Kodak confuses us customers by marking "Easyshare" on the cameras and then using it as the name of the camera support program. You know, the CD that comes packed with a new camera. It's the program that sucks photos out of the camera and onto the hard drive. Anyhow, I am talking about the Easyshare program, not the camera here.
I'm currently on the lookout for a Easyshare replacement. What do I have against the factory program? Several things.
1. Slow and fat. It takes forever to load. Tries to become ram resident, i.e. load automatically at boot time whether you need it or not. Which slows the computer's boot up. After I defeated Easyshare's automatic loading, it still worked, but it wouldn't stop and shut down. It hung around in ram slowing everything else. I used Windows Task Manager to kill it off and the machine became noticeably quicker.
2. You can't find your photos out side of Easyshare. This is a pain. To upload photos to Facebook or other websites you must find the photos on disk, using programs other than Easyshare. Easyshare uses numbers for filenames. So, is the cute photo you just uploaded 110575.jpg or is it 110492.jpg? Who knows?
3. Easyshare's "albums" don't coorespond to disk file folders. I upload some photos into a album 20-03-09. (automatically generated album name of today's date.). I sort them out, moving some pictures into album "cats" and others into album "model trains". When I go to upload the pictures from "model trains" I can't find the files in folder "model trains" they are still in folder "20-03-09" Cool. I'm having trouble locating photos I sucked in today. God help me finding anything next year.
4. Easyshare offers to put your photo's on the web, so others can link to them. Only it doesn't work. To get a link to a photo on the web, you have to pay money to buy "Gallery Plus". Cheaper is to put your photos on Photobucket, which is free and will give you a link to the photo for use on other websites.
5. Easyshare won't "move" a photo from one album to another. All it does is copy. To "move" you have to first copy the photo to the new album and then delete it from the old one.
6. You can't back up your Easyshared photos on your hard drive. The "album" information (which photo from which folder goes into which album) is hidden somewhere on hard drive. Just backing up the Easyshare folders to CD won't get the album information. And without that, you will never find the photo you need out of a modest collection of only a thousand photos.
So, soon as I find some other program that will suck the photos out of the camera, I'm ditching Easyshare.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Blame Elliot Spitzer for the AIG collapse
Charles Gasparino of the New York Post gets it right. Spitzer forced Hank Greenburg, the founder and long term CEO out of AIG. The place went down hill under Greenburg's successors.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Can Obama end Great Depression II?
Obama is making speeches. He's good at that. He says that federal health care, education, and alternate energy are "investments" that will pull the economy out of its death spiral.
Oh really? Let's go one by one. Health care. The real problem with health care is we put too much money into it. We put 16% of GNP into health care. That's twice as much as any other country in the world. Health in the United States is no better than health in the other industrialized countries. Life expectancy, and infant mortality are just as good overseas as they are in America. But in America we spend ("invest") twice as much money on health care.
This is a disaster. The cost of American products is jacked up 16% just to pay the worker's health care. Our overseas competitors products only get marked up 8%. Guess who wins the contract? Or, why is production moving overseas (outsourced)? To get away from the 16% of GNP health care cost imposed upon American produced goods.
Obama is pushing universal health insurance. Want to bet that greater health insurance coverage will increase the percentage of GNP "invested" in health care? In short, Obama's universal health insurance push will make a bad situation worse.
Education? We have college graduates running out of our ears. There are so many excess college graduates that we have them driving cabs and waiting tables. And we graduate too few scientists and engineers and too many black studies, women's studies, education, sociology, and other silly studies majors. We don't need more college education to save the economy. We need more economy to offer jobs to the college educated.
The one place American education needs help, the inner city ghetto schools, just got a kick in the head. Charter schools got defunded in Washington DC. And Obama didn't speak out against it.
Alternate Energy? Windmills and solar panels. Cool and oh so green. Very expensive. And useless. The electricity has to stay on all the time. Windmills get becalmed, and the sun goes down at night. So responsible electric utilities have to build real power plants to handle the load. Most of your electric bill goes to paying the utilities mortgages on plant and equipment. Fuel costs are small compared to capital costs. Alternate energy spending just raises capital costs. You have to pay for just as many real power plants plus the alternate energy plants. Alternate energy could double electricity costs.
