lot like the Roman numeral II. Like the RasPi, the Apple II was a hobbyist's computer whose popularity turned the computing world upside-down and laid the foundation for both the Macintosh and the IBM PC. I look for something similar to happen with the RasPi. If they weren't a private foundation, I'd buy a slice of the company. As it stands, all I can give them is praise and publicity. Oh - and my business.
There's another single-board computer out there, also taking the world by storm. Arduino began in 2005 as an educational computer, for students to use with their design and control projects (robotics, for instance). According to Wikipedia, in May 2011 there were 300,000 Arduinos in the wild. However, Arduino and the RasPi are distinctly different. The RasPi is meant to replace the desktop (or laptop) computer, with keyboard, display, and mass storage device(s). Arduino is a microcontroller, meant to control robots, giant billboards, 3D printers, coffee makers - you get the picture. They don't compete - if anything, they coexist.
You can connect an Arduino-equipped appliance to a RasPi computer. In fact, in the near future, you will be able to program an Arduino board from a RasPi board. Now that's cool.
The Apple II moved successfully from the hobbyist and educational worlds to the Real World, and opened the way for others to follow. Arduino moved quietly and successfully from the educational and hobbyist worlds to the Real World. Arduinos are everywhere, but you probably don't know it. The Raspberry Pi will do the same thing. I don't expect it to displace the Mac/Windows/BigLinux boxes, but it will definitely claim its place on the stage.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Get a whole computer for US$35. Yes, really!
Have you heard about the $35 computer? It's for real, and I want one.
Actually, the $35 Raspberry Pi Model B is still vaporware, but the $25 Model A is selling RIGHT NOW. The Model B won't be vaporware for long. The first production run of Model B is expected to ship this month, and at 10,000 units, it will sell out fast.I want one.
The Raspberry Pi computer is the brainchild of Eben Upton, a former professor at Cambridge University in the UK. In 2006, Upton and several of his colleagues had noticed that the skill level of incoming Computer Science students had been falling gradually over the years. As they puzzled over what to do about it, they came up with the idea of a credit-card-sized computer, which could be sold cheaply enough that literally any student could afford it. The hardware would be simple enough that anybody could learn to program it.
They decided that the project should be managed, and the computer should be sold, by a nonprofit corporation. This would help them to keep costs down and to keep focused on the original objective. The result: the Raspberry Pi Foundation, led by Upton, and their product, the Raspberry Pi computer.
This is an awesome piece of hardware. Unfortunately, it's not for everybody. Keep your Macs and your PCs; this may not be the computer for you. While it has Ethernet and HDMI capability, it does not have a hard disk drive. (But you can attach a USB hard disk drive!) It's not even in a case yet! (I'm gonna build a case for it out of Legos. Or maybe popsicle sticks.) It will not run Windows, Mac OS X, or Android. It will not run any commercial software (yet). It runs Linux.
I want one.
Want to know more? Read an article about Raspberry Pi at Yahoo! News. Then go straight to the project's own website.
Friday, September 16, 2011
The new bubble: China
In the wake of the dotcom bubble of 1995-2000, and the real-estate-bubble catastrophe of 2003-2008, economists and policymakers are looking around anxiously, trying to predict the next bubble to burst. In all their casting about, they are quietly ignoring the dead moose lying right there on the coffee table in the middle of the room: China.
Consider the dotcom bubble for a minute. The bubble was caused by a bunch of entrepreneurs who jumped on the make-money-fast-on-the-Internet bandwagon (the ".com" suffix, pronounced "dot-com," became a new word and a label for the whole fiasco), and all the investors who fed them money. Greed fueled the dotcom bubble. Even people who should have known better, smart and educated Wall Street professionals, bought into the boom. Some college professors and very conservative investment advisors warned that both the entrepreneurs and the speculators were ignoring the basic principles of investing, but others said that the dotcom boom had rewritten the rules. I actually heard several "experts" on public radio saying, "This time it's different."
Well, that time, it was no different. Most of the dotcom businesses went bankrupt in a few years. The entrepreneurs and the investors lost everything. The money simply disappeared, along with everything built on that money.
When you get right down to it, the cause of the dotcom bubble was pure and simple greed: people wanted to get rich quick.
The real estate bubble was the same way: Before the bubble began, mortgage lending was governed by strict rules. A potential homebuyer had to have a large enough down payment to indicate a serious intent to keep the property, and a demonstrated ability to make the required monthly payments. Potential lenders did serious evaluations of buyers' ability to pay: the credit appraisal. Millions of homebuyers have experienced the anxious waiting period while their credit appraisal was being completed, wondering what kind of credit risk the lender would assess them at, and what mortgage terms they would be offered as a result.
Suddenly, almost overnight, the lending rules changed. The required down payment dropped from 20 percent, to 10 percent, then five percent, and finally zero percent. No down payment was required to get into a house. At the same time, credit terms were relaxed. There was no longer any need to demonstrate that a buyer could sustain a mortgage payment - not for one month, let alone for 30 years. And finally, an insidious form of mortgage which had been quietly gaining in popularity for 30 years seemed to take over the market. This was the negative-amortization loan, which allowed a buyer to make smaller payments than the minimum required by the traditional formulas, with the accrued interest being added to the principal, so that the buyer owed more and more money as time went on. Some of these negative-amortization loans had a a schedule of gradually increasing payments as the years went on. Some only had a term of three to five years, with a huge "balloon" payment at the end, with the unwritten (but oft-spoken) mutual expectation that the buyer would arrange new and better financing before the loan expired.
Two things happened as a result of this relaxation of the rules. First, people who should never have been buying houses started buying houses. Second, everybody - well, almost everybody - started buying houses bigger than they could afford. Then sellers started realizing that they could get a lot more money for their property than they were expecting, and so they started jacking up the prices of their homes. Home prices had been rising steadily for decades anyway, but suddenly the prices accelerated their upward trend.
Everybody was getting rich. Buyers were getting bigger houses than they could afford. Sellers were making lots of money. Lenders were getting lots of mortgages - meaning that they owned lots of homes. Then the sellers, mostly banks, started bundling the mortgages together (think of the physical metaphor, all of those paper mortgage agreements, stacked up and held together with rubber bands) and selling them to each other as investment instruments. Heck, if all those buyers actually made their payments for 30 years, those mortgages represented a lot of income for the lenders!
(We haven't even talked about China yet. Stay tuned.)
So buyers, sellers, lenders, and stockholders saw the chance to get really rich, really quick, and they jumped on it. Once again, as with the dotcom bubble, people ignored the safe and sensible rules of investing, caught up in the chance to make money off the rapid rise in property values. Builders built, banks lended, flippers flipped, and real estate agents (and their friends, the mortgage brokers) paid cash for fancy new cars and stuff. As before, greed ruled the day.
This entire house of cards was built on a foundation of borrowers - home buyers - who couldn't afford to pay back the money they had borrowed. When these people eventually ran out of money and defaulted on their loans, the lenders exercised the terms of the mortgage, kicked them out of their homes, and took over their property. But foreclosed property doesn't make the banks any money. They try to get rid of it as quickly as they can. But the banks had acquired so many homes that they couldn't sell them all - not quickly, not slowly, and not for anywhere near their appraised value. That's because the home values had been horrendously inflated in the price runup that was the bubble.
Now the banks had the properties, but not the cash flow that the properties were supposed to generate. Without money coming in, the banks couldn't take care of their own financial obligations. So the banks started failing, or at least were in danger of failing. The only way they could generate money in a hurry was by selling some of their investments. And the vast majority of investments were those bundles of mortgages - "mortgage-backed securities," they were called - and since those mortgages were in default, they were worthless pieces of paper. Nobody wanted to buy them.
So the homeowners lost their homes, the banks lost their money, and the investors lost their money. Banks couldn't afford to pay their bills or their employees. All the money that went into the real estate market disappeared and was gone forever. The ripple effects from this disaster led to failures in other, tightly connected industries, such as investment broker Merrill Lynch, insurance company AIG, and automaker General Motors. That's when all the banks, the investment companies, the insurance companies, and the automakers ran crying to the government, saying "we're too big to fail."
In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'll say it again. The entire dotcom bubble and bust was caused by greed. The entire real estate bubble and bust was caused by greed.
And that brings us to China. I speak of China here as one monolithic entity, encompassing its government, its financial institutions, and its industries. Some of you may object if I include Taiwan and Hong Kong in the monolith, but for now that's what I'm doing. I may lump the Chinese people in here as well, because the individuals are what make up the aforementioned institutions.
China is the next big bubble, and when it busts, the results will be a worldwide catastrophe. And as with the dotcom and real estate bubbles, the driving force behind it all is greed.
China has systematically undercut prices for manufactured goods all over the world. Because of the low prices offered by Chinese manufacturers, many American companies have moved all their manufacturing from North America to China. It saves the American companies lots of money, which shows up in their corporate profits. Besides, it lets them sell their goods to American consumers more cheaply, and American consumers like "cheap." Most American consumers prefer "cheap" over "quality," but I don't think we'll get into that here.
As a result, most, if not all, of the American companies who make their goods in China are trapped. For example, all of Apple's iPads and iPhones are made in China. They could not stay in that business segment if they were suddenly forced to make them here. Even if they could set up an assembly line, they couldn't run it without the components - the display, the batteries, and so on - because the components are also made in China.
(There was a great article in Forbes recently, called "Why Amazon Can't Make a Kindle in the USA.")
Much of today's high-tech gadgetry, including the cheapest cellular phone on the market, depends on some exotic minerals known as rare earth elements to operate. Those rare earths used to be mined in Africa, Russia, and North and South America. Several years ago, China started mining them and selling them at drastically reduced prices. The other mines could not compete and shut down, leaving China as the sole source for these rare earths. Recently, China has been talking about jacking up the price or restricting the supply of these minerals. Guess what would happen to Nokia and other (non-Chinese) cellphone manufacturers if rare earths became too expensive to buy, or simply unavailable? That's right!
Recently, I wanted to buy my wife a new kitchen mixer. I went to three department stores here in the western U.S. Every single mixer I looked at was made in China. The venerable domestic brands like Sunbeam, and the classy European brands like, um, Braun (I think) all had "Made in China" stamped on the box somewhere. And they were all made in China because it's cheaper.
Our first vacuum cleaner was a Hoover. It was made in America (or Canada, I think) and it was mostly made of metal. Our second vacuum cleaner was also a Hoover. It was mostly made of plastic, but it was still made in America. Together, those two vacuum cleaners lasted over 30 years. They were sturdy machines, and we used them A LOT. Now we're shopping for our third vacuum cleaner. We looked at the offerings from Hoover. They're made mostly of plastic. They're made in China. They have a terrible reputation for workmanship, reliability, and vacuum-ability. Why should we buy Hoover again? We won't.
Hoover's not the worst, nor is it the cheapest. There are cheaper vacuum cleaners. They don't work very well, either. And guess where every single one of them is made?