In short Obama's plan[s] to pull us out of Great Depression II mean dumping more money into health care, paying more college tuitions, and raising the price of power. Does not sound like a winner to me.
Oh really? Let's go one by one. Health care. The real problem with health care is we put too much money into it. We put 16% of GNP into health care. That's twice as much as any other country in the world. Health in the United States is no better than health in the other industrialized countries. Life expectancy, and infant mortality are just as good overseas as they are in America. But in America we spend ("invest") twice as much money on health care.
This is a disaster. The cost of American products is jacked up 16% just to pay the worker's health care. Our overseas competitors products only get marked up 8%. Guess who wins the contract? Or, why is production moving overseas (outsourced)? To get away from the 16% of GNP health care cost imposed upon American produced goods.
Obama is pushing universal health insurance. Want to bet that greater health insurance coverage will increase the percentage of GNP "invested" in health care? In short, Obama's universal health insurance push will make a bad situation worse.
Education? We have college graduates running out of our ears. There are so many excess college graduates that we have them driving cabs and waiting tables. And we graduate too few scientists and engineers and too many black studies, women's studies, education, sociology, and other silly studies majors. We don't need more college education to save the economy. We need more economy to offer jobs to the college educated.
The one place American education needs help, the inner city ghetto schools, just got a kick in the head. Charter schools got defunded in Washington DC. And Obama didn't speak out against it.
Alternate Energy? Windmills and solar panels. Cool and oh so green. Very expensive. And useless. The electricity has to stay on all the time. Windmills get becalmed, and the sun goes down at night. So responsible electric utilities have to build real power plants to handle the load. Most of your electric bill goes to paying the utilities mortgages on plant and equipment. Fuel costs are small compared to capital costs. Alternate energy spending just raises capital costs. You have to pay for just as many real power plants plus the alternate energy plants. Alternate energy could double electricity costs.
In short Obama's plan[s] to pull us out of Great Depression II mean dumping more money into health care, paying more college tuitions, and raising the price of power. Does not sound like a winner to me.
WSJ attacks Comic Sans
The rise of the font snob. Comic Sans (sans serif) is an informal font packed with Windows. It's quite popular. The WSJ article goes on at length (and with tongue in cheek) about the rise of people/groups who dislike Comic Sans and agitate to stop its use. Wow. Next thing Comic Sans Tea Parties.
It makes me feel old. I used write letters in Comic Sans to the children at summer camp (No email at summer camp). At the time I thought it was a nice informal font trying to look handwritten. The anti Comic Sans rant in the Journal makes me feel totally lacking in proper taste, proper style, and je ne sais quoi.
Actually, Comic Sans still looks pretty good to my untrained eye.
It makes me feel old. I used write letters in Comic Sans to the children at summer camp (No email at summer camp). At the time I thought it was a nice informal font trying to look handwritten. The anti Comic Sans rant in the Journal makes me feel totally lacking in proper taste, proper style, and je ne sais quoi.
Actually, Comic Sans still looks pretty good to my untrained eye.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Synaptics Touchpad Driver, Syntpenh
This driver can be completely omitted and your touch pad will work just fine. Windows XP comes with a driver for the Synaptics touchpad that makes all the usual mouse/touch_mouse things work. The fancy, plump, and sluggish Synaptics driver supports a couple of things I never use, like tap-to-click and pressure sensitivity. I was able to completely remove the Synaptics driver using add-and-remove programs in Control Panel. After rebooting the laptop the touch pad still worked and the machine was perceptable more lively.
In short, speed up your laptop for no cost, just remove the Synaptics touch pad driver. I did this in Windows XP, but it ought to work in Vista and Windows 7.
In short, speed up your laptop for no cost, just remove the Synaptics touch pad driver. I did this in Windows XP, but it ought to work in Vista and Windows 7.
Kodak Z1485 IS Picture Size
This camera offers 14 Megapixels, which is a selling point. (More is better). It stores them JPEG compressed with a typical snapshot size of 6 megabytes. This is a compression ratio of about 7, quite modest as JPEG goes. Where does 7 come from? An crude approximation, assume each raw pixel is stored as Red, Blue, and Green (RGB), 8 bits (one byte) for each color. That makes 14 Megapixels into 43 megabytes. Divide by the JPEG compressed file size and you get to 7. Actually the camera probably uses YUV color encoding, which permits each color pixel to be stored in merely 16 bits, but let's stick to the crude estimate based on 24 bit per pixel RGB color encoding.