It gets worse. Shall we look at automobiles? The concept of a "made in America" automobile, even a manly American pickup truck, is laughable. All of the electronics are made in China, or assembled in the U.S. (or Mexico or another country) from components made in China. The bumpers and fenders may be made in the U.S. (or Mexico or Ohio), but the raw materials for those metal bumpers and plastic fenders were shipped to the U.S. from overseas - mostly from China! Even the fabric or vinyl upholstery for the seats comes from China. The light bulbs! The floor mats! Detroit has outsourced all of it, in an effort to make a buck.
(John Deere, in Iowa, still makes a lot of their own components. But Chinese electronics are starting to make inroads there, even.)
How did the U.S. government finance the bailout of the companies that got caught in the 2008 financial crisis following the bust of the real estate bubble (especially the "too big to fail" companies that should have been allowed to fail, or else cut up into smaller pieces that were no longer "too big to fail")? They sold government-backed securities to other countries. And which country bought the lion's share of those securities? Which country was so flush with cash (or the promise thereof - remember how the real estate bubble worked!) that it could step in and buy billions of dollars of U.S. treasury bonds without flinching? Well, China, of course!
And guess where China got all that money from? From America, of course! They sell us their stuff, they collect our money, and then they buy our country and our future.
But it's all a house of cards, just like the dotcoms and the housing boom. China has looked into their future and they're forecasting massive growth - so massive that they've gone out into the countryside and carved out entire cities from nothing. Street lights, apartment buildings, government buildings and shopping centers have risen out of the pastures and are waiting for people to move into them. These "ghost cities" can be seen on Google Maps, and they're eerily empty. The Chinese are mining coal and burning it at a furious rate, to literally fuel their growth. They are damming rivers and gouging out strip mines to supply their hungry industries with raw materials.
And they are engaging in a centuries-long tradition of imitation and deception. They take products made in the West, try to figure out what makes them work, and then try to come up with a copy that looks the same - right down to the trademarks, the colors and the textures. Some of the patented and trademarked cable that my own employer makes has appeared in counterfeit form in Asia - made in China.
In the ultimate irony, they duplicate not only Apple's computers and handheld products (and remember, the legitimate ones are also made in China), but they sell them in 22 imitation Apple stores. The stores are not affiliated with Apple Computer in any way, but their layout, decor, and even employee uniforms and name badges are exact duplicates of what you will find in real Apple stores. The deception is so complete that some of the store employees think they are really working for Apple Computer.
I have already written about the sham (and the scam) that was the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It was a plastic imitation of the real thing, a shameless ripoff of other people's hard work, enabled by the duplicity of the Chinese government and the gullibility of the rest of the world. In the same way, the duplicity of monolithic China and the willingness of the rest of the world to be led around by the nose (or other body parts) has contributed to the growth of the house of cards that is the Chinese bubble.
Actually, that's not completely accurate. At the core of everything, it is the greed of monolithic China and the greed of the rest of the world that have contributed to the Chinese bubble.
One day, the U.S. government or another government will not be able to make good on the financial instruments that China holds. China will find out that it is holding on to worthless pieces of paper, and that China does not have enough real money to keep operating. With no money to pay its own obligations, power plants and mines will shut down. Trains will stop operating. With no way to get raw materials, factories will shut down and send their workers home. With no jobs and no money to spend, Chinese people will stop buying their own goods. With nothing to ship, ships will stop crossing the ocean, and Americans will no longer be able to buy Hoover vacuum cleaners, Sunbeam mixers, or Apple iPhones. Without the raw materials and components from China, American automakers (and Japanese and German ones, too) will no longer be able to build cars.
Printing presses, computers, traffic lights, tables, chairs, dishes, cutlery, light bulbs, furniture, clothing: all of it will come to a stop until alternative sources can be found or tooled up. Those alternative mines and factories will spring up all over the world, but they won't start producing overnight. They will take years. And the wealth, or commerce, or economic prosperity - the money - that was lost forever will take even more years to replace.
It may take a decade for the bubble to burst. Some people will argue with me and say it will never happen. But it ony took 15 years for the gigantic Japanese economic machine, which was also supposed to take over the world, to come crashing down. It surely did, and the Chinese one will come crashing down just as surely. And when it does, it will take years for the world to recover.
From its own greed.
Consider the dotcom bubble for a minute. The bubble was caused by a bunch of entrepreneurs who jumped on the make-money-fast-on-the-Internet bandwagon (the ".com" suffix, pronounced "dot-com," became a new word and a label for the whole fiasco), and all the investors who fed them money. Greed fueled the dotcom bubble. Even people who should have known better, smart and educated Wall Street professionals, bought into the boom. Some college professors and very conservative investment advisors warned that both the entrepreneurs and the speculators were ignoring the basic principles of investing, but others said that the dotcom boom had rewritten the rules. I actually heard several "experts" on public radio saying, "This time it's different."
Well, that time, it was no different. Most of the dotcom businesses went bankrupt in a few years. The entrepreneurs and the investors lost everything. The money simply disappeared, along with everything built on that money.
When you get right down to it, the cause of the dotcom bubble was pure and simple greed: people wanted to get rich quick.
The real estate bubble was the same way: Before the bubble began, mortgage lending was governed by strict rules. A potential homebuyer had to have a large enough down payment to indicate a serious intent to keep the property, and a demonstrated ability to make the required monthly payments. Potential lenders did serious evaluations of buyers' ability to pay: the credit appraisal. Millions of homebuyers have experienced the anxious waiting period while their credit appraisal was being completed, wondering what kind of credit risk the lender would assess them at, and what mortgage terms they would be offered as a result.
Suddenly, almost overnight, the lending rules changed. The required down payment dropped from 20 percent, to 10 percent, then five percent, and finally zero percent. No down payment was required to get into a house. At the same time, credit terms were relaxed. There was no longer any need to demonstrate that a buyer could sustain a mortgage payment - not for one month, let alone for 30 years. And finally, an insidious form of mortgage which had been quietly gaining in popularity for 30 years seemed to take over the market. This was the negative-amortization loan, which allowed a buyer to make smaller payments than the minimum required by the traditional formulas, with the accrued interest being added to the principal, so that the buyer owed more and more money as time went on. Some of these negative-amortization loans had a a schedule of gradually increasing payments as the years went on. Some only had a term of three to five years, with a huge "balloon" payment at the end, with the unwritten (but oft-spoken) mutual expectation that the buyer would arrange new and better financing before the loan expired.
Two things happened as a result of this relaxation of the rules. First, people who should never have been buying houses started buying houses. Second, everybody - well, almost everybody - started buying houses bigger than they could afford. Then sellers started realizing that they could get a lot more money for their property than they were expecting, and so they started jacking up the prices of their homes. Home prices had been rising steadily for decades anyway, but suddenly the prices accelerated their upward trend.
Everybody was getting rich. Buyers were getting bigger houses than they could afford. Sellers were making lots of money. Lenders were getting lots of mortgages - meaning that they owned lots of homes. Then the sellers, mostly banks, started bundling the mortgages together (think of the physical metaphor, all of those paper mortgage agreements, stacked up and held together with rubber bands) and selling them to each other as investment instruments. Heck, if all those buyers actually made their payments for 30 years, those mortgages represented a lot of income for the lenders!
(We haven't even talked about China yet. Stay tuned.)
So buyers, sellers, lenders, and stockholders saw the chance to get really rich, really quick, and they jumped on it. Once again, as with the dotcom bubble, people ignored the safe and sensible rules of investing, caught up in the chance to make money off the rapid rise in property values. Builders built, banks lended, flippers flipped, and real estate agents (and their friends, the mortgage brokers) paid cash for fancy new cars and stuff. As before, greed ruled the day.
This entire house of cards was built on a foundation of borrowers - home buyers - who couldn't afford to pay back the money they had borrowed. When these people eventually ran out of money and defaulted on their loans, the lenders exercised the terms of the mortgage, kicked them out of their homes, and took over their property. But foreclosed property doesn't make the banks any money. They try to get rid of it as quickly as they can. But the banks had acquired so many homes that they couldn't sell them all - not quickly, not slowly, and not for anywhere near their appraised value. That's because the home values had been horrendously inflated in the price runup that was the bubble.
Now the banks had the properties, but not the cash flow that the properties were supposed to generate. Without money coming in, the banks couldn't take care of their own financial obligations. So the banks started failing, or at least were in danger of failing. The only way they could generate money in a hurry was by selling some of their investments. And the vast majority of investments were those bundles of mortgages - "mortgage-backed securities," they were called - and since those mortgages were in default, they were worthless pieces of paper. Nobody wanted to buy them.
So the homeowners lost their homes, the banks lost their money, and the investors lost their money. Banks couldn't afford to pay their bills or their employees. All the money that went into the real estate market disappeared and was gone forever. The ripple effects from this disaster led to failures in other, tightly connected industries, such as investment broker Merrill Lynch, insurance company AIG, and automaker General Motors. That's when all the banks, the investment companies, the insurance companies, and the automakers ran crying to the government, saying "we're too big to fail."
In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'll say it again. The entire dotcom bubble and bust was caused by greed. The entire real estate bubble and bust was caused by greed.
And that brings us to China. I speak of China here as one monolithic entity, encompassing its government, its financial institutions, and its industries. Some of you may object if I include Taiwan and Hong Kong in the monolith, but for now that's what I'm doing. I may lump the Chinese people in here as well, because the individuals are what make up the aforementioned institutions.
China is the next big bubble, and when it busts, the results will be a worldwide catastrophe. And as with the dotcom and real estate bubbles, the driving force behind it all is greed.
China has systematically undercut prices for manufactured goods all over the world. Because of the low prices offered by Chinese manufacturers, many American companies have moved all their manufacturing from North America to China. It saves the American companies lots of money, which shows up in their corporate profits. Besides, it lets them sell their goods to American consumers more cheaply, and American consumers like "cheap." Most American consumers prefer "cheap" over "quality," but I don't think we'll get into that here.
As a result, most, if not all, of the American companies who make their goods in China are trapped. For example, all of Apple's iPads and iPhones are made in China. They could not stay in that business segment if they were suddenly forced to make them here. Even if they could set up an assembly line, they couldn't run it without the components - the display, the batteries, and so on - because the components are also made in China.
(There was a great article in Forbes recently, called "Why Amazon Can't Make a Kindle in the USA.")
Much of today's high-tech gadgetry, including the cheapest cellular phone on the market, depends on some exotic minerals known as rare earth elements to operate. Those rare earths used to be mined in Africa, Russia, and North and South America. Several years ago, China started mining them and selling them at drastically reduced prices. The other mines could not compete and shut down, leaving China as the sole source for these rare earths. Recently, China has been talking about jacking up the price or restricting the supply of these minerals. Guess what would happen to Nokia and other (non-Chinese) cellphone manufacturers if rare earths became too expensive to buy, or simply unavailable? That's right!
Recently, I wanted to buy my wife a new kitchen mixer. I went to three department stores here in the western U.S. Every single mixer I looked at was made in China. The venerable domestic brands like Sunbeam, and the classy European brands like, um, Braun (I think) all had "Made in China" stamped on the box somewhere. And they were all made in China because it's cheaper.