Of course, 6 megabyte snapshots are slow to upload, and suck up disk space. Plus having more pixels in the image than you have on the display device doesn't improve image quality. For instance my laptop LCD screen is 1024 * 768 or 786,432 pixels. Putting more than 786,432 pixels into the image won't improve the image seen on the screen. That's a lot less than 14 Megapixels.
So I set the picture size down to 5 megapixels and took some close up shots. This reduced the JPEG compressed image size to about 1 megabyte, with superb quality as viewed on my laptop screen. I plan to leave the camera set that way, cause the camera memory will hold more pictures, they upload faster, and it could be that the camera is smart enough to average adjacent pixels together which would reduce image noise and improve the light sensitivity of the image sensor. The Kodak documentation hints (but doesn't come flat out and say) that averaging does take place.
With a 2 Gig plugin memory card, the camera could hold 300 snap shots at 14 megapixels per shot. With 5 megabyte shots, the capacity jumps to 1800 snap shots. Which is like infinity on the smallest memory card Staples sells.
Of course, 6 megabyte snapshots are slow to upload, and suck up disk space. Plus having more pixels in the image than you have on the display device doesn't improve image quality. For instance my laptop LCD screen is 1024 * 768 or 786,432 pixels. Putting more than 786,432 pixels into the image won't improve the image seen on the screen. That's a lot less than 14 Megapixels.
So I set the picture size down to 5 megapixels and took some close up shots. This reduced the JPEG compressed image size to about 1 megabyte, with superb quality as viewed on my laptop screen. I plan to leave the camera set that way, cause the camera memory will hold more pictures, they upload faster, and it could be that the camera is smart enough to average adjacent pixels together which would reduce image noise and improve the light sensitivity of the image sensor. The Kodak documentation hints (but doesn't come flat out and say) that averaging does take place.
With a 2 Gig plugin memory card, the camera could hold 300 snap shots at 14 megapixels per shot. With 5 megabyte shots, the capacity jumps to 1800 snap shots. Which is like infinity on the smallest memory card Staples sells.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Cap and Trade according to Aviation Week
The airline community is watching cap&trade closely since they are massive users of fuel. Aviation Week reports that Rep Henry Waxman, D-Calif, bald headed twit with an attitude, and Ed Markey, D-Mass, my old rep, dunderhead supreme, have drafted a 648 page Cap and Trade bill. Right there we are in trouble. Nobody knows what's hidden inside 648 pages of legal gobbledegook, and it will take months to read and understand it all, so if it passes, we have no idea how much it's gonna hurt.
Apparently Obama would decide how much CO2 America could emit (the cap). Most likely the cap will be lower than current emissions, so we are in more trouble right there. Somehow permits to emit so much CO2 would go to people like electric utilities. CO2 emitters (just about everyone) might get permits given out for free, or might have to buy them at a government run auction. The government run auction brings in cash, so good chance the final bill will be written that way. The oil companies would have to buy permits to cover the CO2 emitted when the fuel they sell is burned. They would raise fuel prices to pay for the permits.
In short, Aviation Week sees cap and trade as a fuel tax, lightly disguised, and wrapped up in a green ribbon.
The airlines are hoping the fuel tax paid by the airlines would go to improving the airline infrastructure (airports, nav aids and such). Fat chance of that happening. The airline spokesmen admit that fuel taxes are coming, the public will allow them to pass
Apparently Obama would decide how much CO2 America could emit (the cap). Most likely the cap will be lower than current emissions, so we are in more trouble right there. Somehow permits to emit so much CO2 would go to people like electric utilities. CO2 emitters (just about everyone) might get permits given out for free, or might have to buy them at a government run auction. The government run auction brings in cash, so good chance the final bill will be written that way. The oil companies would have to buy permits to cover the CO2 emitted when the fuel they sell is burned. They would raise fuel prices to pay for the permits.
In short, Aviation Week sees cap and trade as a fuel tax, lightly disguised, and wrapped up in a green ribbon.
The airlines are hoping the fuel tax paid by the airlines would go to improving the airline infrastructure (airports, nav aids and such). Fat chance of that happening. The airline spokesmen admit that fuel taxes are coming, the public will allow them to pass
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