Our first vacuum cleaner was a Hoover. It was made in America (or Canada, I think) and it was mostly made of metal. Our second vacuum cleaner was also a Hoover. It was mostly made of plastic, but it was still made in America. Together, those two vacuum cleaners lasted over 30 years. They were sturdy machines, and we used them A LOT. Now we're shopping for our third vacuum cleaner. We looked at the offerings from Hoover. They're made mostly of plastic. They're made in China. They have a terrible reputation for workmanship, reliability, and vacuum-ability. Why should we buy Hoover again? We won't.
Hoover's not the worst, nor is it the cheapest. There are cheaper vacuum cleaners. They don't work very well, either. And guess where every single one of them is made?
It gets worse. Shall we look at automobiles? The concept of a "made in America" automobile, even a manly American pickup truck, is laughable. All of the electronics are made in China, or assembled in the U.S. (or Mexico or another country) from components made in China. The bumpers and fenders may be made in the U.S. (or Mexico or Ohio), but the raw materials for those metal bumpers and plastic fenders were shipped to the U.S. from overseas - mostly from China! Even the fabric or vinyl upholstery for the seats comes from China. The light bulbs! The floor mats! Detroit has outsourced all of it, in an effort to make a buck.
(John Deere, in Iowa, still makes a lot of their own components. But Chinese electronics are starting to make inroads there, even.)
How did the U.S. government finance the bailout of the companies that got caught in the 2008 financial crisis following the bust of the real estate bubble (especially the "too big to fail" companies that should have been allowed to fail, or else cut up into smaller pieces that were no longer "too big to fail")? They sold government-backed securities to other countries. And which country bought the lion's share of those securities? Which country was so flush with cash (or the promise thereof - remember how the real estate bubble worked!) that it could step in and buy billions of dollars of U.S. treasury bonds without flinching? Well, China, of course!
And guess where China got all that money from? From America, of course! They sell us their stuff, they collect our money, and then they buy our country and our future.
But it's all a house of cards, just like the dotcoms and the housing boom. China has looked into their future and they're forecasting massive growth - so massive that they've gone out into the countryside and carved out entire cities from nothing. Street lights, apartment buildings, government buildings and shopping centers have risen out of the pastures and are waiting for people to move into them. These "ghost cities" can be seen on Google Maps, and they're eerily empty. The Chinese are mining coal and burning it at a furious rate, to literally fuel their growth. They are damming rivers and gouging out strip mines to supply their hungry industries with raw materials.
And they are engaging in a centuries-long tradition of imitation and deception. They take products made in the West, try to figure out what makes them work, and then try to come up with a copy that looks the same - right down to the trademarks, the colors and the textures. Some of the patented and trademarked cable that my own employer makes has appeared in counterfeit form in Asia - made in China.
In the ultimate irony, they duplicate not only Apple's computers and handheld products (and remember, the legitimate ones are also made in China), but they sell them in 22 imitation Apple stores. The stores are not affiliated with Apple Computer in any way, but their layout, decor, and even employee uniforms and name badges are exact duplicates of what you will find in real Apple stores. The deception is so complete that some of the store employees think they are really working for Apple Computer.
I have already written about the sham (and the scam) that was the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It was a plastic imitation of the real thing, a shameless ripoff of other people's hard work, enabled by the duplicity of the Chinese government and the gullibility of the rest of the world. In the same way, the duplicity of monolithic China and the willingness of the rest of the world to be led around by the nose (or other body parts) has contributed to the growth of the house of cards that is the Chinese bubble.
Actually, that's not completely accurate. At the core of everything, it is the greed of monolithic China and the greed of the rest of the world that have contributed to the Chinese bubble.
One day, the U.S. government or another government will not be able to make good on the financial instruments that China holds. China will find out that it is holding on to worthless pieces of paper, and that China does not have enough real money to keep operating. With no money to pay its own obligations, power plants and mines will shut down. Trains will stop operating. With no way to get raw materials, factories will shut down and send their workers home. With no jobs and no money to spend, Chinese people will stop buying their own goods. With nothing to ship, ships will stop crossing the ocean, and Americans will no longer be able to buy Hoover vacuum cleaners, Sunbeam mixers, or Apple iPhones. Without the raw materials and components from China, American automakers (and Japanese and German ones, too) will no longer be able to build cars.
Printing presses, computers, traffic lights, tables, chairs, dishes, cutlery, light bulbs, furniture, clothing: all of it will come to a stop until alternative sources can be found or tooled up. Those alternative mines and factories will spring up all over the world, but they won't start producing overnight. They will take years. And the wealth, or commerce, or economic prosperity - the money - that was lost forever will take even more years to replace.
It may take a decade for the bubble to burst. Some people will argue with me and say it will never happen. But it ony took 15 years for the gigantic Japanese economic machine, which was also supposed to take over the world, to come crashing down. It surely did, and the Chinese one will come crashing down just as surely. And when it does, it will take years for the world to recover.
From its own greed.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Tangled: A Movie Review
I took my sweet wife to see Tangled on Friday night. I want to buy it. My computer graphics professional's eye was tuned to the quality of the CG animation. It was an interesting contrast to Tron, which is a mixture of live action and deliberate CG.
In Tron, the storytellers and artists went for photorealism. They expected the audience to do the suspension-of-disbelief thing that sucks people into Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on. In most of the scenes, they succeeded.
In Tangled, instead, the storytellers and artists went for cartoony effects. The characters were caricatures, the scenery elements were fanciful and exaggerated, the physics was cartoon physics -- and yet they sucked you in anyway.
And just when you were getting comfortable with the cartooniness of the thing, they gave you a visual effect that was stunning in its realism. I offer you four examples:
1. Rapunzel's dress
Disney being Disney, I'm sure they made several real dresses, put them on several models, and took hundreds of videos and stills for the artists to work from. Well, their meticulousness paid off. The laces on the back of the dress were not spaced perfectly, just as laces on a real dress would not be, and yet the laces kept their imperfect spacing when Rapunzel moved - just as they would on a real dress. The hem on the white petticoat looked and moved just like a lace-trimmed hem on a real petticoat.
And the sleeves! Did you notice the sleeves? I'm not talking about the puffy shoulders, but the delicate, sheer, skin-hugging material that went all the way down her arms and ended with embroidery? binding? some kind of fancy trim, anyway, at her wrists. Maybe these subtle touches were missed on most of the audience, but without them, the film would have felt a little less polished. It's like a dressmaker drew every frame with the dress in it.
One other subtle touch, and please don't think I'm a perv for noticing this: In real life, a wide neckline gapes open just a fraction of an inch at the sides, at the reverse curve on the front of the shoulder. (Shoulder straps can often be seen in this gap.) The gap widens and closes according to the wearer's posture and movement. Few, if any, animated movies get this right. No, change that. Until Tangled, every animated movie ignored this gap completely. Even Shrek ignored it. I don't know how, but Tangled got it right.
Again, you might ask: why go for all this realism if you intended to make a cartoony movie in the first place? I dunno. But the fact that they did, and got it right, makes the movie that much richer.
2. Water
Everywhere there was water, its modeling was a mixture of cartooniness and realism. The cartooniness was deliberate, and so was the realism. How they decided which approach to use, and when, is beyond me, but again they got it right. The waterfalls, the dam, the flooding of the cavern, and - oh my - the lake that surrounded the island town, were all modeled so perfectly that they enhanced, rather than distracted from, the film. For a contrast, look at the CG water in The X-Men, which was a nice try but still obviously fake, and in The Incredibles, which was also intentionally cartoony, and felt more like plastic than water.
3. Light
If you watch the film again, you will notice that "light" was a central theme throughout the movie. That was deliberate, and they put real money into "light". The Lighting department got a major portion of the credits at the end.
The story line followed the light, emanated from light, and always returned to light. Starting with the fireflower in the prologue, then with the incident in the nursery, light against darkness mattered. It was central to the story. It told the story. The interplay of light rays and shadows in the tower told of good versus evil, knowledge versus ignorance, courage versus fear, hope versus despair, freedom versus captivity. The complicated animation that was Rapunzel's glowing hair was fascinating. But to me, the most breathtaking use of light was during the festival of the lanterns.
4. The lantern scene
When the first lantern was lit and launched, that was okay. Yeah, it was amazingly realistic, but by then I was used to the amazing realism. But then the entire town lit up lanterns - and I gasped out loud. These glowing tissue-paper lanterns lifted off and floated around, hundreds of them, in individual paths, all around the palace towers. It was a powerful visual representation of hope. It brought tears to my eyes.
Then, combining the water and light effects, the camera zeroed in on the boy and girl, sitting in a small boat in the middle of the lake, surrounded by lanterns in the air and lantern reflections in the calm water. Right then, I wished we were watching the movie in 3D. That's the kind of scene 3D cinema was made for.
I sat there with my mouth hanging open until the lantern scene ended. Between the tears and the mouth agape, I'm glad the theatre was dark.
***
It was a good story, too, and well told. There's a reason G and PG movies still pull in most of the money in the movie industry, in spite of the fact that they are outnumbered by all the other titles. And I'm not embarrassed by the fact that I prefer movies like Tangled over most of that other stuff.
Having said that, I am looking forward to Cowboys and Aliens this summer.
In Tron, the storytellers and artists went for photorealism. They expected the audience to do the suspension-of-disbelief thing that sucks people into Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on. In most of the scenes, they succeeded.
In Tangled, instead, the storytellers and artists went for cartoony effects. The characters were caricatures, the scenery elements were fanciful and exaggerated, the physics was cartoon physics -- and yet they sucked you in anyway.
And just when you were getting comfortable with the cartooniness of the thing, they gave you a visual effect that was stunning in its realism. I offer you four examples:
1. Rapunzel's dress
Disney being Disney, I'm sure they made several real dresses, put them on several models, and took hundreds of videos and stills for the artists to work from. Well, their meticulousness paid off. The laces on the back of the dress were not spaced perfectly, just as laces on a real dress would not be, and yet the laces kept their imperfect spacing when Rapunzel moved - just as they would on a real dress. The hem on the white petticoat looked and moved just like a lace-trimmed hem on a real petticoat.
And the sleeves! Did you notice the sleeves? I'm not talking about the puffy shoulders, but the delicate, sheer, skin-hugging material that went all the way down her arms and ended with embroidery? binding? some kind of fancy trim, anyway, at her wrists. Maybe these subtle touches were missed on most of the audience, but without them, the film would have felt a little less polished. It's like a dressmaker drew every frame with the dress in it.
One other subtle touch, and please don't think I'm a perv for noticing this: In real life, a wide neckline gapes open just a fraction of an inch at the sides, at the reverse curve on the front of the shoulder. (Shoulder straps can often be seen in this gap.) The gap widens and closes according to the wearer's posture and movement. Few, if any, animated movies get this right. No, change that. Until Tangled, every animated movie ignored this gap completely. Even Shrek ignored it. I don't know how, but Tangled got it right.
Again, you might ask: why go for all this realism if you intended to make a cartoony movie in the first place? I dunno. But the fact that they did, and got it right, makes the movie that much richer.
2. Water
Everywhere there was water, its modeling was a mixture of cartooniness and realism. The cartooniness was deliberate, and so was the realism. How they decided which approach to use, and when, is beyond me, but again they got it right. The waterfalls, the dam, the flooding of the cavern, and - oh my - the lake that surrounded the island town, were all modeled so perfectly that they enhanced, rather than distracted from, the film. For a contrast, look at the CG water in The X-Men, which was a nice try but still obviously fake, and in The Incredibles, which was also intentionally cartoony, and felt more like plastic than water.
3. Light
If you watch the film again, you will notice that "light" was a central theme throughout the movie. That was deliberate, and they put real money into "light". The Lighting department got a major portion of the credits at the end.
The story line followed the light, emanated from light, and always returned to light. Starting with the fireflower in the prologue, then with the incident in the nursery, light against darkness mattered. It was central to the story. It told the story. The interplay of light rays and shadows in the tower told of good versus evil, knowledge versus ignorance, courage versus fear, hope versus despair, freedom versus captivity. The complicated animation that was Rapunzel's glowing hair was fascinating. But to me, the most breathtaking use of light was during the festival of the lanterns.
4. The lantern scene
When the first lantern was lit and launched, that was okay. Yeah, it was amazingly realistic, but by then I was used to the amazing realism. But then the entire town lit up lanterns - and I gasped out loud. These glowing tissue-paper lanterns lifted off and floated around, hundreds of them, in individual paths, all around the palace towers. It was a powerful visual representation of hope. It brought tears to my eyes.
Then, combining the water and light effects, the camera zeroed in on the boy and girl, sitting in a small boat in the middle of the lake, surrounded by lanterns in the air and lantern reflections in the calm water. Right then, I wished we were watching the movie in 3D. That's the kind of scene 3D cinema was made for.
I sat there with my mouth hanging open until the lantern scene ended. Between the tears and the mouth agape, I'm glad the theatre was dark.
***
It was a good story, too, and well told. There's a reason G and PG movies still pull in most of the money in the movie industry, in spite of the fact that they are outnumbered by all the other titles. And I'm not embarrassed by the fact that I prefer movies like Tangled over most of that other stuff.
Having said that, I am looking forward to Cowboys and Aliens this summer.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
What was once a "program" is now an "app"
Observe, with me, the interesting progression of terminology in the software industry.
(For those who are not computerly inclined, here's a quick definition of basic terms. Way back in the dawn of digital time, computers were composed of hardware and software. Hardware is all the tangible, physical parts of a computer: the metal case, the printed circuit board and all the little components on it, even the wires that connect everything together. Even soft plastic parts are still tangible, so we still call them "hard" ware.
Software is all the intangible stuff that makes computers run -- the programs. They're not tangible or physical, so they can't really be called "hard" ware. But since they're as essential to the computer's functioning as the hardware, they had to be called something -- hence, "soft" ware.)
Today we consider all the synonyms for "software":
Even in the early days of home computers, people called them programs. One program fit on one floppy disk, and to use the computer, users ran the program.
As computing tasks got more complicated, programmers started including other things on the disk: data files, libraries, configuration files, and additional programs to be run automatically by the main program. Since users weren't just running a single program anymore, programs began to be marketed as software -- an interesting, and not at all inappropriate, reuse of the generic term.
I still crack up when I see a marketing department or a magazine writer refer to these things as software programs. It's a hilarious redundancy.
Some software is critical enough to the computer's operation that it's stored in a memory chip inside the computer. Because this software is stored in hardware, it's neither hard nor soft, so the pros call it firmware.
We've come a long way from the days of flipping switches. Today you can use one programming tool on one machine to write programs in many different programming languages, for many different systems. This has led programmers to start referring to the stuff they produce as code. There's source code, object code, assembly code, byte code, high-level code, low-level code, compiled code, interpreted code, Mac code, Linux code, Windows code, ... and it's all just programs and programming.
Somewhere along the way, software vendors began to combine separate programs into agglomerations that were (supposed to be) more powerful than the individual programs. These were referred to as suites. For a while, everyone was selling an office suite. Adobe has a lock on the best graphics suite in the world. Other companies sell animation suites, CAD suites, audio/video production suites, gaming suites, and in a beautiful recursion, software development suites.
Also somewhere along the way, someone said, "We're not selling programs, we're selling applications." After that, what was formerly known as something else became known as an application -- still just a collection of programs and related software items.
With the introduction of very smart handheld devices such as the iPhone, someone said, "Since these devices are small, the term for the software they run should also be small." So an application became an app, as in "There's an app for that."
Ah, but the term app got away from its creators. First it spread to non-iPhone handhelds, and then to non-handheld hardware, and finally to browsers. Now any software that runs on any kind of computing device is an "app".
But when you distill it down to its essential parts, it's still just a program.
(For those who are not computerly inclined, here's a quick definition of basic terms. Way back in the dawn of digital time, computers were composed of hardware and software. Hardware is all the tangible, physical parts of a computer: the metal case, the printed circuit board and all the little components on it, even the wires that connect everything together. Even soft plastic parts are still tangible, so we still call them "hard" ware.
Software is all the intangible stuff that makes computers run -- the programs. They're not tangible or physical, so they can't really be called "hard" ware. But since they're as essential to the computer's functioning as the hardware, they had to be called something -- hence, "soft" ware.)
Today we consider all the synonyms for "software":
- program
- software program
- firmware
- code
- suite
- application
- app
Even in the early days of home computers, people called them programs. One program fit on one floppy disk, and to use the computer, users ran the program.
As computing tasks got more complicated, programmers started including other things on the disk: data files, libraries, configuration files, and additional programs to be run automatically by the main program. Since users weren't just running a single program anymore, programs began to be marketed as software -- an interesting, and not at all inappropriate, reuse of the generic term.
I still crack up when I see a marketing department or a magazine writer refer to these things as software programs. It's a hilarious redundancy.
Some software is critical enough to the computer's operation that it's stored in a memory chip inside the computer. Because this software is stored in hardware, it's neither hard nor soft, so the pros call it firmware.
We've come a long way from the days of flipping switches. Today you can use one programming tool on one machine to write programs in many different programming languages, for many different systems. This has led programmers to start referring to the stuff they produce as code. There's source code, object code, assembly code, byte code, high-level code, low-level code, compiled code, interpreted code, Mac code, Linux code, Windows code, ... and it's all just programs and programming.
Somewhere along the way, software vendors began to combine separate programs into agglomerations that were (supposed to be) more powerful than the individual programs. These were referred to as suites. For a while, everyone was selling an office suite. Adobe has a lock on the best graphics suite in the world. Other companies sell animation suites, CAD suites, audio/video production suites, gaming suites, and in a beautiful recursion, software development suites.
Also somewhere along the way, someone said, "We're not selling programs, we're selling applications." After that, what was formerly known as something else became known as an application -- still just a collection of programs and related software items.
With the introduction of very smart handheld devices such as the iPhone, someone said, "Since these devices are small, the term for the software they run should also be small." So an application became an app, as in "There's an app for that."
Ah, but the term app got away from its creators. First it spread to non-iPhone handhelds, and then to non-handheld hardware, and finally to browsers. Now any software that runs on any kind of computing device is an "app".
But when you distill it down to its essential parts, it's still just a program.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Now *That's* Data Security
As an IT professional, I subscribe to a weekly publication called eWeek. Among its other features, eWeek provides product reviews. The Feb 15, 2010 edition had a review of a pair of USB flash drives built by a company called "IronKey." These USB drives are almost physically indestructible, and the data they hold can be made as secure as the user wants to make it.
The guts of the drive are encased in "military-grade epoxy" - just like the engine computer under the hood in your car, or in a Humvee or Stryker - and then "wrapped in a single-piece aluminum casing." The reviewer who tested them put them through all kinds of agony, and only one of the seven evaluation units died.
Each drive is serialized, with the serial number embedded in the electronics and etched in barcode on the side of the aluminum case. Data security is provided through a Web-based interface that can get to the drive wherever it is in the world, as long as it's attached to a computer connected to the Internet.
One of the coolest features of this device is its "self-destruct" feature. If it gets lost or stolen, the owner can issue a self-destruct command through the Web-based interface. The drive consists of one or more flash memory chips and a CryptoChip (capitalization is by IronKey, not me). (The CryptoChip is what manages the data security.) When the drive is connected to the Internet, it receives the self-destruct command, wipes its flash memory chip clean, and destroys its own CryptoChip. It doesn't blow up, Mission-Impossible style, but the device is essentially bricked.
Yeah, so I don't own one of these myself, but now I want to. To find out more about the IronKey USB flash drive, read the eWeek review at http://tinyurl.com/yjqe73j , or read more about it at https://www.ironkey.com/s200 or https://www.ironkey.com/d200. This is one cool toy.
UPDATE, 13 AUGUST 2019: Those product links don't work anymore, but fear not: IronKey is still around. The company was acquired by Imation, and then by Kingston Technology. Kingston has kept the IronKey product line alive, and greatly expanded it. Go to https://www.kingston.com/us/usb-flash-drives and scroll down, almost to the bottom of the page. The product line has expanded to more than 20 different drives, all of them with the same features as the original S200 and D200.
The guts of the drive are encased in "military-grade epoxy" - just like the engine computer under the hood in your car, or in a Humvee or Stryker - and then "wrapped in a single-piece aluminum casing." The reviewer who tested them put them through all kinds of agony, and only one of the seven evaluation units died.
Each drive is serialized, with the serial number embedded in the electronics and etched in barcode on the side of the aluminum case. Data security is provided through a Web-based interface that can get to the drive wherever it is in the world, as long as it's attached to a computer connected to the Internet.
One of the coolest features of this device is its "self-destruct" feature. If it gets lost or stolen, the owner can issue a self-destruct command through the Web-based interface. The drive consists of one or more flash memory chips and a CryptoChip (capitalization is by IronKey, not me). (The CryptoChip is what manages the data security.) When the drive is connected to the Internet, it receives the self-destruct command, wipes its flash memory chip clean, and destroys its own CryptoChip. It doesn't blow up, Mission-Impossible style, but the device is essentially bricked.
Yeah, so I don't own one of these myself, but now I want to. To find out more about the IronKey USB flash drive, read the eWeek review at http://tinyurl.com/yjqe73j , or read more about it at https://www.ironkey.com/s200 or https://www.ironkey.com/d200. This is one cool toy.
UPDATE, 13 AUGUST 2019: Those product links don't work anymore, but fear not: IronKey is still around. The company was acquired by Imation, and then by Kingston Technology. Kingston has kept the IronKey product line alive, and greatly expanded it. Go to https://www.kingston.com/us/usb-flash-drives and scroll down, almost to the bottom of the page. The product line has expanded to more than 20 different drives, all of them with the same features as the original S200 and D200.
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